America has spent $1.5 trillion on federal surface transportation since the early ’90s. Roads and bridges: same condition as 2001. So where did the money go?

Steve Ellis talks with Beth Osborne of Smart Growth America about Repair Priorities 2026, a new TCS-partnered report tracking how states actually spend federal highway dollars — and why expansion keeps winning over maintenance, no matter how much Congress appropriates. They cover the data gaps, the accountability failures, and a House committee’s quiet vote against a basic “fix it first” requirement — all with the program’s September reauthorization deadline approaching.

The funding is close. The policy to use it right isn’t.

Announcer (00:02):

Welcome to Budget Watchdog All Federal, the podcast dedicated to making sense of the budget, spending, and tax issues facing the nation. Cut through the partisan rhetoric and talking points for the facts about what’s being talked about, bandied about, and pushed to Washington. Brought to you by taxpayers for common sense. And now the host of Budget Watchdog AF. TCS President Steve Ellis.

Steve Ellis (00:40):

Welcome to all American taxpayers seeking common sense. You’ve made it to the right place. For 30 years, TCS, that’s taxpayers for common sense, has served as an independent nonpartisan budget watchdog group based in Washington, DC. We believe in fiscal policy for America that is based on facts. We believe in transparency and accountability because no matter where you are in the political spectrum, no one wants to see their tax dollars wasted. Every five years or so, Congress passes a big transportation bill, declares victory for America’s roads and bridges and sends billions of dollars to the states. And every few years, the grades don’t move. Roads, D plus, bridges, C. That’s essentially where the American Society of Civil Engineers had us in 2001 at the dawning of the 21st century and where they have us today after more than a trillion dollars in federal transportation spending since then.

(01:34):

So what’s actually going on? A new report from our partners at Transportation for America, co-released with TCS, digs into the data state by state and has some pointed answers. It’s called Repair Priorities 2026 and the findings are directly relevant to every taxpayer and to Congress, which has to reauthorize the Federal Surface Transportation Program before the current law expires this September. Here to help us walk through it is my good friend, Beth Osborne, President and CEO of Smart Growth America, the national nonprofit that runs Transportation for America. Beth, welcome to Budget Watchdog, All Federal.

Beth Osborne (02:10):

Thanks for having me. It’s fun that we now get to talk about this in this form after doing this, what? This is our fourth of these reports. There were no podcasts when we started this effort.

Steve Ellis (02:25):

Not at all, Beth. You’re absolutely right. And as our Budget Watchdog AFA Phil can already tell, Beth and I go way back and so does this report. And as you pointed out, Beth, this is the fourth edition. The first was in 2011 and 2014 and 2019. So Beth, give us the elevator pitch. What is Repair Priorities trying to answer and why does it matter right now?

Beth Osborne (02:47):

Absolutely. The fact of the matter is every time at the congressional level, federal level or state level that elected leaders are talking about funding transportation, they use a phrase that I think all your listeners will be very familiar with. The purpose of this funding is to fix our crumbling roads and bridges. And yet, like you said, we don’t see that outcome. We announce an incredible amount of funding and it’s going to be transformative and it’s going to fix the problem. And then we come back five, six years later and announce that the problem is unchanged. Now we should do the exact same thing again. So we wanted to dig into how the money’s actually being spent to figure out whether or not it was a funding problem or whether it was a policy problem. Now, we are a policy shop.

(03:40):

It was a loaded question, a leading question. We knew the answer. And we found that when we first started this, states are spending way more on expansion than they were on repairing the system they have. And that’s because it’s super fun to build new stuff. Maintenance, as you have often said, is more like flossing teeth. It’s something we all know we have to do but no one gets excited about. And over the years we have seen that more money has gone into maintenance, but they dug the hole so deep and the cost to do anything at all is so much higher now that we’re still not digging our way out of the hole. So the elevator pitch is despite spending $1.5 trillion from the federal level in service transportation since the early ’90s, our roads and our bridges are really in the same condition because we spent all that time building new stuff we couldn’t afford to maintain.

Steve Ellis (04:37):

And Beth, I mean, what’s staggering is that this report covers 2018 to 2024, which includes the historic investment from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, IIJA, and yet it didn’t really move the needle, did it?

