DALLAS -- A proposal by Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., to almost double current federal gasoline and diesel taxes is one of more than 250 proposed amendments to the six-year, $325 billion highway funding bill adopted by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on Oct. 22.
The House Rules Committee will meet Monday night and Tuesday afternoon to decide which of the amendments will be allowed consideration when the measure is up for a vote by the full House, which could come later this week.
The proposed Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act of 2015 (H.R. 3763) sets out annual funding levels through fiscal 2021 but doesn't include revenue provisions to cover a $15 billion per year gap between collections dedicated to the Highway Trust Fund and expenditures from it.
Blumenauer said his amendment, which would add 15 cents to the current federal levies of 18.4 cents per gallon of gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon of diesel and index them to inflation, would put enough revenue into the HTF for significant increases in transportation funding.
"My amendment will not only fully fund H.R. 3763, but also provide enough revenue to increase investment above the current, anemic levels of spending," Blumenauer said.
The Senate bill relies on "a combination of budget gimmicks and tax code smoke and mirrors over the next decade," he said.
"Congress will be back to square one when that money runs out, facing an even bigger hole in the Highway Trust Fund and once again throwing hundreds of thousands of jobs into uncertainty," Blumenauer said.
The Senate's six-year, $360 billion DRIVE Act (H.R. 22), which passed in late July, uses $45.4 billion of revenue offsets to support transportation projects in the first three years but leaves the remaining three years unfunded.
The measure eventually adopted by the House must be reconciled with the Senate bill in a conference committee before the Nov. 20 expiration of the three-week reauthorization of transportation funding adopted by Congress last week.
A new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office said the House committee's proposal would provide $158 billion of funding for surface transportation infrastructure in the first three years and $157 billion in the final three years.
The fuel taxes generated most of the $39.4 billion of revenue dedicated to the HTF in 2015, CBO said, with $24.4 billion from the gasoline tax and $9.7 billion from the diesel tax. A tax on trucks and trailers brought in $3.8 billion, with two other taxes adding another $1.5 billion. Expenditures from the HTF in fiscal 2015 totaled $53.7 billion.
Supporting fuel tax revenues enough to keep funding at current levels would require an additional $100 billion over six years, CBO said. Congress has transferred more than $73 billion of general revenues into the HTF since 2008 to cover the shortfall.
Dr. Alison Premo Black, chief economist at the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, argued for a higher gasoline tax during a
"We can't keep doing more with less," she said at the Oct. 27 debate. "If we don't raise the federal gas tax, we're going to have to do less with less, and that means the system is going to suffer."
The low level of transportation funding is harming the U.S. economy, Black said.
"We used to be able to build great things in this country," she said. "But in the last few years, this partisan politics has frozen our ability to raise the gas tax or do much of anything."
