June 14, 2019 – The House of Representatives finally started considering general appropriations bills for fiscal year 2020 this week, but there were early snags when a small core of anti-domestic-spending Republicans forced the House to take 70 roll call votes on amendments over an 18-hour period.
June 14, 2019 – The House Appropriations Committee on June 11 approved a $64 billion draft bill making appropriations for the Homeland Security Department for fiscal year 2020.
June 14, 2019 – This is a list of all the transportation-related amendments filed with the House Rules Committee that may or may not be offered to the FY 2020 Transportation-HUD appropriations bill.
June 7, 2019 – The House Appropriations Committee on June 4 approved a $87.7 billion budget for the U.S. Department of Transportation, as part of an overall Transportation-Housing appropriations bill that passed by party-line vote of 29 yeas to 21 nays.
June 7, 2019 – The House of Representatives will begin floor consideration of the fiscal 2020 appropriations bill this week, starting with a five-bill “minibus” package based on the Labor-HHS-Education spending bill (H.R. 2740). The Energy and Water Development appropriations bill, which includes the budget for the Army Corps of Engineers’ water resources program, has been incorporated as Division E of the package.
June 6, 2019 – This week, the House Appropriations Committee released the text of its draft fiscal 2020 appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security, and the bill was approved by voice vote during a brief subcommittee markup session on June 5.
May 23, 2019 – This morning, the House Subcommittee on Transportation-Housing Appropriations formally approved the draft fiscal year 2020 Transportation-Housing appropriations bill.
May 17, 2019 – The White House this week sent up a package of FY 2020 budget amendments to Capitol Hill, including small tweaks to Coast Guard, Corps of Engineers, and FHWA budget requests.
May 16, 2019 – This week, the House Appropriations Committee released the text of the two draft fiscal 2020 general appropriations bills that fund federal water infrastructure programs at levels that are over $600 million above last year’s levels. Both bills – the Energy and Water Development bill and the Interior and Environment bill – were marked up in subcommittee, without amendment, yesterday.
May 10, 2019 – The bipartisan leaders of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee this week wrote to their Budget Committee counterparts and the leaders of both parties in the House to ask that certain budget-related highway and water funding issues be addressed in the context of an overall budget deal with the Senate and the White House.
May 10, 2019 – Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office released its analysis of President Trump’s fiscal 2020 budget request, including the effects of a planned spending freeze on the Highway Trust Fund.
May 10, 2019 – On May 8, the House Appropriations Committee adopted chairman Nita Lowey’s (D-NY) plan for dividing $1.295 trillion in discretionary spending amongst the twelve general appropriations bills.
May 6, 2019 – On May 8, the House Appropriations Committee will consider a 2018 spending plan that would give the Transportation-HUD Subcommittee a net increase of $2.5 billion in discretionary budget authority over the year 2019, once changes in offsetting receipts are factored in.
May 2, 2019 – The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) today released updated baseline budget projections for the ongoing fiscal year 2019 and the ten-year period of fiscal 2020-2029. The new baseline estimates that the cost of keeping the Highway Trust Fund solvent at baseline spending levels (FY 2019 enacted levels plus annual inflation increases of around 2 percent per year) has risen to about $176 billion, which is about $12 billion higher than the $164 billion that CBO projected in its January 2019 preliminary baseline.
May 2, 2019 – The House Appropriations Committee moved three of the twelve annual appropriations bills for fiscal year 2020 through subcommittee this week. While none of the three bills deals with transportation, they do give a good picture of how much money will be left over for the Transportation-HUD appropriations bill.
April 30, 2019 – The budget blueprint approved last month by the Senate Budget Committee calls for a highway user tax increase that, ETW calculates, could be the equivalent of an 18 cent per gallon increase in gasoline and diesel fuel excise taxes.
April 12, 2019 – This week, the House of Representatives adopted a resolution giving the House Appropriations Committee a spending total for fiscal year 2020, allowing that panel to start marking up the twelve annual appropriations bills when the House comes back from recess the week of April 29.
April 12, 2019 – U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao made her annual trip to the House Appropriations Committee this week to defend the Trump Administration’s fiscal 2020 budget request for USDOT.
April 11, 2019 – Congress has chosen to let mass transit spending get significantly farther ahead of its dedicated revenue stream than highways has gotten ahead of its revenue stream, comparatively speaking.
April 11, 2019 – Yesterday, the Treasury Department announced that the Mass Transit Account of the Highway Trust Fund has failed its forward-looking solvency test for fiscal year 2020. As a result, unless Congress passes new legislation fixing the problem, apportionments of FY 2020 mass transit formula funding to transit agencies will be reduced by around 12 percent from the levels provided by the FAST Act.