Beth Osborne (04:52):

No, no. Back up a little bit to our last report. Take a look at it. You’ll see that there’s a graphic that shows a major increase in investment under what was called the Recovery Act, which is the same sort of proposal. Infrastructure spending, it’s going to save the economy, it’s going to create all these jobs and all these spinoff effects and we’re going to do it while investing in our future. Sounds like a great pitch, but there was this massive spike in funding and yet no leveling off or major improvement in the condition of our roads and bridges. And it’s because the way states used it was to say, “Oh, I got unexpected money. There’s a project that’s been sitting on the shelf because it was irresponsible for us to build it and now we’ve got the money to do it. ” And that’s what they did.

(05:37):

Now, things have changed. We are in a different environment now where states overwhelmingly, not all, but most of them have gone much heavier into investing in their existing system and repairing things. But now it’s so expensive to do. It’s not enough. Their shift is not close to enough to dig out from under it and very few of them are building no new capacity, which is really where we need to be.

Steve Ellis (06:08):

Yeah. I think just quoting the report, it is not simply how much we spend but how we spend it. And you pointed out, Beth, and accurately, that the states have been trending or most of the states have been trending in the right direction. Now, some of this gets to the other point that we should make is that it may be federal dollars, but it’s state decision making that’s going on here. And you see South Dakota is leading the nation in repair spending, but then North Carolina is putting nearly two thirds of its highway capital budget into expansion. So what drives pun intended these differences, Beth?

Beth Osborne (06:46):

Yeah, it’s a really interesting … The whole program working in transportation is so interesting. It is relentlessly bipartisan.

Steve Ellis (06:57):

I would hope you’d think working in transportation is interesting, Beth, because you’ve been doing it your whole career. I

Beth Osborne (07:03):

Know, I know. But the bartisanship in this program is really weird. So there are those that believe you should not spend money to build things you can’t maintain and that you can find that in states run by Republicans and Democrats, but it tends to be in larger low population states that there’s a little more care given. What you find in states that are growing very fast like a Texas and a North Carolina, particularly a Florida and a North Carolina is throw caution to the wind, build now, think later, don’t look back and see if what you built got you what you want. Just keep doing what you’re doing and build, build, build, build. There’s really nothing that has changed since 1956 in their minds. I mean, that might be unfair. Maybe their policies made it all the way to the 1980s, but there’s really very little introspection there.

(08:12):

And so it’s like- minded in those ways and you find a similarity of we can build our way out of all our problems. If we just do more of what we’ve always done, we’ll get different results.

Steve Ellis (08:27):

And I think one thing to keep in mind, Budget Wash IAF Faithful is that Beth, you mentioned the beginning of the interstate system and obviously there was, for lack of a better term, virgin areas where you could build new interstates, but now you’re talking about Florida. There isn’t a lot of … So it’s really about in some cases about adding lane miles. So I can see that people were like, “Well, how much more can you build in Florida?” But it is about expansion and new lane miles, which then of course become tomorrow’s maintenance backlog.

Beth Osborne (08:58):

Absolutely. And they always call it an investment and they seem to forget that it is also a liability, that to maintain it means you have to budget for maintaining it. And I’m actually one of those people that don’t love it when people compare government work to the household income or the household budget, but this one is a perfect example of it would be like saying, “I have a major leak in my roof and it needs to be replaced, but instead of replacing the roof, I’m going to build an addition.” This is where we have been for years and years and years and there are so many reasons for it. You get many more accolades for building something new than for inconveniencing people with repair. When you’re finished with repair, you have a situation where you’re just giving people back what they always had. That doesn’t feel as good.

(09:48):

But the fact of the matter is even in a state like Florida, it’s not just the interstates that they’re adding to. It’s their lanes, their major roads in the middle of communities and they’ve built things in such a spread out way that by the way, costs way more to service with government services than they bring in tax dollars. They’ve got lots of land to just keep adding on. And where they don’t, they’re actually willing to knock down homes and businesses to accommodate more space for vehicles because there’s a belief that there is some magical amount of space you can give to vehicles that will finally reduce congestion all past results be damned.

Steve Ellis (10:31):

And so one of the things that the report looked at, Beth, is it talks about how urban roads are in a dramatically worse shape than rural roads. And you talked about how bigger, less populous states seem to invest more in maintenance and that would make sense and that with urban roads, about 26% are in poor condition versus 11% for rural roads, but states aren’t directing proportionally more repair money to urban areas, even though those roads are used so much more. Who ends up paying for that mismatch?

