Editor’s Note: President Obama signed a measure late Tuesday ending the budget impasse. Click here for an update.

ARLINGTON, Va. — State transportation officials said the sudden shutdown of the federal highway program is putting them at risk of abandoning projects and cutting safety programs unless Congress reaches a deal to extend the now-lapsed reauthorization.

“We have to have money to come in from the reimbursement so that we can pay our bills for the federal programs that we fund,” said Butch Brown, executive director of the Mississippi Department of Transportation.

Brown spoke here at a meeting Monday of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

He said that the shutdown — largely the result of Sen. Jim Bunning’s one-man filibuster of a bill that would have extended the highway bill, as well as unemployment and health insurance benefits to out-of-work Americans — was costing states $157 million a day in highway funds and $157 million a week in transit funding.

Last week, Bunning began blocking the Senate from voting on the extension, forcing the Department of Transportation

to furlough thousands of employees and suspend payments to states for highway projects. As of late Tuesday he continued to hold up the bill despite calls from Senate Republicans and Democrats to release his hold.

Brown said if Congress can get the program restored by Thursday, the damage to states may be mitigated.

“The battleship right now is still coasting – it hasn’t stopped yet,” he said. “If it stops completely it is going to take some time,” he said.

Without a deal between the House and Senate to temporarily reauthorize the highway and transit programs, Brown said states “cannot proceed doing business as usual — planning projects, implementing projects and financing projects without any certainty of federal funds.”

In addition to delayed construction projects, since highway safety programs run by the

© 2010, Transport Topics Publishing Group. All rights reserved.