McCarthy to House GOP: ‘We will need to act’ on road funding

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told members of the chamber’s Republican caucus that they will “need to act” to extend federal transportation funding this month. 

“Looking ahead to May, we will work to aggressively pursue policies focused on bolstering national security, preventing job-killing over-regulation, and modernizing our government and economy to meet the opportunities and the challenges of the 21st century,” he said in a memo to GOP lawmakers. 

“May will also bring our next funding bill, the Fiscal Year 2016 Legislative Branch Appropriations Act (T. Graves) and we will need to act on the impending expiration of the authorities under the Highway Trust Fund,” he continued. 

{mosads}The federal government’s transportation funding bill is scheduled to expire on May 31. Lawmakers are struggling to come up with a way to pay for an extension of the measure, although the deadline is looming large in Washington. 

The Department of Transportation has said it has enough money to cover projects for a month or two after that, but then it will have to cut back on payments to state and local governments who are expecting federal help with large infrastructure projects. 

The traditional source of funds for federal transportation maintenance has been the 18.4 cents per gallon federal gas tax. The gas tax, which was first implemented in the 1930s, has not been increased since 1993, and improvements in fuel efficiency have sapped its purchasing power. 

The federal government typically spends about $50 billion per year on transportation projects, but the gas tax only brings in approximately $34 billion at its current rate. 

Transportation advocates have suggested that raising the tax or at least indexing it to inflation would be the easiest way to close the infrastructure funding shortfall, but lawmakers have been reluctant to ask drivers to pay more at the pump. 

McCarthy did not weigh in on the debate about how to pay for an extension of the transportation-funding bill in his memo on Friday, but he said earlier this week that a gas tax increase is dead on arrival in Congress. 

“I think passing a gas tax is politically impossible,” he said on Tuesday, pointing out that he just paid $3.20 a gallon to fill up his car in his hometown of Bakersfield, Calif.

The California lawmaker said then that Congress may have to tackle a short-term patch to replenish the depleted Highway Trust Fund in order to reach a longer-term solution. 

“The ultimate goal is to do a long-term [bill], five to seven years. The best way to get to a long-term one is to probably do a short-term one first,” McCarthy told reporters at a news briefing in his office.

“It may be the case that we have to do a short term to be able to do the long term.”