Federal Funding

Four months ago – just days after the Democrats' "shellacking" at the polls – a bipartisan commission offered President Obama the chance to retake the budgetary high ground from Republicans, who had positioned themselves as the party of fiscal sanity. The blue-ribbon deficit commission – led by Erskine Bowles, President Bill Clinton's budget negotiator, and former Republican Senator Alan Simpson – detailed its agenda for getting federal revenues and spending into balance, capping both at 21 percent of GDP over the next 25 years [PDF]. Transportation advocates were gratified to see a strong recommendation for a 15-cent increase in the gas tax to stabilize the Highway Trust Fund.

Just when we thought transportation had gotten off relatively easy in the shutdown-aversion budget deal:

It’s Monday morning, and the government is open for business. In a last-minute agreement just an hour before the current budget extension was to expire Friday night, Democrats and Republicans avoided the nuclear option of a government shutdown.

A powwow between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, President Obama, and House Speaker John Boehner last night failed to yield a compromise that would put a budget in place before the government shuts down at midnight tonight. The failure of yet another attempt to negotiate makes a government shutdown all but inevitable.

With House GOP leadership making it abundantly clear that they would be pleased to return federal transportation policy to the 1950s, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works met today to get serious about the who, what and how of funding a 21st century transportation system.

With the release of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's budget proposal yesterday, right wing calls for massive cuts to transportation spending are now enshrined in the GOP leadership's fiscal plan. Ryan singled out transportation as an area particularly ripe for cuts, criticized the use of gas tax revenues for projects that aren't highways, and called for transportation spending levels to barely cover half of what President Obama requested in February.

While House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan grabbed headlines with the release of a fiscal plan that would severely constrain the federal transportation program (more on that later), the theme of the day at the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee was the desperate need to invest in infrastructure, as members of Congress provided their own proposals to the House Subcommittee on Highways and Transit.

USDOT Deputy Secretary John Porcari kicked off the Transportation Equity Network’s “One Nation, Indivisible” conference yesterday with a call to think long-term. By 2050, he said, we can expect the U.S. population to grow by 100 million people, and nearly all of them will live in large urban centers. Problems like crumbling infrastructure, inadequate transit systems, grinding traffic and pollution will be much worse then if we don’t start acting today.

So Congress hasn't resolved the 2011 budget impasse yet, and already there are bigger budget battles about to consume Capitol Hill.