Beth Osborne (11:04):

The people using the system for sure their vehicles get more beat up and there are problems that are caused by that that actually does delay them. But the fact of the matter is the states think that they’re going to build their way out of congestion, which has never worked any place ever in the face of the earth and they will only allocate a certain amount of money to urban areas because there does need to be geographic equity in the way you spend money within a state. And so the way you spend at the rural level is to maintain stuff, but then at the urban level, you spend your energy on trying to fix congestion by doing more of what you’ve always done and we’re just stuck in that loop. Those urban areas pay for that in so many ways. There’s damage to the vehicles. There’s the fact that you are supplanting active business with roadway that costs you money.

(12:00):

Yes, it’s a very strange system that truly is based on the early interstate era where as you said, we were building on wide open fields, which is relatively easy to do and we built out that interstate system and declared it completed in the early 90s, but still wanted to spend these federal dollars. So we took that interstate approach and all the rules and regs associated with it and we applied it to anything built with federal dollars or state dollars, which meant that the road outside your neighborhood and we put interstate rules on it and are trying to treat that like an interstate and it has resulted in this inefficient non-functional system that actually generates congestion and that’s where we want to spend all our money because this whole program and all of the folks working in, it come out of that era where we’re just going to create more lanes and that is going to allow us to drive at full speed into the sunset.

(13:14):

And we’ve never been able to make that pivot to say, “All right, we have a system. These wonderful civil engineers built us this huge system. Now let’s bring in the industrial engineers or the civil engineers and make it work better, make it more efficient, really consider asset management and make the system sustainable.” And frankly, the fact that we have a program that operates under a trust fund so members of Congress don’t have to consider it every Congress means that they don’t know much about the program when it comes up for a vote and they don’t realize that it’s delivering terrible results for a lot of money.

Steve Ellis (13:58):

Well, and to that point, Beth, you mentioned the trust fund. Obviously as a budget watchdog, we’re concerned about the dollars and even though everybody’s complaining about the gas tax and how much they’re paying and they’re even talking about doing a holiday on the gas tax, it’s only a portion of what’s actually being spent on this transportation program. We’re taking money out of the general treasury, out of the tax dollars that you’re paying through your income taxes and shifting it over to these road programs to try to keep them whole, to keep the level of spending that they’ve done before.

Beth Osborne (14:34):

And wildly more, they’re spending our grandkids’ tax dollars to create a problem that those same grandkids are going to have to spend a fortune to fix. It’s absolutely insane that this is popular or that any taxpayer would be comfortable with the notion that we would spend so much to accomplish so little

Steve Ellis (14:59):

Kind of the inverse of Winston Churchill’s observation about this. I

Beth Osborne (15:03):

Mean, look, I run a nonpartisan organization. I’m a lifelong Democrat. Do I sound like one? These people have turned me in to like a 1980s budget hawk fiscal conservative and it’s because I’ve had to watch throughout my career them make the exact same irresponsible investment decisions and come back and say they deserve more money because their bad approach failed. Their failure is the reason they deserve more and now they’re asking again for my kids and grandkids money to, I mean, which thankfully is being lent to us by the Chinese in order to continue to build this inefficient non-producing system.

Steve Ellis (15:52):

We’re also paying higher interest rates to get to borrow that money.

Beth Osborne (15:56):

Absolutely. And that’s only going up. And I agree, look, people are frustrated with the price of gasoline. There’s a part of me that absolutely wants that gas holiday because it would create a massive crisis in this program and I think that’s what it needs. Our organization is opposed to going forward with the current approach and we’d rather have no program than continue to have the program that’s been pushed on us for the last several decades.

Steve Ellis (16:24):

Unfortunately, Beth, I think that they would just grab more from the treasury if there was a gas tax holiday. As much as I would like to see it force change, I have a hard time, but

Beth Osborne (16:35):

I don’t know. I wonder.

Steve Ellis (16:38):

Well, it is a question. So then let’s get to one of the things also in the report was about kind of accountability and transparency. I mean, one of the things that was shocking to me, and I’ve been transportation adjacent in my whole career, I mean, I cover a lot of different issues, but is that this other spending category has seemed to have grown. You’ve got expansion, you’ve got maintenance, and then other and other was 41% of Washington state spending during the period of the report. I know that the other could be safety related or transportation operations spending, but we don’t know. How does that matter on an accountability standpoint?

