Lawmakers approaching yet another highway bill deadline

Congress has until Friday to deliver a conference report reconciling long-term federal transportation and infrastructure spending measures put forth by the House and Senate and send it to both sides of the legislature for a vote.

   Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
   The United States Congress has until the end of the week to reconcile respective long-term federal transportation and infrastructure spending bills from the House and Senate and prevent a shutdown of highway funding.
   If that sounds like a familiar refrain, it’s because this is the third such deadline Congress has faced in as many months.
   Legislators claimed they needed the current two-week stop-gap measure, which extended the expiration of federal transportation spending from Nov. 20 until Friday, Dec. 4, to give a conference committee enough time to work out differences between the House’s six-year, $325 billion Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform (STRR) Act of 2015 and the Senate’s DRIVE Act, passed back in July.
   Both bills, however, are only partially funded because there is not enough money coming into the Highway Trust Fund from motor fuel user fees to pay for anticipated projects and lawmakers have previously been unable to agree on how to make up the difference. Neither STRR nor DRIVE included any proposals to increase the motor fuels tax, which hasn’t been adjusted in over 20 years despite inflation and slowing consumption of oil caused by more fuel-efficient vehicles resulting in lower HTF revenues.
   The Department of Transportation estimates a shortfall of about $96 billion – $16 billion per year – in the HTF over the life of a six-year spending bill.
   Things have been relatively quiet on Capitol Hill this week, with the only public mention of the highway bill coming in the form of a House agenda item. On the website of Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the House floor agenda includes a line for the “Possible Consideration of the Conference Report to Accompany H.R. 22 – Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act of 2015.”
   Hill observers seem confident a long-term measure will be approved before Friday’s deadline, but some analysts are understandably skeptical.
   Online news outlet Politico reported this morning the conference committee is “still working out the final details,” but said it has “firm intel that the deal is coming today.”
   According to Politico, “The rough plan is for dealmakers to review the report this morning before it’s filed, for the House to take it up on Thursday and for the Senate to send it off to the White House on Friday — just in time to avoid either a lapse in transportation authority or another short-term policy patch.”
   Should that actually happen, it would represent the first time since 2005 Congress has passed transportation funding legislation lasting longer than two years. Legislators have instead opted for a series of short-term spending extensions despite protests from transportation industry advocates, as well as President Obama.