With Congress continuing to struggle over how to fund the next six-year highway bill, a former U.S. DOT Transportation Secretary believes the funding extensions have just begun.
James Burnley IV, who led the U.S. DOT under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush from 1987-1989, told D.C. Velocity that it may be as late as 2013 before a new long-term legislative measure is signed into law.
“I started saying a year ago that we were facing four years of short-term extensions of existing [federal funding] programs, and I’m sorry to say that this is a prediction that I believe will come true,” he told the magazine.
Burnley’s prediction can be backed up a number of ways. The November elections could produce a wave of Republican victories. The GOP has been against any increase in taxes, including the federal gas tax, during this economic recession. You also have the rising popularity of the Tea Party, which is calling for a reduction in taxes as well as in government spending.
SAFETEA-LU has been extended through the end of 2010, but Congress and the Obama administration still has not figured out a way to fill a $200 billion funding gap for the next six-year bill. Burnley feels that the firewalls surrounding highway spending legislation might lead to the industry’s demise, at least in terms of the Highway Trust Fund.
“You can’t make the argument that . . . it should be walled off from the appropriations process while at the same time getting huge sums of money from general revenues,” he told D.C. Velocity. “That is a corrosive process.”
Burnley added that by 2013 the notion of the trust fund could be obsolete.
