On September 30, the current federal transportation bill expires. Signed into law in 2021 as part of the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), it paired a traditional five year transportation reauthorization with roughly $550 billion in new spending, with more than $300 billion for roads, bridges, and other surface transportation programs. Five years after this massive spending package, Congress is preparing to write the next five-year transportation bill.
Enter the BUILD America 250 Act, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s proposal to reauthorize federal transportation programs through 2031 and provide roughly $580 billion for roads, bridges, transit, rail, and related programs. The bill also includes new revenue measures, including annual fees on electric and hybrid vehicles, intended to help narrow the persistent gap between transportation spending and the fuel taxes that have traditionally financed the Highway Trust Fund.
Congress is understandably focused on the road ahead, but taxpayers should first ask what the last five years of record spending actually delivered. The IIJA represented the largest federal infrastructure investment in generations. Supporters promised transformative improvements to roads, bridges, and other transportation assets. Yet the results suggest that money alone cannot fix the deeper problems in federal transportation policy.
Consider bridges. One of the marquee transportation provisions in IIJA was a new $27.5 billion bridge formula program layered on top of existing federal bridge funding. Yet despite that historic investment, the overall condition of the nation’s bridges changed surprisingly little over the next five years. Transportation for America documented that the share of bridge deck area in poor condition improved by less than a percentage point, while the share in good condition actually fell by more than three percentage points.
The same is true for our nation’s roads. States are spending more on repair than they once did, but the results have been modest. Road conditions remain stubbornly poor in many places, particularly in urban areas where most Americans live and drive. Meanwhile, states continue adding to the system. Between 2018 and 2024, the public road network grew by nearly 113,000 lane miles, creating billions of dollars in future maintenance obligations.
That is not a sign of failure, per se. America’s transportation system is enormous, aging, and expensive to maintain. But it is a reminder that spending more money does not automatically produce better results. If existing roads and bridges remain in poor condition despite a historic influx of funding, why are transportation agencies continuing to add so much new infrastructure? It’s a fair question, and one BUILD America 250 largely sidesteps.
The bill preserves the basic framework that has governed federal transportation policy for decades. States retain broad flexibility to direct federal dollars toward new construction, repair, expansion, and a variety of other activities. What the bill does not do is require states to meaningfully reduce their backlog of poor-condition roads before adding new capacity. As a result, Congress is authorizing more spending without fundamentally changing the incentives that have allowed mounting maintenance needs and expansion goals to compete for the same dollars.
In effect, Congress is trying to solve the Highway Trust Fund’s revenue problem without addressing the transportation system’s maintenance problem. The challenge is not simply that transportation programs need money. It is that states continue to accumulate maintenance obligations faster than they reduce existing backlogs, and the bill does little to change those incentives.
To be fair, Congress faces difficult choices. The Highway Trust Fund’s finances are unsustainable under current policies. Lawmakers can debate whether the solution is higher gas taxes, electric vehicle fees, mileage-based user fees, additional Treasury transfers, or some combination of the above. But even the revenue proposals currently on the table fall well short of fully closing the long-term gap between trust fund revenues and spending.
The last five years demonstrated that simply spending more money is not enough. Without stronger requirements or at least incentives to prioritize repair, greater accountability for outcomes, and better transparency about where transportation dollars go, taxpayers are likely to get more of the same. Namely, modest improvements, growing maintenance obligations, and recurring debates about how to refill the Highway Trust Fund.
BUILD America 250 will ensure that transportation dollars continue flowing from Washington. But that’s the easy part. What the bill does not do is ask whether the federal transportation program is delivering the results taxpayers were promised from the last round of historic spending. Before Congress approves another half trillion dollars, that seems like a question worth answering.
