Federal Funding

If the House, Senate, and President Obama don’t agree on a course of action by the end of this week, the U.S. will be left with no federal budget, and the government will shut down. Transit agencies and construction interests don't seem alarmed, but the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials estimates that a government shutdown would stop $100 million in transportation dollars a day from flowing into the national economy.

Members of Congress worked all day Friday, until 4:42 Saturday morning, to finish voting on hundreds of amendments and, finally, the final HR 1 bill to set spending levels for the rest of 2011.

If I told you there was a fantastic, $35 billion federal program to lend money for railroads to improve their infrastructure, you’d probably assume one of the following:

Bet you weren’t expecting to hear any good news from the floor of the House today, were you? Turns out not everyone in Congress is as axe-happy as some high-profile Republicans. For example, Amtrak survived one attempt to cut all its funding and another to cut $447 million. (Amtrak funding does stand to lose $224 million in cuts already included in HR 1, the budget bill for the rest of FY2011.)

House Speaker John Boehner won’t take no for an answer. As the House struggles to consider and vote on nearly 600 amendments to the FY2011 budget – in a process the GOP is heralding as unprecedented democracy and the Democrats are calling chaos – the prospects for consensus on the continuing resolution is becoming increasingly narrow.

We reported yesterday that the president's six-year transportation plan proposes simplifying federal policy by eliminating 55 highway programs and rolling them all into five umbrella programs: the National Highway Program, Highway Safety Improvement, Livable Communities, Federal Allocation, and Research, Technology, and Education.

The president’s six-year transportation plan [PDF], included as part of the administration’s FY2012 budget proposal, weighs in at a hefty $556 billion and lays out several policy reforms that, if enacted, could help the nation transition to a more multi-modal, less oil-dependent transportation system.

The White House has released a fact sheet on the transportation provisions in the President's budget. [PDF]

The White House hasn’t released its FY2012 budget request yet. What we know so far is that it’s a $3.7 trillion budget that would reduce the deficit from $1.6 trillion projected for 2011 to $1.2 trillion next year. President Obama “trims or terminates” more than 200 federal programs, according to the Washington Post, but has big plans for transportation: his budget envisions a $556 billion transportation bill. The Hill reports that the proposal includes "$50 billion in up-front investment that 'creates hundreds of thousands of jobs in the short-term.'"