Beth Osborne (17:23):

It’s a great question. And frankly, most data we get in transportation is pretty flawed. We don’t do a good job of collecting information on how investments are made and what we’re getting for them. The program lacks accountability and generally it is when you have a system of accountability that you collect the data you need to hold people accountable. So if you have a program that has very little, you collect data less and you also may not collect it as well. We collect it to make sure we’re meeting certain checklist rules. In every report we’ve ever done, we have a huge appendix that talks about everything we hate in the data and everything we wish they did better. And this other category is interesting. We need to dig deeper into it. But one of the reasons we focused on bridges this time as well as roads is I was afraid that other was including bridges and I didn’t want people states to be punished for the fact that they were rebuilding bridges and therefore it was blowing up this other category, but that was not it.

(18:34):

So other can include, like you said, certain safety projects. And I know that Washington State has aggressively gone forward with complete streets projects to make sure roadways are safe to walk and bike on and that’s very important, but it also includes environmental review, engineering and any number of other things. And I don’t know. I don’t know if they’re spending their money well if we can’t really understand this spending. And I also wonder, my hypothesis is we’re doing a lot of studying of gigantic capacity projects that can’t move forward because there’s not enough money and then the studies of it get old and so we repeat studies. And so we’re just doing a lot of analysis to justify getting to a project that is tough to justify. And I fear that there’s a lot of money going into that kind of engineering and planning and environmental review.

(19:36):

And if that’s the case, it’s yet another reason to say, let’s just repair what we have because they don’t require the same level of engineering and environmental review and permitting and stuff like that. It’s an existing asset, you just need to replace it. And that would save us a lot of money too, but that’s just my hypothesis.

Steve Ellis (19:56):

Yeah. And I think that just you’ve got 50 states in the District of Columbia and everybody’s kind of reporting and combined. I mean, that was one of the things the report pointed out as well is that the data integrity, if you would, it varies so much between states that it’s even doing a report like this is hard to actually say this is exactly where the money’s gone or what has been the success or the failures.

Beth Osborne (20:21):

It is wild. In some cases, states will claim that they have tens of thousands more lane miles in one year than another. And it’s not because they got rid of them all or handed them over to locals, it’s because the reporting was on fewer lane miles for whatever reason. But if you do that, there’s no penalty. So one year you cover what you can and the next year you get back to covering them all. So yes, it’s very non-standardized for an organization like mine that likes to look at the state transportation improvement programs or STIPs to see how they’re investing their dollars, it’s fascinating to see how differently every state handles that. And in many cases, the states just have a PDF online unsearchable that describes projects as a paving or building mile marker to mile marker, and that’s all you know. And it’s very, very hard to analyze internally, much less compare to other states.

Steve Ellis (21:24):

Yeah. There was a group one time that said that transparency equals online. And we would always say online doesn’t necessarily equal transparency. It needs to be downloadable, sortable, searchable to actually be transparent data. And you mentioned about no accountability, though one of the things the report pointed out was one official in California was reassigned after raising concerns that projects were labeled as routine rehabilitation but were actually highway widening in disguise

Beth Osborne (21:58):

Yeah, that was a really disappointing thing to see. She is an incredible transportation leader. She continues to work in transportation in California, but yeah, she kept raising that California, their DOT is called Caltrans, was gaming the system. This is not unusual where the state DOT or sometimes a local public works agency knows that if the totality of the project they want to undertake is considered in one fell swoop, that it triggers permitting and environmental review. So they cut the project into a bunch of little pieces and each piece looks okay and you can call it repaving or maintenance or you’re just doing a service road or something that’s not seen as new capacity, a turning lane and find a way to get around it. And she said, “This is happening.” And they said, “Go away.”

Steve Ellis (23:02):

Yeah, see you.

Beth Osborne (23:03):

So rather than, “Huh, we probably should be more honest about what we’re doing. And if we’re going to do these big projects that do have big impacts on the communities around them and on public health, we should be honest about it.

