Editorials

Congress must put the brakes on its runaway raids on the highway trust fund.

"Recent projections by the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office reveal that the highway trust fund will run out of money during fiscal year 2009," warns Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation. "Unless the fund is replenished soon, federal spending on highways could decline significantly as the fund reverts to a spend-as-you-earn basis until a permanent remedy is enacted."

Congress is simply spending too much, he explains.

"The soon-to-be-empty trust fund is a direct consequence of recent congressional overspending in excess of the fuel tax revenues that replenish the fund as well as decades of congressional mandates allowing non-highway interests access to the highway trust fund," Utt says. "In FY 2008, these mandates are estimated to have diverted approximately 38 percent of trust fund spending to projects and programs of little value to the motorist's mobility needs."

And not surprisingly, members of Congress want even more money.

"Leaders of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure want total spending in the next highway reauthorization bill raised from the current $286 billion to nearly a half a trillion dollars," Utt reports. "Achieving this rate of spending would likely require a doubling of the federal fuel tax from its current level of 18.3 cents per gallon."

They cite an "infrastructure crisis" to justify their demand for higher taxes.

"The so-called crisis seems limited exclusively to the infrastructure managed by Congress, and legislative mismanagement -- not the level of funding -- is a large part of the problem," Utt contends.

The first thing Congress needs to do is stop using the highway trust fund for programs such as bicycle paths, community development, recreational trails and mass transit projects that don't help highways.

"Altogether, these diversions absorb an estimated $19.6 billion in trust fund spending, or about 38 percent of the total spent from the trust fund," Utt says. "As a consequence, motorists will receive only about 62 percent of what they have paid into the fund for general purpose roads and safety programs. Redeploying these diverted funds back to roads used by the motorists and truckers who fund the system would yield the equivalent of a 50 percent increase in new spending for road improvements and capacity increases."

But the best solution would be to get the federal government -- with its undeniable inefficiency -- out of the extra-constitutional business of fixing roads.

"Under the circumstances, the combination of existing diversions and the new ones likely to be enacted over the coming year suggest that the federal transportation program will become more costly and less effective," Utt notes. "As a consequence, proposals to shift transportation responsibility and revenue sources back to the states are now even more compelling. One such proposal, the Transportation Empowerment Act, would do just that by 'turning back' the highway program and its source of revenues to the states."

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