Continued and increased federal funding of highways and transit is vitally important, says Jack Schenendorf in a paper titled, The Case Against Transportation Devolution. Devolving transportation to the states “would conflict with the nation’s long and unbroken history of federal transportation investment, balkanize the nation’s transportation networks, cause a substantial drag on the economy, and bring about a host of other serious problems.”
Schenendorf may be a Republican, but that doesn’t make him a conservative, at least not in the fiscal sense. He was the chief of staff for the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee from 1995 to 2001. Those happen to be the years when committee chair Bud Shuster (R-PA) made himself known as “one of the most shameless promulgators of pork-barrel spending in all of Congress.” Shuster has all sorts of highways, museums, and buildings named after him throughout his district and state, and he paved the way for his son, Bill, to take his seat when he retired. Today Bill also chairs the House T&I Committee.
Also during those years, Congress passed the 1998 transportation bill, TEA-21, which happened to be the first law that mandated increased spending every year even if revenues did not keep up. While that only became a problem in 2007, it is the main reason why Congress is gridlocked today. In other words, Schenendorf is part of the reason why the federal transportation funding process has broken down.
