House Republicans rejected a proposed 15-cent gas tax increase to the current 18.4-cents-per-gallon federal gas tax. The House has worked its way through 81 out of the 280 amendments to the proposed highway bill. The bill, which has passed Senate, is for six years but without a viable funding source and House Republicans aren’t budging by introducing a gas tax hike as a way to pay for the bill.
“It’s all junk, basically,” said Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon, the lead Democrat on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. “They won’t confront the fact that we haven’t raised the gas tax since 1993, and they won’t look at alternatives.”
Lawmakers are set to debate amendments to the highway bill, titled the Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act of 2015, and plan to take a final vote by the end of the week.
The measure reauthorizes the collection of the gas tax at the current 18.4 cents-per-gallon rate for another six years and calls for spending $261 billion on highways, $55 billion on transit and approximately $9 billion on safety programs over that time — but only if Congress can come up with a way to pay for the last three years.
