Highway and Transportation Funding Act of 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, we are here today because our Federal highway policy status quo is not working, and it hasn't been working for a long time. This is the sixth time American taxpayers have been asked to bail out the highway trust fund since 2008--the sixth time since 2008.

None of those patches, $52 billion worth of bailouts in 7 years, fixed the problem, and neither will the $10.8 billion authorized by the bill that is before us today. It will buy us only a few months before we are right back in the same place once again, the same place where we are now.

Indeed, this debate is itself the dysfunction of Washington, DC, in miniature. Here--as in health care, higher education, assistance for the poor, energy, and so many other areas--the Federal Government has created a permanent structural problem, and it responds with duct tape. Worse, this bill solves only Washington problems, only the problems of Washington, DC, not those of the American people.

Under the broken status quo this bill not only protects but also extends, in 6 months--and in 6 years--our roads will still remain congested. Too many single moms will still live on a knife's edge trying to make it to their second jobs all the way across town. Too many dads will still have to leave for work before breakfast just to make it to their job and then do the same thing again as they try to make it home for dinner. Children will still look in vain into the empty seats at their piano recitals and at their Little League games. Commuters will still squeeze onto overcrowded subway cars, hold their breath, and hope they don't break down again. Young families will still be unfairly priced out of neighborhoods near the best jobs and the best schools, and diverse communities will still be subject to the monotonous inefficiency of an outmoded Federal bureaucracy.

But it doesn't have to be this way. There is a better way. The Interstate Highway System is one of the greatest achievements not only in the history of the Federal Government but in all of American history. It unified a sprawling continental nation by investing in our common destiny. It simultaneously met the economic, social, cultural, and security needs of an emerging superpower. It was and it remains a wonder of American innovation and self-government.

More than that, the Interstate Highway System was the daring, audacious work of a young nation literally on the move, bristling with confidence in its future and in its people. With the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, Congress threw off the yoke of the status quo and it met the emerging needs of a new generation.

Yet today, some 58 years later, in a new century with new needs, new technologies, and a new economy, Congress anxiously clings to that exact same policy like some kind of a tattered security blanket.

Six decades ago, Federal highway policy represented a triumph of imagination. Today, our refusal to modernize that same policy represents a failure of imagination. So we are here with the duct tape and WD-40 trying to keep this 20th century bureaucracy in place, rather than embracing the worthy challenge of building a new mobility policy, one that is well suited for the 21st century. That is exactly what my amendment, the Transportation Empowerment Act, would do.

In 1956, it made sense for the Federal Government to collect the majority of gas taxes from around the country and then coordinate the construction of a national system. We needed it. But with the interstate system now largely complete and most transportation issues that we see today existing at the local level, there is no longer the same need for Washington to serve as the central coordinator. We have become an intrusive middleman. We need to refocus the Federal Government solely on interstate priorities and to empower a diverse, flexible, open-source transportation network controlled by the States.

My amendment would empower States and communities to customize their own infrastructure according to their own needs, their own values, and their own imagination.

It would, over 5 years, gradually transfer funding and spending authority over local transportation infrastructure projects to the States.

Today the Federal gasoline tax stands at 18.4 cents per gallon. My amendment would lower it by 2019 to 3.7 cents per gallon.

In the interim, we would gradually send States more of their allotment without strings to prepare them for the eventual transfer of this differential. After this gradual transition, Congress would retain enough revenue to continue to maintain the Interstate Highway System, which rightfully, properly remains a Federal priority and a core competence of our government at a national level, but States and communities would be newly empowered to launch a new era of local investment and local innovation.

The idea behind this plan is not only that there is a better way to improve America's infrastructure, there are 50 better ways and even thousands of better ways. In our increasingly decentralized world, there are as many ideal transportation policies as there are communities across this great country.

Washington is standing in the way, imposing obsolete conformity on a vibrant, diverse society. For if we truly love local transportation infrastructure--and who doesn't--we should set it free.

