Dems Successfully Moved the Goal Posts

At first glance, a proposed $400 billion transportation bill from House Republicans appears to be more reasonable than President Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill or even Senate Republicans’ $568 billion alternative infrastructure plan. In fact, the latter two plans are supposed to be on top of Congress’ periodic reauthorization of routine highway and transit spending, while the House Republican plan is supposed to be for that reauthorization.

As such, the Republican plan represents such a massive increase in spending over previous years that it is almost as if it was written by the Democrats. The 2015 “FAST Act” spent $305 billion over five years, or $61 billion a year. That in itself was too much because the Highway Trust Fund collected less than $212 billion in highway user fees during those five years, so an additional $93 billion came out of deficit spending.

Considering the pandemic, revenues over the next five years aren’t likely to be much greater. Yet House Democrats proposed last year to spend $495 billion over five years, a huge increase that would require a tripling of deficit spending over the previous five years. The Republican response is a $400 billion bill, which is still a doubling of deficit spending. Instead of being ashamed of this, Republicans bragged that they are proposing “the largest percentage increase for surface transportation programs in the last quarter-century.”

Republicans don’t offer any way to pay for this increase other than more deficit spending. If Democrats intentionally proposed an outrageously expensive bill in order to move the goal posts in their direction, they succeeded.

People inside the Beltway often say that infrastructure bills have bi-partisan support, by which they mean pork barrel has bi-partisan support. Outside the Beltway, there is no justification for spending this much money. Despite the I-40 Mississippi River bridge, state highways and bridges tend to be in good condition and no increase in spending is needed to keep them that way. Transit ridership was declining even before the pandemic and is likely to remain low for the next several years, so transit doesn’t need an increase in spending either.

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The Republican bill does have one good thing: it proposes to allow “states the option to treat all federal funds they receive under the Federal-Aid Highway Program as having been apportioned in a lump sum.” One problem with federal highway (and transit) distributions is that they are divided in a dozen different funds (for highways and another dozen for transit). A lot of federal bureaucracy and red tape is involved in making sure that monies from fund A aren’t actually spent on program B. Consolidating the funds into one fund would reduce this red tape.

Unfortunately, this would only be a pilot program applying to “a limited number of states.” Also, it only applies to highway funds, not transit funds. This goes to a fundamental question: who knows best how state and local agencies should spend funds: the state and local governments or Congress? Many members of Congress think they know better than the locals; that, after all, is the premise of earmarking.

As I’ve recently written, a true fiscally conservative reauthorization bill would, at the very least, include no earmarks; no deficit spending; and no competitive grant funds that encourage wasteful projects. Senator Capito, the ranking Republican on the Environment & Public Works Committee, says she opposes earmarks. (Significantly, however, House Democrats are waiting to release their 2021 bill until they complete their list of proposed earmarks.) But both the House and Senate bills include a lot of deficit spending and at least some competitive grant funds.

As I’ve recently noted, Congress once had a firm policy of spending no more on surface transportation than was collected into the Highway Trust Fund. The problem with the moving-the-goals-posts strategy is that it only works one way. In last year’s divided Congress, the idea of increasing spending by 62 percent went nowhere, but it convinced Republicans that increasing spending by “only” 32 percent sounded reasonable when in fact it is just a different degree of insanity. If there is no way to reverse that strategy, government will just keep getting bigger and more out of taxpayers’ control.