Short-term transportation authorization expires Friday

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.    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.
   The current three-week stop-gap measure, which extended the expiration of federal transportation spending until Friday, Nov. 20, was signed by President Obama on Oct. 29 just hours before the previous short-term authorization was set to expire.
   Lawmakers opted for another short-term measure in order to give themselves more time to work out details and differences between the House’s six-year, $325 billion Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform (STRR) Act of 2015, which passed by a vote of 363 to 64 a week later, and the Senate’s DRIVE Act passed back in July.
   STRR also included a provision to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank, which has been shuttered for new business since July when Congress failed to renew its charter.
   The legislation, however, is only funded for the first three years because there is not enough money coming into the Highway Trust Fund from motor fuel user fees to pay for anticipated projects. Legislators have previously been unable to agree on how to make up the difference and did not include any proposals to increase the motor fuels tax, which hasn’t been adjusted for inflation or slowing consumption of oil caused by more fuel-efficient vehicles since 1993.
   In fact, according to reports from congressional news outlet The Hill, a handful of lawmakers, including Republican presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Marco Rubio and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, are backing a plan to cut the 18.4 cents-per-gallon gas tax by about 15 cents.
   “We need to get the federal government out of this infrastructure business, other than vital economic highways,” Santorum reportedly said in response to a question about how the government should fund road projects during a Republican undercard presidential debate in Wisconsin.
   “It has been said that if we cut the gas tax to three to five cents and send the rest back to the states, and just take care of the federal infrastructure that’s vital for our economy, we don’t need the federal government in the road business that it is today.”
   Supporters of the concept of rolling back the gas tax, known as “devolution,” argue that development of road and transit infrastructure should be left up to states. But transportation industry advocates worry about the projected $16 billion-per-year shortfall in the Highway Trust Fund, which funds the majority of major highway and infrastructure projects across the country. They argue that insufficient funding, in addition to a number of short-term stop-gap bills, has caused widespread uncertainty among states with regards to funding, thereby limiting the ability of states to tackle large construction projects.
   Should the STRR and Drive bills be reconciled and passed in both chambers of Congress by Friday, it would represent the first transportation funding legislation lasting longer than two years Congress will have passed in almost a decade.