Under the Transportation Empowerment Act, Americans could finally enjoy the local infrastructure they want. More environmentally conscious States and towns could finally have the flexibility to invest in more green transit projects and bike lanes. Regions reaping the benefits of America's recent energy renaissance could accelerate their own infrastructure and their own buildouts to keep up with their explosive growth. Dense cities could invest in more sustainable public transit networks. Meanwhile, surrounding counties could reopen the frontiers of the suburbs to a new generation of far more livable communities. State and local governments will also be free to experiment with innovative funding mechanisms not necessarily tied to the unreliable, unpredictable, gasoline tax. By cutting out the Washington middlemen, all of those States, communities, and taxpayers will be able to get more for less.

My amendment would not reduce America's investment in infrastructure any more than Uber reduces America's investment in car services. In the real world, value is not a cost. Rather, my plan would empower a nation hungry for greater mobility to spend its infrastructure dollars on steel and on concrete instead of on bureaucracy and special interests.

Some of my colleagues oppose this plan. Some will offer Washington's eternal promise. The status quo will work, it just needs more money. That is all it needs, and it will work. The Federal gasoline tax has not changed since 1994, they will say. We are starving the trust fund, they will add.

But it is not true--at least it is an inaccurate and incomplete picture. For in the 12 years prior to 1994, the gasoline tax skyrocketed by an alarming 460 percent from 4 cents per gallon to 18.4 cents per gallon.

Put another way, since 1982, the Federal gasoline tax has grown by an equivalent of 6.1 percent per year. Chasing ever more money will not solve this problem. That is what we have been doing, and the bill before us today is incontrovertible proof that it hasn't worked.

Others argue that reducing Washington's role in local transportation would invite economic and infrastructural catastrophe. This makes two very peculiar assumptions.

First, it assumes that Washington is uniquely competent in the area of local transportation, even as a long train of abusive boondoggles and bridges to nowhere tell us exactly the opposite.

Even more bizarrely, this argument assumes that the 50 States of our exceptional Republic, many of which would rank among the wealthiest nations in the world on their own, are unstable banana republics nursing the development of primitive hunter-gatherer societies whose only transportation services involve the clearing of woodland paths for their pig-drawn carts.

State and local governments already pay for 75 percent of all surface transportation infrastructure projects in this country.

In my home State of Utah, one of the best run in the country, only 20 percent of our transportation money comes from Washington. The other 80 percent we raise ourselves. Of course, we raise most of that 20 percent too. It is just that under the broken status quo, Washington middlemen take their cut before sending that back to us.

Why not just leave that extra 25 percent to the States and communities who need and use it in the first place?

The States already own and maintain the highways and local transit projects that are inherently local. So why not let the Federal Government focus on interstates and let Oregonians plan, finance, and build their bike paths; San Franciscans their green energy transit experiments; and Texans their eight-lane expressways, in their own way, tailored to their local needs and their own local values? All we add to the process in Washington, DC, is unnecessary overhead and self-congratulating press releases, trying to take credit for it all.

Finally, many who admit that the status quo is unsustainable nonetheless support it because they believe their particular State benefits by receiving more money back from the highway trust fund than it puts in. Washington perpetuates the myth that transportation money is free, especially for these so-called net donee States. But as in every other middleman arrangement, the status quo policy ensures that States actually get less value back than they should.

Federal regulatory strings not only make infrastructure projects unnecessarily expensive, they specifically divert resources away from actual infrastructure and waste it on special interests and bureaucratic redtape.

The Federal Davis-Bacon Act, for instance, costs States an additional 10 cents for every single dollar they spend on infrastructure construction projects.

Numerous regulations under the National Environmental Policy Act--or NEPA, as it is frequently called--collectively cost State governments an additional 9 cents on the dollar. No wonder the trust fund needs to be bailed out every year. Washington is charging taxpayers a 20-percent processing fee off the top.

I encourage my colleagues to work out the math for their own States.

But for Utah, that means that of the $335 million we receive annually from the highway trust fund, nearly $64 million goes to political overhead instead of steel and concrete.

Everything in our economy and our society today is moving away from rigid, centralized, bureaucratic control and toward flexible, open-sourced community and individual empowerment. This is a simple question of old versus new, of bold versus unimaginative.

The Interstate Highway System met a crucial need in its time and represented a wonder of innovation, but so did Borders bookstores at one time, so did Blockbuster Video at one time, so did record stores, and so did rotary telephones.

