Congress Must Get Serious About Addressing Transportation Issues

As appeared in the July 16, 2020 edition of the Lititz Record Express, Elizabethtown Advocate & Ephrata Review.

Prior to joining Congress, while serving as a state senator, I saw the Pennsylvania General Assembly come together to invest in our state's crumbling roads and bridges. Now serving in Congress, I have served for the past two terms as a member of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. While supporting our national transportation infrastructure has long been a bipartisan effort in Congress, the latest surface transportation bill, which includes highway and transit funding, was advanced along a party-line vote in the House. Congress must act by September 30, 2020 to reauthorize federal investment in surface transportation infrastructure.

Earlier this month, the House considered H.R. 2, Investing in a New Vision for the Environment and Surface Transportation (INVEST) in America Act. Unfortunately, the legislation was not a serious effort to address and improve our nation's surface transportation infrastructure. Rather than engaging in earnest and cooperative policymaking, House Democrats drafted H.R. 2 without any Republican input. During the legislation's consideration in committee, despite offering hundreds of amendments, nearly all amendments offered by Republicans were rejected.

This bill does not adequately balance investments in rural and urban transportation infrastructure. It prioritizes funding increases to passenger rail and transit programs, while offering substantially smaller investments in highway and bridge funding. For example, the bill creates a "Rebuild Rural" grant program which is funded at $250 million, compared to spending nearly $2 billion to build electric charging stations for use in urban and suburban communities. While infrastructure spending is a balancing act, this bill simply does not come close to achieving an acceptable equilibrium.

H.R. 2 also included numerous costly policies unrelated to infrastructure. Approximately two of every five dollars spent in the legislation would go towards Green New Deal priorities and issues totally unrelated to surface transportation. This bill also does not include necessary changes to environmental review regulations which add years to project completion timelines.

Like our state government, the federal government has a restricted account for transportation spending, known as the Highway Trust Fund. This bill would spend more money than the Highway Trust Fund takes in and would require borrowing additional dollars from the General Fund, which funds everything from national security to education. Even worse, the $1.5 trillion legislation also does not specify how it would be paid for, either through reductions in spending or increases in revenue.

And while Congress spends its time debating legislation which will never become law, it is time we are not spending attempting to solve the long-term issues facing our nation's transportation policy. A 2019 report by the independent and non-partisan Government Accountability Office, states that the Highway Trust Fund faces solvency issues and needs over $100 billion in new funding by 2026.

The simple fact is that Congress must get serious about addressing these underlying issues with our nation's transportation policy and return to the bipartisanship which has long been the hallmark of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Unfortunately, H.R. 2 avoids these challenging questions and is only a partisan messaging bill. I remain committed to supporting legislation which invests in infrastructure by supporting both rural and urban communities, providing states additional flexibility to meet their unique needs, and limiting expensive and onerous mandates.