Restoring Trust in the Highway Trust Fund
Federal surface transportation policy is at a fateful crossroads. Since the completion of the Interstate system, the federal program has lost its focus and its sense of purpose. And the users-pay/users-benefit funding mechanism which built that system (dedicated fuel taxes) has gradually been transformed into a public works tax for Congress to spend on its own-rather than highway users’-priorities. Most proposals to reformulate the federal transportation program would further break faith with highway customers.
While appearing to advocate simplification and program consolidation, they would add costly new non-highway programs, increasing highway use taxes but diverting much of the proceeds to still more non-highway programs, from passenger trains to energy subsidies to federalized land-use planning. Yet it is thanks to these very trends that American taxpayers no longer have trust in the Highway Trust Fund. Instead of welcoming an expanded federal program, most oppose increases in fuel taxes as unlikely to improve their own transportation situations.
The federal transportation program needs to be rethought. It is notoriously politicized, failing to make the best use of existing funds and failing to focus on the most important national transportation goals. Every serious study in recent years has concluded that America is under-investing in highway infrastructure; major improvements to the system are few and far between. But rather than simply putting larger sums of money into a seriously flawed process, the better course is to rethink and refocus the federal role, in order to spend more on core federal purposes and less on peripheral concerns. Some reauthorizations have brought big changes to the federal transportation program. This one should as well, not by moving further away from a user-fee funded system designed to improve mobility, but by moving back toward it.