DALLAS — A Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Tuesday approved a bill that would keep federal highway funding in fiscal 2015 at the previous year's level but would increase transit spending by $310 million.
The $72 billion that would be provided to the Department of Transportation next year by the legislation is $17.7 billion more than in President Obama's request for DOT in fiscal 2015, but more than in the bill approved last month by the House Appropriations Committee.
A Senate subcommittee spokesman said the president's budget request assumed that many of the surface transportation programs would be authorized and funded by a new surface transportation bill rather than through the appropriations process.
The full Senate Appropriations Committee will consider the bill, which also includes allocations for the Department of Housing and Urban Development in fiscal 2015, on Thursday morning.
Subcommittee chairman Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said transportation funding in the appropriations bill is based on an assumption that the current two-year highway bill will be extended past its scheduled expiration on Sept. 30.
The Highway Trust Fund, which supports federal spending for highway and transit projects, is expected to run dry in late July or early August if Congress does not supplement it before then, she said.
If the fund is depleted before fiscal 2015 begins on Oct. 1, Murray warned, states will be unable to proceed with new highway and transit projects next year because gasoline tax collections are outpaced by outlays from the fund.
"While this bill is no solution, I hope Congress can work together to avoid this unnecessary and preventable crisis," she said.
Murray, who is also chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said in a report last week that the United States has not invested enough in transportation infrastructure over the last two decades
"Part of the reason we currently face such enormous needs in our infrastructure systems is that, as a nation, we have been under-investing in these areas for far too long," she said. "As a percentage of [gross domestic product], the United States is now spending less on infrastructure than at any point in the last 20 years."
The under-investment problem would get worse if the House committee's spending plan prevails, Murray warned. "The House budget is a recipe for exacerbating our infrastructure deficits, not solving them," she said in the report.
The Senate subcommittee's bill would provide a total of $71.7 billion for DOT in 2015, including $18.1 billion of discretionary budget authority. The total amount is $536 million more than the fiscal year 2014 appropriations, which included $53.5 billion of outlays and $17.7 billion in discretionary budget authority.
Federal highway funding would be set at $40.3 billion next year in the legislation, the same as in fiscal 2014 under the current transportation infrastructure law, Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century.
The Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery program for ports, highways, and transit would be $550 million in 2015 in the subcommittee's bill rather than the $100 million proposed for grants in the House committee's legislation.
TIGER funding totaled $600 million in fiscal 2014. President Obama proposed increasing the TIGER program to $1.25 billion next year and a total of $5 billion over four years.
The New Starts and Small Starts transit investment grants would receive $2.2 billion in the subcommittee's 2015 proposal, an increase of $221 million from 2014. The House appropriation measure reduced funding for the grant program for rail and transit projects to $1.7 billion next year from $1.9 billion in 2014.
The president's 2015 DOT budget proposal included $2.5 billion for the capital improvements grant program.
