A Republican proposal to rein in out-of-control highway spending surprisingly isn't winning the full-throated support of advocates to end car dependency — because without further reforms, it could take down transit systems across America along with it.
Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) recently introduced a bill that would take the simple but radical step of prohibiting the federal Department of Transportation from spending more money each year than the gas tax brings in. Radical, because the department has overspent its Highway Trust Fund coffers every year since 2008, when Congress began bailing out the fund with general tax dollars — including those paid by people who don't drive.
Needless to say, that spending spree overwhelmingly went to building highways, which cost $58.5 billion in 2025 alone even though motorists only paid $38.9 billion into the fund that year. Add that with the last nearly two decades of shortfalls and the result is "around $275 billion to cover the huge gap between how much Congress keeps spending on transportation and the far lower amount the gas tax brings in each year," said Steve Davis of Transportation for America.
And that the gap is on pace to reach more than $40 billion every single year.
For context, $40 billion is more than four times what it would cost to provide permanent housing for every unhoused family who stayed in an emergency shelter in the U.S. in 2022, and nearly enough to end world hunger by 2030, at least by some estimates.
If America spent the cash on things like that rather than endless, senseless highway lanes that don't even cure congestion like their proponents claim, it would also result in a staggering 22 percent reduction in U.S. carbon emissions — which Davis says makes the legislation "technically the most ambitious climate bill in Congress."
That's especially bold considering that Lee had a 3-percent rating from the League of Conservation in Voters last year.
“The Highway Trust Fund is a disaster," said Senator Lee in a statement to Streetsblog. "Congress cannot keep spending more on this program than what the gas tax brings in.”
If that sounds too good to be true, though, it probably is.
In a recent blog post, Davis points out that Lee's proposal is something of a devil's bargain because it will radically scale down transit spending, too. Thanks to an infamous Reagan-era compromise, about three out of every 18 cents brought in by the gas tax today is funneled to transit, a contribution on which small and rural systems, especially, rely for their very existence since they earn so little money from fares and state-level sources.
Davis estimates that Lee's proposal would actually math out to a 66-percent reduction in federal transit funds, "causing pain and fiscal ruin for transit systems across the country — especially smaller ones," he writes.
Still, Davis praised Lee for at least not suggesting that the Mass Transit account within the Highway Trust Fund be eliminated altogether, as the White House recommended in November. Still, he says that the "Balance the Highway Trust Fund Act" isn't a serious policy proposal — and until we have a more fundamentally transformative bill, people who care about livable streets shouldn't support this one.
"And so transit advocates will continue to have no choice but to be boosters for an enormous highway program, just to keep transit funding at the same paltry level that’s far less than what we need to truly invest in the rest and build a world-class system for all of our cities, big and small," he continued. "The structure of this program requires transit advocates to essentially back AASHTO’s fever dream of deficit spending on historic funding for highways, more flexibility, and even less oversight."
But Davis says there is an alternative to advocates "hold[ing] their nose and swallow[ing] insane amounts of unaccountable highway funds that undermine our transit investments." And that starts with addressing the root reasons why America's highway spending crisis got so out of control in the first place.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act expires in September, and when Congress passes a bill to replace it, Transportation for America is advocating for them to put basic guardrails around how states that receive federal transportation money can spend it, like requiring them to demonstrate how their road projects will impact residents' ability to access the destinations they rely on — including those who don't drive. Those types of move could slow the pace of downtown highway spending to a crawl, considering how highways shred urban fabrics and make it impossible for people to get around on foot, bike, or even transit.
Even states that aren't particularly ambitious about expanding multimodal access could still be required to hit basic safety and repair targets on all their roads before they spend another dime on construction — and if they don't, Congress could "redirect federal dollars to these purposes." And considering that 55 percent of U.S. roads were rated only "fair" or "poor" in the latest American Society of Civil Engineers scorecard, states have decades of repair projects to keep them busy before they pour a single drop of new asphalt.
Davis says putting teeth behind meaningful metrics (along with the other policy prescriptions outlined in the group's reauthorization platform) could create "a smarter, virtuous funding mechanism that, for each dollar invested, supports good investments across all modes."
First, though, it's worth taking a moment to appreciate how broken America's transportation policy has become when aggressive highway and anemic transit funding are so deeply intertwined that simply balancing the former means annihilating the latter — and how important it is for us to pass new policies without those kind of poison pills.
This story has been updated with a statement from Senator Lee.
