Budget Panels Reject Obama Proposal, Retain Highway Trust Fund Firewall
This story appears in the April 6 print edition of Transport Topics.
Budget committees in Congress have approved draft versions of spending-revenue plans for next year that reject an Obama administration proposal to remove the firewalls that have traditionally protected the Highway Trust Fund and other transportation-related funds.
In both the House and Senate versions the budget would continue to dedicate revenue raised by the taxes that support the trust funds to transportation programs, rather than including them in the federal government’s general revenues.
Tim Lynch, senior vice president of American Trucking Associations, said that by retaining the protections around trust fund dollars, Congress made it easier to ask for increases in revenue-producing levies such as fuel or excise taxes.
“We’re pleased that the budget committee saw the wisdom of retaining” the firewalls, Lynch told Transport Topics. “It would be very difficult to convince our industry to support an increase or additional revenue going into the trust fund if the contract authority and, ultimately, the firewalls that protect the program, came down.”
Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said he was “pleased that the budget resolution continues to recognize the unique nature of trust-funded programs by rejecting this ill-advised proposal.”
Oberstar said that if the recommendation of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget had been adopted, the process of allocating money for transportation programs would have been transformed into “a simple authorization of appropriations” without ensuring that funds collected from transportation user fees were dedicated for transportation-related programs.Mike Joyce, a lobbyist for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, told TT the Obama budget “probably overreached a little” in dealing with highway funds.
“We all know that, really, the authorizers and appropriators in Congress are the ones that call the shots,” he said.
Joyce added that even with highway fund protections maintained, OOIDA was unlikely to support a fee increase without “seeing some reforms to how the 36% of the Highway Trust Fund that truckers pay for are used.”
The House resolution assumes a “base allocation of $324 billion for highways, highway safety and transit programs” during the next reauthorization period, Oberstar said, but establishes a reserve fund that “allow[s] this base allocation . . . to be adjusted upward as necessary to accommodate higher funding levels to the extent they can be supported by the Highway Trust Fund.”
In the Senate, a similar provision was included in the legislation.
Both the House and Senate were expected to vote on their respective budget resolutions after TT went to press.
