Congress Agrees on Five-Year Funding for Highways, Bridges, and Transit

December 4, 2015 – After three dozen short-term extensions to the federal highway trust fund, Congress agreed to provide $305 billion to repair and expand highways, bridges, and transit during the next five years. The bill now heads to President Obama, whose is expected to sign it.

The legislation represents a significant accomplishment to provide state and local governments greater certainty about transportation funding so they can plan major projects, according to an article on usatoday.com. Congress has passed 36 short-term extensions since 2009.

The 1,300-page bill authorizes $281 billion through the Highway Trust Fund and $24 billion through annual appropriations that lawmakers could decide not to supply in a given year, according to the article. The bill increases highway spending 15% by its final year and transit spending 18% during that period, according to lawmakers. If approved, the funding would provide $12 billion for mass transit, $10 billion for Amtrak and $1 billion for National Highway Traffic Safety Administration programs.

Congress set the gas tax of 18.4 cents per gallon in 1993, and it hasn’t kept pace with construction demands because of inflation and more fuel-efficient cars. The shortfall forced lawmakers to scramble to find about $15 billion per year to fund transportation priorities, noted the article.

To bridge that shortfall, the bill would claim $53 billion in Federal Reserve surplus funds during the next decade, $6.9 billion from reducing a Federal Reserve dividend to banks, $6.2 billion from selling a portion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, $5.2 billion from indexing fees paid to Customs and Border Protection for inflation and collecting $2.4 billion more by allowing the Internal Revenue Service to hire private tax collectors, according to USA Today.