Ensuring Tax Exempt Organizations the Right to Appeal Act

Floor Speech

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Mrs. SHAHEEN. Madam President, in just 10 days, authorization for the highway trust fund will expire. The fund will run out of money entirely by the end of July, which means transportation projects in New Hampshire and across this country will grind to a halt.

What is Congress's response to this crisis? This week, leadership will bring to the floor yet another inadequate short-term extension of the highway trust fund authorization, and there is no plan whatsoever to address the insolvency of the fund. In other words, once again, we are kicking the can down the road. But in this case the road is overwhelmed by traffic, badly in need of modernization, and filled with patches and potholes. For a country that seeks to remain competitive in the 21st century global economy, this is totally dysfunctional and unacceptable.

I know my colleagues and the Presiding Officer travel around the city of Washington. Sometimes I feel like I am in a Third World country when I travel along the roads in DC. There are few more basic and necessary functions of government than providing for modernized highways, bridges, and other infrastructure. Yet Congress is grossly neglecting this responsibility. China spends about 9 percent of their gross domestic product on infrastructure, Brazil spends about 8 percent, but infrastructure spending in the United States has fallen to just 2 percent of our GDP. That is half of what we were spending in the 1960s.

Our highways and bridges face a more than $800 billion backlog of investment needs, including nearly one-half trillion dollars in critical repair work, and Americans spend a staggering 5.5 billion--that is billion not million--hours stuck in traffic each year. Yet earlier this month, the majority party in Congress voted almost unanimously for a budget resolution that will slash Federal funding for transportation by 40 percent over the next decade. This is just irresponsible. This isn't about cutting fat and extravagance from the transportation budget; this is about cutting the muscle, the sinew of our Nation's critical transportation infrastructure.

Last week, I went with the mayor and the city manager to Concord--New Hampshire's capital city--to inspect one of three bridges that are critical to the city of Concord. It is rusted out and it is now closed--the Sewalls Falls Bridge. Our office had worked with the city and U.S. DOT to get the approvals to replace this bridge. The city of Concord lined up all the permits--and then nothing. Because of uncertainty about Federal funding for the project, it was stopped dead in its tracks, until the city and State last week, when they realized we weren't going to act, stepped in with short-term funding in anticipation we would finally do the right thing.

Well, thousands of other road and bridge projects across the country have been put in this same jeopardy and limbo because of our failure to do our job. This neglect is creating bottlenecks in our economy, it is hurting our global competitiveness, and it is killing jobs, especially in the construction trades, where employment still has yet to recover from the recession. According to a Duke University study, providing Federal funding to meet the U.S. Department of Transportation's infrastructure requests would create nearly 2 1/2 million jobs.

Earlier this month, I joined with a bipartisan group of eight Senators who previously served as Governors: Senators KING, ROUNDS, KAINE, HOEVEN, WARNER, CARPER, MANCHIN, and myself. We sent a letter to our Senate colleagues urging them to commit to fully funding national infrastructure priorities and putting a stop to the destructive, dysfunctional short-term fixes that have become routine in recent years.

Madam President, you are too young to remember, but I remember being in elementary school when Dwight Eisenhower championed our great Interstate Highway System. That was a visionary move. I remember talking about it in class and being excited about it. The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956 ensured dedicated Federal funding to build a network that today encompasses more than 46,000 miles of roadways. That system has transformed our economy and it has created countless millions of jobs, but it is now six decades old. Its dedicated funding mechanism--the highway trust fund--is in constant shortfall and today is just 2 months away from becoming insolvent.

So for Congress to pass yet another short-term extension is damaging and dysfunctional. It kicks the can down a road that is crumbling, congested, and increasingly uncompetitive. It is time for Congress to come together, on a bipartisan basis, to break the cycle of patchwork fixes. It is time to pass a 5- to 6-year funding bill that will allow government at all levels to plan long-term capital investment projects and to build a 21st century transportation system that meets the needs of our 21st century economy.

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