Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) borrowed a page from the Joe Biden playbook May 22 by equating an aspect of American infrastructure to that of a Third World country to draw attention to the country’s aging transportation system.
Vice President Biden last year said New York’s LaGuardia Airport resembled an airport in a Third World country. For Shaheen, Washington, D.C.,’s roadways evoke a similar reaction.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m in a Third World country when I travel on the roads in D.C.,” Shaheen said on Senate floor before a vote on a two-month extension of highway funding authority. The vote is expected to occur before senators leave town for the Memorial Day recess.
Shaheen called the two-month patch that would authorize the Highway Trust Fund “damaging and dysfunctional.”
“It kicks the can down a road that is crumbling, congested and increasingly uncompetitive,” she said.
On May 21, Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), a senior transportation authorizer, was on the floor to press colleagues to back a multiyear highway bill: “We need to find a long-term solution that we can agree on to fix this problem, and we need to do it this summer.”
According to the Congressional Budget Office’s recent baseline, the trust fund is spending slower than expected, and a two-month patch would eliminate the need for offsets before August. After August, Congress would need to transfer funds into the trust fund or implement a long-term funding fix to keep the account operable.
The Senate Environment and Public Works panel plans to mark up a six-year highway bill in June, reported by Politico to be June 24. Funding concerns are expected to come up during that markup hearing.
Since 2008, Congress has approved more than $65 billion in transfers to prevent the fund’s collapse.
