Foxx: ‘Glaring problems’ with Senate highway bill

Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said Friday that there were “glaring problems” with the Senate highway bill but stopped short of saying the Obama administration opposed the measure. 

Foxx said the administration most objected to the Senate bill’s safety provisions, which have drawn the ire of top Democrats in the upper chamber as well. Lawmakers face a July 31 deadline to pump new funding into the Highway Trust Fund.

{mosads}But Foxx also insisted that his department couldn’t make a final call on the measure yet, just a week before that deadline and after the administration endorsed a House proposal. The Transportation secretary noted that the Senate bill is more than 1,000 pages and was released just days ago and that GOP leaders had made more than a couple of tweaks to both the measure’s offsets and policy in recent days.

“We’re not in a position to be either for or against the whole bill,” Foxx said at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. “There are certainly portions of it we find very troubling.”

The Senate measure — a six-year bill, with enough funding to pay for three years — cleared another key procedural hurdle on Friday. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other Senate Republicans have signaled for weeks that they wanted to get a highway deal that would at least push the issue beyond the 2016 election.

On Friday, Foxx continued to applaud the House highway measure, which would provide funding through mid-December.

President Obama and key House Republicans, such as Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), say that sort of deal would give them a chance to negotiate a revamp of the international tax system that would provide enough funding for a six-year highway bill this fall.

“There is a reasonable chance the stars could align for some variation of the business tax reform proposal we put in our bill,” Foxx said.

Top Democrats and Republicans have some agreements on a basic framework of an international tax revamp, but would still have to make some very difficult decisions to flesh out the details.

Foxx said the administration had been very open with lawmakers about their issues with the Senate bill but had not asked Democrats to oppose it.

He added that the administration is concerned that the Senate bill doesn’t take a tougher stance on barring the sale of rental cars that have been recalled. Democrats have also complained that the measure would extend a deadline for railroads to install an automated navigation system.