Investing in A New Vision for the Environment and Surface

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Madam President, infrastructure is important. We all need it. We rely on it to get to and from our homes, to and from work. We rely on it for our day-to-day needs. It has to be there. Not all of it has to be Federal, and what is Federal can be made more efficient. My amendment today is directed at exactly that set of objectives.

It would finally resolve the fiscal insolvency of the highway trust fund and give Americans a tax cut. It would allow Americans to pay less and Federal, State, and local governments to build more. Pay less, build more--that is the emphasis of this entire amendment. We should pay less for what we need, and we should build more of it.

Specifically, my amendment would transfer $120 billion in unused COVID-19 funds to the highway trust fund. It returns the scope of the highway trust fund dollars so that they can be used only for projects on the Interstate Highway System. This was, after all, why the gasoline tax was created, and it ought to be what we use it for today. After all, most roads are not interstate, and most systems are not the Interstate Highway System. The Federal Government doesn't need to do all of it.

And, in fact, what we find is that, when States and localities do infrastructure, they can do so more efficiently, far less expensively as a result of the Byzantine labyrinth of Federal regulations that you have to comply with as soon as you are doing any kind of a road project that involves even a single dollar of Federal funds. My amendment also requires a 5-year plan to pay off all of our highway trust fund's outstanding obligations.

And, on day one, my amendment reduces the fuel tax from 18.4 cents to 7 cents on gasoline and the diesel tax from 24.3 to 8.3 cents to keep pace with the current spending needs of the Interstate Highway System.

We also can't forget the burdensome Federal regulations and intervention that balloon the costs of our country's infrastructure projects. The Competitive Enterprise Institute has estimated that Federal regulations and intervention cost American consumers and businesses nearly $2 trillion annually. We know that, within Federal infrastructure projects, there are a multitude of Federal regulations that drive up the cost of each project by as much as 20 percent, in many cases more like 30 percent, and I am told, in some cases, even more than that.

Ultimately, we drive up infrastructure costs when we make the projects Federal. It doesn't need to be this way, because most of these are not Federal projects. That is why my amendment also addresses two key regulatory challenges in our infrastructure context.

One, it reforms the NEPA process to ensure projects are given certain timelines and not stalled out by frivolous lawsuits. It reforms NEPA so that our infrastructure money actually goes to NEPA rather than resulting in endless delays brought about by NEPA and NEPA-related litigation.

Two, it repeals the Davis-Bacon wage requirements that artificially increase the labor costs beyond what the market demands--labor costs that are especially important and hard felt right now given the labor shortage.

The Senate has a choice today. You can choose to pay less and build more. You can offer Americans a tax cut--a tax cut that will affect poor and middle-class Americans most acutely, most immediately, most directly--and it will also simultaneously provide long-term solvency to the highway trust fund and lower the costs of our Nation's infrastructure projects.

Or, alternatively, if you don't want to vote for this, you can choose our current path, which is to continue to saddle the American people with debt, more inflation, financial insolvency, and more inevitable taxes. You can also vote against it and choose to continue the current practice of allowing for endless, needless, pointless delays in our infrastructure projects that really harm Americans.

Look, at the end of the day, we just want more of our tax dollars going into funding steel and concrete to go into the ground so that America's moms and dads can spend less time stuck in gridlock traffic and more time with their families. The choice seems very clear to me.

I urge all of my colleagues to vote for this amendment to build more and pay less.
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