Steve Ellis (23:17):

Absolutely. And also in the report it flagged that about 10%, nearly 10% of federal aid lane miles nationwide have no reported pavement condition data at all and that’s actually gotten worse. And so I would think listeners would be shocked to hear that. And then I want to get into what are the legislation and where things are moving, but I mean, what needs to be required to try to get that data and to have a better informed policymakers both at the state and the federal level?

Beth Osborne (23:46):

Yeah. This is the crux of the issue and this is the time to be talking about it. We need to determine what are the base level pieces of information we need to evaluate what investment is needed and how well the funded community is doing with the money with your money that we give them. And there needs to be a penalty for not collecting the appropriate information. I understand that every legislator, every elected leader wants to put as much of the money to the projects they want built as possible. And what we’re seeing is in many cases, particularly state legislators, legislatures as a general rule, they’re cutting corners. They’re not collecting data like they need to. They’re not making sure the data are as accurate as they should be. They’re not hiring contract experts and project managers because they really just need the engineers and they’ll let the engineers do the contract management, which is not what you go to engineering school for and therefore don’t know how to manage these contracts or address some of the procedural issues in that contract management and then the price goes through the roof.

(25:11):

So there’s a lot of cutting corners. So I think what we need to do is we need to set some standards about how we are going to require the funded community to collect information. And if you’re not meeting that standard, we’re not going to reimburse you for your spending full stop.

(25:28):

We’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars. Collect the data and let the taxpayer know what is happening on the ground. If you can’t do that, then you probably can’t properly handle the hundreds of billions of dollars that we are giving you. And I know that that stuff can be frustrating and it can be argued is more regulation and more work, but you’re getting so much money from the taxpayer and it’s not being covered by current taxes. I don’t understand how we can responsibly do this again. I’d also say as we’re considering this bill in the House, there’s an interesting amendment that I want to make sure everyone is aware of by a member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, a guy named Robert Garcia. And Robert Garcia introduced an amendment to this bill that said states would not be permitted to spend federal dollars to build new highways or added capacity if they couldn’t show that they could afford to maintain it throughout its useful life.

(26:46):

And they would also have to show they’re maintaining the rest of their system throughout their useful life. This is just basic responsibility and being fiscally responsible and it was voted down without even a recorded vote. So members did not have to say yay or nay. It was just all those in favor say aye. All those in favor say nay. The chair says nay. And the chair, Chairman Graves from Missouri said,” I don’t like this amendment because I want states to have the ability to add capacity to their highway system. “It’s not what the amendment said. The amendment said you can add capacity if you have the ability to maintain it. So what the chair said and the rest of the committee agreed with is we want to make sure that state DOTs can take your tax dollars and build something they know on day one they can’t possibly afford to maintain.

(27:48):

And that is the discretion that the leadership of both parties in the US House believe in. And I think as taxpayers we need to let them know we disagree.

Steve Ellis (28:01):

Absolutely. Lots to unpack there, Beth. At one point when you’re talking about, can they handle it? I’m thinking of few good men. “You can’t handle the tax dollars, Colonel Jessup.” And then this whole thing about, can you actually afford to maintain these roads and being able to prove that. And one of your colleagues on a webinar we were on earlier talked about your mortgage and you’ve got to be able to prove to your bank that you’ve got a salary, you’ve got a way that you’re going to be able to pay off this mortgage over the next 30 years or 15 years or whatever it is. And that isn’t the case here. And I also think about my mom actually who always said about a car that the cheapest thing about owning a car is buying it because it’s all the gas and the maintenance and everything else that goes onto that.

(28:54):

And it’s the same thing with the road. I mean, there’s a certain expense of building it, but then you got to keep maintaining it and you’ve got to do that. And can you do that? And if you can’t, well, then you’re not doing anybody any favors by building in the first place.

Beth Osborne (29:06):

And there’s this belief that there’s not a cost just to the general operation of a roadway, but there’s a ton of cost. In the northern states, you’ve got snow removal in all states, you have the policing of it and managing crashes and there is trash removal and there is mowing of grass and pruning of trees and there’s so much. And then in that asset management, there’s a certain amount of work you have to do on the roadways throughout the 20 to 50 year lifespan of these things before a full replacement. There’s real money. In my home state of Louisiana, the way they handled, which by the way, my home state of Louisiana looks real bad in this report. They really lead the pack in blowing it. Over the years, the way they found And to keep the cost, I’m making air quotes, the cost of operating these roadways cheaper is to push it off on the locals.

