As the House overwhelmingly passed its version of the budget-busting new highway bill last week 317–85, divisions brewed between reformers and representatives set on spending as usual. The bill, chock-full of special funding provisions, would spend $217 billion over the next five years on mostly new highways and transit, busting the limits imposed just last year to ensure budget balance.

From $10 million designated for the George Bush Presidential Parkway to $2 million for a propaganda film promoting the benefits of highways and infrastructure, the bill contains money for most every conceivable type of project. There’s $20 million for the Department of Defense to build roads overseas, $1.5 million to study truck-stop parking, and $12.4 million to build a visitors center in West Virginia.

Despite the overwhelming passage of the bill to reauthorize ISTEA, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, many expressed bitter opposition towards the process. Several representatives complained that the author of the bill, Rep. Bud Shuster (R-PA), was trying to buy their vote with special funding for projects in their district. The bill contains 1400 projects directed to Congressional districts in 48 of 50 states, as well as Washington, DC, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Virgin Islands. According to Rep. Steve Largent (R-OK), “This entire process is what our country is fed up with and it's everything that I ran against” in 1994. “It makes me sick to my stomach.”

As reformers criticized the Republican leadership’s decision to support the budget busting bill, the divide between the leadership and the revolutionaries that brought them to power widened. “It's really obscene that we would get so close to putting our country's finances in order and then blow it with a $30 billion outrage,” said Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), a member of the House Budget Committee, highlighting the figure by which the highway bill would break balanced-budget spending caps. “This is politics at its worst. This is the best indication that the Republican revolution is over.”

Claims by free-spending members of Congress that such huge spending increases are necessary to repair the U.S.’s “crumbling infrastructure” miss the point. If history is a guide, most of the funds will be used for new roads – not to repair existing ones. According to U.S. Department of Transportation data, the majority of roadway spending authorized by ISTEA in 1991 was devoted to new roads and additional lanes (55% in 1992, 55% in 1993, and 53% in 1994).

Negotiators will attempt to iron out the differences between the House bill and the previously passed Senate bill during the Congressional recess.