Administration’s GROW AMERICA Act 2.0 Mixes Bad with Good

Today, Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx unveiled the administration’s latest surface transportation reauthorization proposal. Like the previous White House bill, the latest iteration of the GROW AMERICA Act is unlikely to go anywhere on Capitol Hill. The president’s proposal to fund much of his increased infrastructure spending relies largely on a one-shot tax repatriation scheme, something that will do nothing to improve the long-run fiscal position of the Highway Trust Fund. In addition, the White House proposal would make the very wasteful TIGER discretionary grant program permanent. See this post for more on what good and bad surface transportation policy looks like.

But the administration’s GROW AMERICA 2.0 proposal isn’t all bad. In fact, it contains two very smart elements that Congress should attach to their own reauthorization package.

First, the administration proposal would repeal the current prohibition on states tolling their own Interstate segments, codified at 23 U.S.C. § 129, while also repealing the three-slot Interstate System Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Pilot Program, which was established by the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century of 1998 and has failed to promote Interstate reconstruction through tolling. Contrary to popular belief, the states, not the federal government, own and operate the Interstate Highway System. Currently, the only tolled segments of the Interstate system were grandfathered in by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. No federal-aid funds can be used to maintain these roads, which constitute a little over 6 percent of the Interstate Highway System. Tolling offers a number of advantages over fuel tax or non-user funding. Reason Foundation’s Bob Poole has developed a plan to reconstruct and modernize the Interstate Highway System through the use of all-electronic highway tolling, something policy makers should consider as an alternative to gas tax increases and Highway Trust Fund bailouts.

Second, the current cap on tax-exempt private activity bonds, which bring financing parity to infrastructure development by allowing the private sector to take advantage of similar debt instruments as the public sector, would be raised from $15 billion to $19 billion (see 26 U.S.C. § 142(m)(2)(A)). Ideally, this cap would be repealed, but increasing it is at least a step in the right direction.

To be sure, there is little in the latest GROW AMERICA Act for free marketeers to love. But Congress would be wise to take seriously the administration’s recommendations on Interstate tolling and private activity bonds.

For more on federal surface transportation reauthorization, see CEI's agenda for Congress, Free to Prosper.