America still needs books, movies, music, and communication, and it still gets those things. Today those goods are just delivered more efficiently, more affordably, through flexible models customized to the needs of individual customers. In the very same way Americans still need highways, bridges, subways, and bike paths. Indeed, we need them now more than ever, but Federal policy hasn't kept up with the times.

That is why, even without my amendment, more than 30 States have begun or are considering their own transportation modernization programs.

This is just one more piece of evidence that the transportation renaissance America needs is one that our centralized bureaucratic status quo cannot deliver--not with another $10.8 billion or 10 times as much.

After six decades and historic successes, the time has come for a new Federal transportation policy--one that taps the creativity of our diverse Nation. Today, Americans are unnecessarily stuck in traffic, stuck in overcrowded subway cars, missing their kids' games and recitals, priced out of neighborhoods close to their jobs, and they spend almost a full 40-hour workweek per year stuck in gridlock. They deserve better than what Washington is offering--which is just the status quo, plus a little more money. A new era demands a new approach.

The Interstate Highway System is a success, and the people who created it deserve our great admiration and gratitude. But the way to honor their legacy is to stop imitating them and start emulating them by investing in an innovative transportation network for our own era, just as they did for theirs. Just as it was in 1956, the status quo is once again no longer good enough. We need to transcend it.

The future of America's mobility is not a rigid, monolithic, centralized bureaucracy frozen in amber; it is a flexible, organic, open-sourced network of empowered individuals and communities as diverse as the Nation itself.

My amendment would empower Americans to start to build that future together, and I respectfully ask my colleagues to support it.

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I strongly, respectfully disagree with the characterization my distinguished colleague from California has made suggesting that this somehow represents an 80-percent cut in the transportation funding. That simply is not true. The idea here is to transfer both the revenue collection authority and the spending authority back to where most of it belongs, which is at the State and the local level.

There isn't a State in the Union that wants to do away with transportation infrastructure spending. Quite to the contrary, our States and localities and those who assist the contractors, who provide the services, provide the gravel and other materials that go into these roads and bridges and transit projects--they want to get to work, but they want to put this money into steel and concrete in the ground rather than spending so much of it on lobbying, rather than spending so much of it on things that have nothing to do with steel and concrete in the ground.

I also wish to refer to something my colleague said with regard to the fact that it costs money to maintain the Interstate Highway System. I absolutely agree--I could not agree more--which is exactly why I wrote this amendment so as to retain a 3.7-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax that would be collected and spent better to make sure we would maintain the Interstate Highway System. That is exactly what we do.

A reference was made to my distinguished colleague from Oklahoma, Mr. Inhofe, expressing remorse over the fact that he is not here with us at this moment to have a discussion and wondering what he would say about it. To respond to my colleague's point, Senator Inhofe has voted for this provision in the past. In fact, in the past Senator Inhofe himself has introduced a version of this very piece of legislation.

My colleague also referred to groups that happen to oppose this legislation. I would encourage those groups to learn more about it and also point out that there are lots of groups that support my legislation, including Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Tax Reform, Heritage Action, Club for Growth, National Taxpayers Freedom, Freedom Works, and the list goes on and on.

It is also important to remember that our Federal gasoline tax did increase substantially between 1992 and 1994, increased from just 4 cents per gallon to 18.4 cents per gallon. During that time period we were told that if the gasoline tax was increased at the Federal level, we would be backing up the highway trust fund, that we would make sure it was secure.

Did that happen? No. What happened instead was the Federal Government overreached. The Federal Government started getting more and more involved in surface streets and things that have nothing to do with our Interstate Highway System. That is why we are here today.

I therefore yield back the floor.

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Mr. LEE. Madam President, the amendment we are about to consider would empower States to collect and spend on the transportation infrastructure they need. We have a desperate need within our transportation infrastructure system that is not being satisfied by our current Federal system, one that has been bloated over the years and has centralized too much power within Washington, DC. This has resulted in gridlock within our transportation infrastructure projects. We increased the Federal gasoline tax by 460 percent between 1982 and 1994. Instead of using that to back up and secure the Federal highway trust fund, we instead overreached. We instead expanded dramatically the power of the Federal Government and the expenses we incur.

I encourage all my colleagues to support this measure which would reempower States and move our interests further in the 21st century.

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