Rep. Delaney Urges Increased Transportation Funding

With the highway bill less than a week from its expected markup in the House, Rep. John Delaney wrote to Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Bill Shuster on Oct. 15, urging him to increase baseline funding levels.

“Instead of continuing our glide path to a third-world infrastructure, our next highway bill should reverse course and start our infrastructure comeback,” Delaney (D-Md.) wrote after noting that government investment in infrastructure, as a percentage of gross domestic product, has fallen 54% since 1960. “A meaningful increase in our infrastructure investment will create millions of jobs and help our businesses stay competitive in the global economy.”

Citing the Congressional Budget Office, Delaney said that a new six-year bill starting in 2016 would authorize $328 billion in infrastructure spending and advocated increasing that figure to between $360 billion and $400 billion as detailed in H.R. 625, the Infrastructure Act 2.0 that he introduced in January. The bill would take $170 billion from international tax reform and allocate $120 billion for the Highway Trust Fund and $50 billion for creating a new permanent national infrastructure fund to provide financing to state and local governments.

“If we want to address our infrastructure crisis, we have to go big, and baseline funding just won’t get us there,” Delaney wrote to Shuster.  “We can grow jobs, grow our economy and make our businesses more competitive.”