Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is heading back to Capitol Hill two weeks after encouraging senators to boost U.S. infrastructure funding, saying, “To hell with the politics.”
Foxx is scheduled to testify at the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s hearing on Wednesday morning. It will focus on extending an infrastructure funding measure that is currently scheduled to expire in May. He will later hold a Twitter town hall with the panel Chairman Bill Shuster (R-Pa.).
The appearance follows Foxx taking lawmakers to task for passing only a series of short-term highway funding packages since a 2005 measure expired in 2009 in unusually stark terms, while he testified before a Senate hearing about infrastructure funding.
{mosads}“The transportation system doesn’t care about the political challenges or the funding challenges of addressing its need,” Foxx said during a Jan. 28 Senate hearing.
“From its perspective, and from mine, we are either meeting its needs or we’re not,” he continued. “In order for the system to be as good as the American people, we must do something dramatic. To hell with the politics.”
Despite Foxx’s prodding, lawmakers have struggled to come up with a way to pay for a boost in the nation’s infrastructure funding.
Lawmakers have introduced a series of bills this week to extend the expiring transportation bill, but they have not yet coalesced around a specific funding source for the measure. The idea of increasing the 18.4-cent-per-gallon federal gas tax to help pay for construction projects has been discussed, but many lawmakers are reluctant to ask drivers to pay more at the pump.
Proposals from the White House and lawmakers like Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) rely on the idea of taxing overseas corporate revenue through a process that is known as “repatriation” to pay for a new round of road projects.
The gas tax, which has not been increased since 1993, has struggled to keep pace with infrastructure expenses in recent years, as cars have become more fuel efficient.
The tax at the pump, which predates the highway system by about 20 years, brings in approximately $34 billion per year. The federal government typically spends about $50 billion per year on road and transit projects, and transportation advocates have maintained that the larger figure is only enough to maintain the current state of U.S. infrastructure.
The House Transportation Committee said in a statement that Wednesday’s hearing with Foxx will be the “first in a two-part series of hearings on surface transportation reauthorization, with the second hearing scheduled for later this month.”
The current transportation funding bill, which included about $11 billion for infrastructure projects, is scheduled to expire on May 31.