DALLAS – President Obama would sign the five-year, $305 billion transportation bill passed by the House on Thursday, even though he would prefer more robust infrastructure funding, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.
"If passed, this legislation would be a real step forward for our transportation infrastructure after years of short-term patches," Earnest said at Wednesday's press briefing.
"So we would actually view this legislation as a step in the right direction, but only a first step," he said "We believe that there are more infrastructure projects that are worthy of funding that would create jobs in the short-term and lay a long-term foundation for our ongoing economic strength over the long-term."
The House adopted the Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act (H.R. 22) on a vote of 359 to 65, with all the "no" votes coming from Republican lawmakers. The bill now goes to the Senate, which is expected to take it up late Thursday. The measure must be passed by the Senate and signed by President Obama before the current funding reauthorization expires at midnight Friday.
Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said the FAST Act is one of the most important accomplishments of the 114th Congress.
"This is the first time we've come together on a long term bill in 10 years," Shuster said during Thursday's floor debate on the funding bill. "It's fully paid for and reauthorizes federal surface transportation programs for five years."
Rep. Reid Ribble, R-Wis., disagreed with Shuster's assessment of the FAST Act.
"You will hear that this spending is fully offset and fully paid for," Ribble said. "That's simply not the case. It relies on phony, godawful pay-fors. They are totally phony."
The FAST Act would allocate $280 billion from the Highway Trust Fund from fiscal 2016 through 2020, while the fund's revenues over the five years from dedicated taxes and interest are expected to total $208 billion, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.
A transfer into the HTF of $70 billion, mostly from the Treasury's general revenue fund, will cover the revenue gap and leave a balance of about $10 billion in the transportation fund at the end of fiscal 2020, CBO said.
The revenue offsets required for the transfer include $53.3 billion from capping the Federal Reserve System's surplus account at $10 billion, $7 billion from a reduction in the Fed's dividend to large member banks, and $6.2 billion from a sale of 900 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen criticized the use of the surplus account to fund transportation as "a bad precedent" that "infringes on the central independence of the bank" in testimony on Thursday before the Joint Economic Committee.
Although the FAST Act provides five years of transportation funding, the revenue offsets will be realized over 10 years.
The five-year bill would allocate $225 billion from the HTF to highways, including $1.44 billion for the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act low-cost loan program that was funded at $1 billion a year in fiscal 2014 and 2015. The proposal provides $275 million for TIFIA in each of the first two years, with the allocation going to $285 billion in fiscal 2018 and $300 billion per year in fiscal 2019 and 2020.
Mass transit funding totals $60.9 billion over five years, including $48.7 billion of formula grants and $11.5 billion of capital investment grants.
