Obama signs highway bill, triggering CSA reboot

Enactment of the five-year $305 billion Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act caused the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to shut off public access to its CSA safety monitoring system until it can be evaluated and improved.    President Barack Obama on Friday signed into law the first major highway infrastructure legislation in a decade, ending a series of patchwork funding extensions since 2009 and giving states the financial certainty to invest in larger, multi-year projects.
   The Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act (FAST) immediately impacted the trucking industry upon going into effect. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced that it shut off public access to its CSA safety monitoring system until the system can be evaluated and improved. Carriers had complained CSA produced flawed scores that shippers were using unfairly to judge safety fitness for hiring.
   Industries that depend on surface transportation for moving cargo hailed the FAST Act for its new focus on freight transportation and regulatory reforms aimed at speeding up the process for approving large projects – a timetable that can take more than a dozen years in some cases before any digging begins.
   The spending blueprint sets aside $4.5 billion for freight projects to be distributed through competitive grants and another $6.3 billion that gets divided among states according to regular federal aid formulas based on miles of highway.
   The authorization covers five years after House and Senate negotiators couldn’t agree on how to finance a full six-year bill, but there is some discrepancy over how to price the total amount. The shorter plan spends more annually than either the House or Senate bill versions. Depending on how supplemental money from the General Fund is counted, the price of the plan is between $281 billion and $305 billion.
   Michael Sargent, a Heritage Foundation research associate in economics, wrote in a blog post that the additional spending puts even more pressure on the Highway Trust Fund, which is receiving about $16 billion less per year in the form of gasoline and diesel taxes than the federal government is obligating to states for completed projects. The shortfall has led Congress to bail out the Highway Trust Fund with more than $40 billion from the Treasury over the past seven years – money that comes from borrowing or diversion from other programs.
   The FAST Act includes $70 billion in so-called budget offsets to make the spending deficit neutral.
   Critics note that the legislation does nothing to address the Highway Trust Fund’s long-term health, which is on life-support because Congress has not raised the fuel tax since 1993 and can’t agree on any other revenue alternative at the same time that Americans are driving more fuel-efficient cars and inflation has eroded the trust fund’s buying power.
   “With its inflated funding levels, the FAST Act would increase the HTF’s projected deficit to $178 billion over the next 10 years — nearly $20 billion more than current projections,” said Sargent. “Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that without reform, the trust fund would exhaust its reserves by 2021, requiring an additional $100 billion just to keep it solvent through 2025.”