Dear Mr.
President:
Your advisors were
absolutely correct in threatening a veto of any highway bill that
would add to the deficit or raise taxes. With budget deficits
approaching $520 billion per year and many of your opponents
threatening to undo the tax cuts that have allowed America to
sustain the strongest economy in the world, a firm stand against
runaway spending will pay big dividends in the struggle to restore
fiscal responsibility to congressional budgeting.
If you ultimately
prevail in this disagreement over highway spending, the compromise
solution should last for no more that two years, to September 30,
2006. The extra year and a half such an extension would provide
should be used to develop a plan to fundamentally overhaul the
current program. At its heart should be a new management system
that imposes quantitative performance goals on federal and state
transportation officials and that redirects spending to benefit the
motorists who fund the system with their fuel taxes.
Under the current
system, special interests absorb as much as 40 percent of all
federal highway spending, and that share is growing as Congress
grants other influential constituencies access to the trust fund.
As a result of this leakage and other pervasive inefficiencies,
$700 billion (inflation adjusted) of federal highway spending since
1970 has added only 7 percent to our road system, a performance
that makes the proverbial $600 Pentagon hammer a benchmark for
cost-effective
government.
While your veto
threat did not deter the Senate from passing a highway bill that
will add another $10 billion per year to the deficit through the
remainder of this decade, it did stop the House, at least, from
moving ahead with its defective highway proposal. It also put a
stop to the $125 billion hike in the regressive federal fuel tax
that many in the House wanted to impose on motorists.
Although it is too
early to predict the final outcome on highway spending totals, you
have clearly gotten Congress's attention and forced many members to
rethink the extent to which they want their tenure to be remembered
as one of wretched excess. And now that you have their attention,
and while Congress is grudgingly rethinking its position on highway
spending, I would encourage you use this respite to ask your
advisors to rethink their own views on highway legislation.
More specifically,
you should ask them if they are prepared to confirm that the
highway bill they crafted for you last year - titled SAFETEA -
would significantly enhance the mobility and safety of the millions
of motorists who pay to fund the highway trust fund. If they cannot
guarantee that outcome, then the breathing room your veto threat
and a two-year extension would allow should be used to rewrite the
bill in a way that meets that goal.
As your advisors
embark upon this legislative rewrite, you should announce to voters
- and especially to motorists who pay the fuel tax - that whatever
plan you ultimately submit to Congress will pander to them and not
to the big spenders whose influence in Washington has risen to
alarming levels. How bad has such pandering become? When informed
that the White House would not agree to anything above $270 billion
over six years, leaders of the Transportation Committee expressed
concern that a figure that low might preclude the thousands of
pork-barrel projects they had already promised members and
lobbyists.
To date, the
disagreement between your advisors and Congress has been over
levels of spending. Cost is an important issue and should be
resolved in your favor, but any resolution based on dollars alone
would still leave the nation hobbled with a grotesquely inefficient
federal transportation program that spends enormous sums of money
to achieve pathetically meager results. Regrettably, the only big
difference between your proposal and that of Congress is that your
bill proposes to misspend a quarter of a trillion dollars over the
next six years, while Congress wants to match your misspending and
raise you another $60 billion or $120 billion. Either way, American
mobility and transportation quality are the losers.
Fortunately for
the long abused motorist, you have a once-in-six-years opportunity
to put an end to this mess. The most important change you could
make would be to restore the program's purpose to that of improving
highway transportation, mobility, and congestion relief by creating
a program that establishes explicit and measurable goals related to
maintaining the quality of our interstate system, enhancing
mobility, reducing pollution, and relieving congestion.
Such clear and
measurable goals defined the federal highway program in the first
several decades of its existence. Created in 1956 to fulfill the
well-defined objective of building a high speed, limited access,
interstate system that stretched coast-to-coast, border-to-border,
and connected all the major cities in between, the program achieved
that goal in a timely and cost effective way, at least by today's
standards. But once the interstate system was completed in the
early 1980s, the program lost its clear sense of purpose and
quickly evolved into the nation's largest spoils system. Where once
it had the goal of providing America with the best transportation
system in the world, today its purpose is little more than to
accommodate a growing list of influential constituencies lucky
enough to have their hands in the piggy bank.
In devising a
better alternative, it will be tempting for many of your advisors
to adopt a Washington-knows-best policy and replace the old and
obsolete mandates and prohibitions with more modern mandates and
prohibitions. But if we have learned anything about Washington
programs, it is that new mandates and prohibitions will soon become
as counter-productive as the ones now hobbling motorists.
As your advisors
go back to the drawing board to develop a better federal
transportation program, they should take as their first principles
the concepts guiding the original version of your "No Child Left
Behind." In the education plan you submitted, school systems were
given wide latitude in how they chose to invest federal education
money. But in return for accepting that money and the wider
discretion that came with it, school systems were also required to
achieve measurable improvements in student performance, or else
face harsh penalties. It was this link between money, performance,
and accountability that made your education proposal both
compelling and unique among federal spending programs.
There is no reason
why a new federal highway/transit program could not be devised with
similar performance-based incentives. Just as there are many
acceptable standardized tests by which to measure a student's
educational achievement, so too are there many quantitative
measures of congestion, mobility, safety, pollution, and road
quality to which state and/or regional transportation officials
could be held accountable in return for money received and
discretion granted.
While this
approach may seem novel and risky to many transportation
traditionalists, the concept has already been implemented in the
federal education program, and before that many states had already
imposed their own performance standards on their local school
systems. Virginia's "Standards of Learning" is an example of a
state-imposed forerunner of the federal program. In transportation,
the Texas Governor's Business Council last year recommended that
the state adopt quantitative standards and performance measures for
its Department of Transportation, and in late 2003 such a system
was implemented as a way to guide the state's transportation
investments in alternative modes, technologies, and places. It's
time to do the same at the federal level, and a two-year extension
of the current law should be enough time to develop the plan and
submit it to Congress.
While this sort of
accountability will certainly leave tens of thousands of road
builders, state and federal bureaucrats, and public transit system
officials less than happy (just think of the teachers who opposed
"No Child Left Behind"), the tens of millions of motorists who pay
their salaries and contracts will be overjoyed. Sounds like a
winning plan in an election year.
Sincerely,
Ron Utt
Ronald D.
Utt, Ph.D., is Herbert and Joyce Morgan Senior Research Fellow in
the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The
Heritage Foundation.