DALLAS -- Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx kept up the pressure for passage of a multi-year surface transportation funding bill in a post-election congressional session during an interview Thursday with a Washington radio station.
Speaking during an WAMU-FM broadcast, Foxx noted that lawmakers in both parties agree that a long-term infrastructure funding measure is needed after years of short-term fixes, extensions, and infusions of general fund revenues into the chronically insolvent Highway Trust Fund.
"There continues to be a bipartisan interest in figuring a way forward," he said. "We are going to have to get through these elections and get Congress back in Washington to see how far we can take it."
That growing momentum will be lost if Congress waits until January or later to begin work on a transportation bill, he said. The recent $10.8 billion extension extends federal highway funding through May 31, 2015.
"I don't think we are going to find ourselves in a better moment to do something than we will over the next few months," he said.
President Obama's $302 billion, four-year Grow America Act is the best of several options being considered in Congress on how to fund federal transportation spending, Foxx said.
The president's proposal would boost highway and transit spending by $90 billion over four years with the help of $150 billion in one-time revenues from corporate tax reforms.
The additional spending is long overdue, Foxx said.
"We need to be doing more, in just about every community in the U.S.," he said.
Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has offered a plan that would provide an additional $126.5 billion for transportation over eight years. Camp's measure would bolster the Highway Trust Fund with a one-time tax on some corporate earnings and offshore profits of foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations.
Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told an economics forum last week that there are signs of a growing bipartisan consensus in Congress that tax reform is a viable funding source.
"I believe that there's a majority in Congress that knows it's the right thing to do and wants to do it," Lew said.
Legislation has been introduced in the House and Senate to raise federal gasoline and diesel taxes to keep the HTF solvent, but Foxx said a tax increase is not needed.
"The way that we pay for Grow America, through business tax reform, increasingly looks like a better idea," he said. "At the same time, we've said all along that we are willing to listen to other ideas that emerge from Congress."
The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has not considered a long-term transportation bill, but the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in May adopted a six-year transportation bill that would keep highway spending at 2014 levels plus inflation through fiscal 2020. The Grow America Act would provide $48 billion for highway projects in fiscal 2015, up from $42.6 billion in fiscal 2015.
The House Appropriations Committee approved a fiscal 2015 budget for transportation with no increase in highway funding, while the budget for fiscal 2015 adopted by the Senate Appropriations Committee increases spending by about $40 million.
