The Senate had been ready to pass a $350 billion, long-term transportation bill that would make changes to highway, transit, railroad and auto safety programs, but only provide enough funds for the first three years of the six years covered by the bill.
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Obama, who has long pushed for a multi-year highway bill, said he had no choice but to sign the short-term measure to prevent an interruption of money for roads and bridges during the busy summer construction season. “How can businesses do any kind of planning in this country when they get one and two and three-month extensions?” “There does seem to be bipartisan awareness and bipartisan support for funding this”, says Rick Geddes, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute think tank and an infrastructure expert at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
According to the National Corn Growers Association citing USDA data, 80% of the domestic corn crop goes to market via trucks. Lawmakers from both parties said the spending is necessary even as they complained about the VA’s failure to anticipate the problem.
The Senate’s long-term transportation bill also renews the Export-Import Bank, which makes low-interest loans to help U.S. companies sell products overseas. House Republican leaders opted for the patch to give themselves more time to work on a long-term – and long-sought – transportation bill.
Minnesota has not canceled any projects because of the unpredictable nature of the funding streams, but Margaret Donahoe, executive director at the Minnesota Transportation Alliance, said that without a long-term funding solution, bigger projects eventually could face delays. We commend the Senate for approving a multi-year bill.
Lawmakers said they hope the three-month patch – the 34th short-term transportation extension since 2009 – will be the last for Congress. It extends the government’s authority to process aid payments to states through October 29.
And, as more videos emerge showing disturbing fetal tissue collection practices, Republicans are increasingly focused on cutting off funding for Planned Parenthood, raising the prospect that Congress will spend September tied in knots over how to avoid shutting down the government over that issue.
Jonathan Ernst/REUTERS Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called the bill’s passage ‘a win for our country.’.
“The staffs are working together as we speak”, said Republican Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee.
The U.S. Department of Transportation said that based on 2013 data, 1,513 of Minnesota’s 13,000 bridges are considered structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. Senator McConnell is also skeptical of the plan, because he prefers broader tax reform under a potentially Republican president post-2016, among other concerns.
“We have now made it a habit where instead of five-year funding plans for transportation”, the president added, “we operate as if we’re hand-to-mouth, three months at a time”.
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The Senate bill would create a multibillion-dollar program to fund freight programs, while setting new policy to prioritize fix grants for high-risk projects.
