Democrats and Republicans both claim to want to finally tackle an infrastructure bill in 2019 — but no one is quite sure how to pay for it.
“The interest is there, the goals are kind of there,” said Joseph Kane, a senior research analyst and associate fellow of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. “The question, though — as always — is … where is the money going to come from?”
President Trump has touted his plans to help fix the country’s aging passenger rail, roads, and bridges since the 2016 campaign. In February, the White House released a blueprint that would use $200 billion in federal funding to spur a minimum of $1.3 trillion in infrastructure spending from state and local governments, in addition to private-sector buy-in. But the plan failed to gain traction on Capitol Hill and was shelved until after the midterms.
The president isn’t likely to see Democrats’ takeover of the House as an obstacle.
“The Democrats will come to us with a plan for infrastructure, a plan for health care, a plan for whatever they’re looking at and we’ll negotiate,” Trump said during a White House news conference after the 2018 midterm election. “We have a lot of things in common on infrastructure.”
Nancy Pelosi of California, almost surely the next speaker of the House, said last month that “infrastructure has always been a bipartisan issue.” House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland, called it a “top priority” for 2019.
“Repairing and replacing our nation’s aging infrastructure and building the innovative infrastructure of the future must be a top priority in the next Congress, and it’s critically important that any new plan be paid for,” Hoyer said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
That last part is key.
To fund a broad infrastructure measure, some lawmakers have suggested raising the federal gas tax, which has remained at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993.
Pelosi supported adjusting the gas tax in 2015 and Oregon Democrat Peter DeFazio, ranking member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has previously signaled that he backs an increase. DeFazio also introduced legislation in 2017 that would invest $500 billion into roads, bridges, transit systems, and airports, among other things by indexing the gas tax to inflation.
DeFazio, who is poised to become the next chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said he is aiming for a plan with significant federal funding.
“There has to be real money, real investment,” DeFazio told reporters after Democrats secured a majority in the House. “We’re not going to do pretend stuff like asset recycling. We’re not going to do massive privatization.”
He also noted that California voters failed to get on board with a state ballot measure to repeal a 2017 gas tax increase. For it to pass at the federal level, Trump must “fully” support it and get Senate Republicans to do the same, DeFazio said.
A spokesperson for DeFazio did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
Although there is some support in the Senate to raise the federal gas tax from lawmakers such as Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., other Senate Democrats want to go another route, in March proposing a $1 trillion infrastructure plan that would repeal some of Trump’s tax cuts and hike the corporate tax rate to 25 percent.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, who opposes raising the gas tax, said that the plan would “build the infrastructure America actually needs, not just what Republican donors and private investors can profit from.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Sam Graves, R-Mo., who is in the running to become ranking member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is a proponent of taxing the number of miles a motorist travels so fees would be dependent on usage.
In a statement to the Washington Examiner, Graves said, “VMT seems to be the best way to capture all users, which gets us the funding we need to fix our roads and bridges and allows us to look forward to those transformative projects. The president is looking for another win and I look forward to working with him to deliver an infrastructure package.”
But nothing is finalized.
“Democrats are looking at a variety of options to pay for bold infrastructure investments in the next Congress,” Henry Connelly, a spokesperson for Pelosi, told the Washington Examiner.
Hoyer expressed similar sentiments.
“There are a number of options for paying for investments in our infrastructure systems, and Congress ought to examine each of them,” Hoyer told the Washington Examiner.
Although Kane said it was uncertain whether a shift to Democratic leadership in the House would deliver an infrastructure plan, he anticipates lawmakers will examine what state and local governments have been doing through pilot programs and other initiatives to address and fund infrastructure needs.
“Where I think there has been agreement is looking at what is happening across the country, that there are novel solutions emerging,” Kane said. “To what extent can those experiments inform some of the federal discourse is going to be interesting to analyze.”
