Federal Funding

TIGER grants, announced last year, hang in the balance as the Senate debates the package of House-passed spending cuts. Congress is about to vote on another extension of the current budget, cutting another $2 billion per week. (Up until now, those "cuts" have mostly been budget items from 2010 that the Democrats weren't going to ask for in 2011.) But will Democrats agree to cut innovative transportation projects that rose to the top of a competitive national process? And more to the point -- will Republicans?

Every year, the cyclists that gather in Washington for the National Bike Summit meet with hundreds of Congressional offices to ask for expanded bike funding. This year, they’re just asking lawmakers not to cut it.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica (R-FL) both agree that a new surface transportation authorization bill needs to be finished before Congress leaves for the August recess. But that doesn’t mean it’ll happen.

Streetsblog Capitol Hill caught up with Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) yesterday after the T&I Committee meeting wrapped up. He’s the only new Republican on the committee who’s not also a new member of Congress. He followed his father, also named Duncan Hunter, into the seat. Hunter is on the Republican Study Committee that recently pushed for cutting $100 billion from the federal budget. New to transportation and infrastructure issues, Hunter has mainly focused on military matters and immigration.

Before President Obama made his call for infrastructure investment in the State of the Union address last night, an impressive panel of about a dozen DOT officials addressed the Transportation Research Board’s annual meeting to divulge what they could about the reauthorization of the long-term national transportation law.

A new Republican proposal would eliminate federal subsidies to Amtrak; kill New Starts, the primary federal transit funding program; and make painful cuts to dozens of other federal programs. It’s a plan by the Republican Study Committee, which is trying to keep alive House Speaker John Boehner’s campaign pledge to reduce the budget by $100 million. Boehner himself has been backing off from the pledge, given the popularity of many of the programs the Study Committee is now proposing to axe.

The headlines have been apocalyptic.

The assault on the MTA's already battered finances could now come from yet another front: the federal government. The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives passed a rule Wednesday that would allow reductions in federal transportation spending, including investment in transit. That puts previously secure federal funds on the negotiating table, making it that much harder for the MTA to balance its books.

In July of last year, when AAA launched their roadside bicycle repair service, cyclists got a warm fuzzy feeling for a minute and thought AAA was about as bike-friendly as an automobile organization could be. That bubble burst in July when AAA Mid-Atlantic President and CEO Don Gagnon editorialized that highway trust fund money should be reserved just for highways [PDF].