Rural Transportation Advocacy Council update – Congress passes highway trust fund fix through May

TransportationJust three hours before the U.S. Dep’t of Transportation was scheduled to implement rationing and reimbursement delays for federal transportation funding, Congress passed a bill last night that will provide an additional $10.8 billion for the Highway Trust Fund which should be sufficient for maintaining solvency through May and also extends authorization through May 31st. Current authority was set to expire on September 30th.

Earlier yesterday, the House rejected the Senate-amended version of the original House bill. The Senate amendments would have reduced the funding to $8 billion and shortened the authority extension to December 19th which would have forced lawmakers to address both issues again during a “lame duck” session between the November election and the start of the next Congress in January.

The House opted to resend their original bill back to the Senate providing the upper chamber with the choice of either passing it with no changes or failing to enact a fix prior to the start of insolvency measures. With a five-week long recess scheduled to start this weekend, failure to pass the House bill would have likely also meant that a fix would not have occurred until September at the earliest.

The Senate opted to pass the House bill last night and the President is expected to sign it very soon.