Eno Transportation Weekly

July 26, 2019 – Support for capital investments in public transit is high in the United States. Evidence for this can be found in measures for new investments that voters approve with regularity at the ballot box, the state legislatures raising their own sources for capital projects, and the widespread recognition that boosting ridership requires investment in the right priorities.

June 28, 2019 – The U.S. Supreme Court issued a preliminary decision yesterday on the Census citizenship question, but no matter what happens, it won’t affect highway funding.

March 28, 2019 – The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee met March 27th to consider eight bills in a markup session, including bills to provide stopgap funding for the FAA and Coast Guard during government shutdowns.

March 28, 2019 – On March 26, USDOT published the list of applicants for the Automated Driving System (ADS) Demonstration Grants which were announced in December, 2018.

March 28, 2019 – The Senate subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies held a hearing on March 27 inviting Secretary of Transportation, Elaine Chao as a witness to review the FY20 budget request for USDOT. 

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” — The Bible “All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.” — Battlestar Galactica The skyrocketing deficits of the mid-1980s led Congress to enact the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law in 1985, which […]

March 20, 2019 – The President’s fiscal year 2020 budget request for the Department of Homeland Security includes proposals for a small cut in Transportation Security Administration operational funding, a large cut in Coast Guard procurement, and a two-thirds cut in Federal Emergency Management Agency transportation security grants.

March 21, 2019 – Amtrak sent its fiscal 2020 budget request to Congress yesterday and asked for $141 million less than Congress actually appropriated for fiscal year 2019. The 2020 request of $1.80 billion is the amount authorized by Congress in the FAST Act of 2015, but Congressional appropriations for Amtrak and other railroad programs in 2018 and 2019 have exceeded the authorized amounts significantly.

March 20, 2019 – What a difference a year makes. In 2019, the Trump Administration requested zero new funding for discretionary grant programs. In 2020, they are requesting $4 billion.

March 19, 2019 – The details of the President’s budget proposal for fiscal 2020 make it clear that, if the Trump Administration has a plan for long-term fiscal solvency of the Highway Trust Fund, they aren’t presenting it in this budget

March 15, 2019 – As part of the Trump Administration’s fiscal 2020 budget rollout, the Federal Transit Administration this afternoon released its detailed annual report on its Capital Investment Grant program, including updates on the project status and ratings of every proposed subway, light rail, and bus rapid transit project in the United States.

March 13, 2019 – The outline of President Trump’s fiscal year 2020 budget request, released this week, calls for unified federal deficits exceeding $1 trillion in each of fiscal years 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 before finally dipping below ten figures in 2024.

March 15, 2019 – The Federal Highway Administration on March 11 finally gave state DOTs their full-year distribution of highway funding permission under the year-long Department of Transportation Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2019.

March 15, 2019 – The White House now says that $200 billion in infrastructure funding in the budget won’t go towards surface transportation reauthorization, but that the surface bill will be counted towards the $1 trillion spending total.

March 14, 2019 – Today, a bipartisan group of Senators, including the chairman and ranking minority member of the committee with jurisdiction over mass transit issues, introduced a bill that would ban U.S. transit agencies from buying rail cars or buses made by any company that is “owned or controlled by, is a subsidiary of, or is otherwise related legally or financially to a corporation” located in the People’s Republic of China.

March 11, 2019 – President Trump has released a fiscal year 2020 budget request today that calls for $84.1 billion in gross budgetary resources for the U.S. Department of Transportation today, a $3.5 billion decrease from 2019.

March 8, 2019 – This week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told an Association for Better New York breakfast meeting that he wants to attach legislation forcing the federal government to start funding a $13.6 billion project to build new passenger rail tunnels under the Hudson River to the next “must-pass” spending bill. But it’s hard to see Schumer getting what he wants without either violating Congress’s ban on earmarks, or else fundamentally restructuring the mass transit Capital Investment Grant program.

March 7, 2019 – This week, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Water Resources and Environment Subcommittee chairman Grace Napolitano (D-CA) introduced legislation reauthorizing various federal grant programs under the Clean Water Act at levels that will more than double recent funding amounts.

March 8, 2019 – As we get ready to receive the fiscal 2020 budget request next week, the White House Office of Management and Budget has now closed the scorekeeping books on the appropriations bills for fiscal 2019.

March 8, 2019 – Fiscal year 2020 appropriations bills will not contain earmarked special projects requested by individual Members of Congress.