(30:09):

So in Louisiana, the state doesn’t pay to light the highways because that costs money. They’re making the cities pay to light the highways that they build sometimes that the cities didn’t want.

Steve Ellis (30:20):

And Beth, I mean, I just got back from New Orleans and I can tell you some of those roads, we were in a car, we were going about five miles an hour because it was so rutted and so potholed and everything. And so there’s currently a maintenance issue there and I’m not surprised.

Beth Osborne (30:39):

And there’s huge issues where the cities can’t raise money, the states don’t allow them to, but the state won’t participate in maintaining local roads. And so most of those roads, that’s the city’s responsibility. And the state’s too busy expanding the highway in Baton Rouge to help with that. And then there’s a whole issue which we never like to get into in places like New Orleans where a lot of those roads are buckling because the subsoil is moving and receding, but also they’re not maintaining their sewer system and those pipes are bursting and that’s causing trouble to the road. So it’s just across the board when we spend taxpayer dollars to build infrastructure, any piece of the built environment, we should have a plan to operate and maintain that thing that we have built throughout its useful life while maintaining and operating the rest of their system.This should be so uncontroversial.

(31:41):

And what was uncontroversial in the US House was voting this down.

Steve Ellis (31:45):

Yes. And actually one thing, and then I do want to shift to the recommendations of the report, but that it was interesting to me again at the webinars that talk to me about Mississippi. I mean, Mississippi is actually increasing their gas tax.

Beth Osborne (32:01):

Yes. Mississippi is an interesting story in so many ways. So years ago they increased their gas tax and the deal was they were going to make sure that there is a four lane highway in every county in the state. So they started building like crazy without any thought about what it would cost to maintain all those roadways that they were building. And it was an economic development issue. They wanted to make sure that all counties across the state were going to have the ability to attract development and bring real investment into each county. I could get in an argument about whether building four lane highway actually does that, but I’m going to shunt that to the side for now. So then they started building up this huge backlog that they couldn’t get to. And at the time they had some leadership that said, “We’ve got to take care of what we have.

(32:54):

We can’t keep building new stuff we can’t afford to maintain.” So they shifted their money wildly into the funding maintenance. I think that that has increased a lot of people’s faith in that DOT and one of the reasons they might be willing now to raise their gas tax again is because they’ve spent years fixing a lot of roads, but they’re also shifting out of that policy and they’re going back to building new stuff.

(33:26):

Yeah, it’s a frustrating thing to see when a state gets things so right and then backs off of that excellent shift. I will also say Mississippi is really strange in that they elect their state commissioners. So it is somewhat divorced from the influence, which could be good and bad, of the governor and the legislature.

Steve Ellis (33:49):

So I promised Budge Washington of Faithful the recommendations. I mean, so it is things we’ve already talked about, measurable outcomes tied to funding, fix it first requirement before expansion, which you already mentioned kind of was partially Congressman Garcia’s amendment and stronger data and transparency standards. And we talked a little bit about that. So Beth, you worked in the Senate and you worked through some of these transportation bills. Tell our listeners one, how those policies would be enacted if we could get them enacted and then how the process works.

Beth Osborne (34:26):

Yes. And I will say if you want to dig in deeper than we did in the report, we have a section of the Transportation for America website, which is T, the number fouramerica.org, that get into the weeds about ways you could reward departments of transportation for doing well and let’s say redirect them if they’re doing poorly so that there’s real consequence for a failure to focus on repair, basically taking away a lot of their ability to move money around and pick their projects. It would force them to focus on repair if they’re not doing well. But the way it would happen is it could be part of the initial drafting of a bill or someone like a Garcia could offer an amendment to something being considered that puts these requirements into the law. This is the time to do it. When we’re talking about money, the give and take should be, “Okay, I’ll talk about giving you more money.

(35:29):

This is what I need to show the taxpayer. I need to show them that their money is spent well and that you’ll meet the commitments you’re making to them today.” Now, what often happens because these bills only come up every five to eight years is everyone who worked on the last bill is long gone and you’ve got a bunch of new people who are often new to the issue, both members and their staff, and they don’t know what is and isn’t working in the program. So they treat this like we’ve got a pot of gold and we’re going to talk about how we’re going to divide up that pot of gold and they don’t get into this policy. As you mentioned at the very beginning, this current program expires at the end of this fiscal year. The federal fiscal year ends on September 30th. It is very typical to extend it, which I think that they will.

