WASHINGTON — The Bipartisan Policy Center released a new spending reform plan Thursday that calls for a near quadrupling of the U.S. Transportation Department’s TIFIA program from a $122 million annual appropriation to $450 million.
The increase in the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act program was part of what the center calls “performance-driven” budgeting or spending. Also included among the center’s recommendations for changing how the federal government spends its transportation money was an alternative minimum tax fix to promote more private-activity bonds and a revival of the Build America Bond program with the inclusion of private participation.
The center contends that the less money the government has to spend for transportation, the more important it is for that money to be spent efficiently on projects that do the most to develop and improve national infrastructure.
The group’s plan assumes highway trust funds for federal spending on transportation will fall from $52.7 billion under the multi-year surface transportation bill — the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users — in 2009 by 24.2% to $40 billion per year because Congress will no longer supplement the trust funds with general revenues.
And get used to it — don’t hope for any more money, according to Joshua Schank, one of the transportation plan’s authors. “There is no bacon,” he declared.
The center is proposing to take 100 or so current transportation programs and consolidate them into 10 programs. It would zero out four programs. The euphemistically named Equity Bonus program, an existing program that has been the repository for earmarks and distribution of money among regions, is at the top of the list to be zeroed out.
States and localities would have less money, but more flexibility under the plan. The federal matching percentage, for example, could vary based on how projects or groups of projects perform.
But it is uncertain how the performance of transportation projects would be rated. The center said Congress should decide on a set of national transportation priorities, though so far it has not been able to do so.
There have been past attempts to require performance-based budgeting, but they often have not worked.
You have a lot of politicians and bureaucrats to please, said Ken Button, director of George Mason University’s Transportation Center. That makes deciding how performance should be judged a sometimes-agonizing process. Then, when you get past that, he said, “What you often get with these performance-based measures is, they play games. They put up a particular parameter and they play around so they can achieve it and nothing else.”
There are examples of gaming the system at your local airport, Button said. Airlines are supposed to give compensation if a flight sits on the ramp too long, but they cancel the flight rather than compensate passengers.
The committee that wrote the center’s transportation plan included several former lawmakers who clearly acknowledged the spending problem, but in the report passed off the far larger political problem of getting any plan like this approved in Congress with references to “entrenched interests.”