(36:26):

They always extend it by at least a year and that gets it out of election year too, which is handy. And it gives us time to go and let our elected leaders know if we think that they should be trusted to spend our money and our kids’ money and our grandkids’ money and to tell them we might need to have a little more accountability in the program before we’re willing to see more money go out the door. So you’re going to hear a lot this summer, but I think we’re going to have over the fall and next spring to revisit these issues and give a shove to those who are so enthusiastic about spending your money about what we want in return.

Steve Ellis (37:13):

Yeah, Beth is a budget watch. Fateful know, and we’re all about tying strings to federal money because I mean, if you don’t want the money, don’t take it. We’ve talked about disaster response, things along those lines. And so it’s sort of taxpayers, especially because so much of it is not just coming from the gas tax, it’s actually coming from the general treasury. So whether you’re driving or not, you’re paying for these roads and you have a right to have them being done in a responsible manner that you know this investment, and I know it’s a liability, not an investment, but it’s argued as an investment, is it going to the right things?

Beth Osborne (37:50):

Absolutely. And like you said, it’s coming from the general fund. So if you never get in a car, you are paying for a system that is being justified as if only the drivers are paying the cost. So we actually have them actively saying that taking care of people who might travel in a different way is not appropriate, even though they’re taking their money through income taxes and any number of other methods and of course debt. And it’s absolutely preposterous. Look, what’s interesting is this program has never paid for itself because the federal program has always been a minority of the funds. The states raise most of the money and the locals raise at least as much money as the feds and they pay for it with property taxes and sales taxes and everything. So we’ve always been paying for this program outside of just the user fee system.

(38:48):

It’s always cost more than the user fee would pay and I think we need to come to terms with that and the fact that it’s gotten worse and as it gets worse, the need for accountability goes up and unfortunately the pressure on folks to demand that accountability has not gone up commensurate with that.

Steve Ellis (39:11):

Yeah. I can remember I’m old enough and been around long enough when then Transportation Infrastructure Chairman Bud Schuster was arguing at the end of the last century about how all the trust fund dollars need to be spent because at that point there was actually a little bit of surplus and that hasn’t been the case now for decades in the trust fund. It’s been a one way valve. Money couldn’t go out of the trust fund to other uses, but more money can go in from the general treasury and shoveled in and that’s what’s been happening this entire century.

Beth Osborne (39:41):

Yes. And that is another thing that I’m also old enough to remember that and it was sacrosanct, the system they claimed the user was paying for, which was not true, had to be protected at all costs, but now that the user isn’t paying for it, it’s not sacrosanct to protect anybody else’s money. They’re happy to go rob the bank and I don’t like it. I don’t like it. And I think it was bad enough when they were spending the users funds, which is the gas tax and the diesel tax to create bad results. It’s worse now.

Steve Ellis (40:20):

Here, here. Well, there you have it. Beth, thanks so much for joining us on Budget Watchdog All Federal. So great to have you on and we really appreciate the partnership with Transportation for America and the Repair Priorities report. Looking forward to the fifth version and seeing all our successes and how we’ve changed the world and that it’s all going towards repair. This is exactly the kind of accountability work taxpayers deserve and that Congress needs to hear with the reauthorization right around the corner, or at least next Congress. Thanks, Beth.

Beth Osborne (40:50):

Thanks for having me. Thanks for being such a great partner on this and I hope that we can all as a taxpaying group stand up and say we deserve better when people are taking our money.

Steve Ellis (41:00):

Absolutely. There you have it podcast listeners. The funding to address our road and bridge repair backlog is available or very close to it. The problem is the absence of any enforceable requirement to simply fix it first. Until Congress changes that, states will keep making their own choices, conditions will keep lagging, and taxpayers will keep being asked to invest more without clear assurance of what they’re getting in return. This is the frequency, market on your dial, subscribe and share and know this. Taxpayers for Common Sense has your back America. We read the bills, monitor the earmarks, and highlight those wasteful programs that poorly spent our money and shift long-term risk to taxpayers. We’ll be back with a new episode soon. I hope you’ll meet us right here to learn more.