Overview

The Bush budget contemplates significant funding cuts and other changes for the nation's transportation infrastructure and systems. The proposals affect highway, rail and air transport. Far from helping ensure needed infrastructure improvements, greater efficiencies or enhanced quality of services, the Bush proposals are likely to create or exacerbate problems in the national transportation system.

Bush Budget for TEA-21

A great deal of our basic national surface transportation infrastructure -highways, mass transit, bridges and the like- is funded under TEA-21, the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, the 1998 law that authorized funding for federal highway and transit programs for fiscal years 1998-2003. Despite an unobligated cash balance of $18.5 billion in the Highway Trust Fund, the Bush budget for fiscal 2003 slashes $9 billion in highway spending under TEA-21.  

• The effect of the Administration's proposed 29% drop in funding for highway spending will be to cut jobs in a recession-wracked economic climate, to under-invest in the needed basic physical infrastructure that underlies national growth and development, and to ignore a backlog of needs that TEA-21 has addressed the past four years.
  
  
• By relying on a quirk in the TEA-21 spending mechanism to justify these cuts in highway infrastructure spending, the Bush budget is ignoring the level of investment strongly supported by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle as appropriate to meeting long-term national infrastructure needs.
  

• A billion dollars invested in highway construction creates more than 42,000 jobs. The drastic cut in funding the Administration proposes will ripple through the economy beyond construction to manufacturing, services and other industries and affect jobs and the economy for years to come.
  
  
• Industry groups estimate that the Bush cut could result in the loss of 380,000 jobs over the next ten years. The immediate job threat is summed up well by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, which says, "There are 140,000 paychecks on the line here." Under-investment in the national transportation infrastructure leads to inefficiencies in transport and delays in travel for business and for the traveling and commuting public. Adequate investments in highway construction are also a key building block for ensuring homeland security. Indeed, national security was one of the key reasons motivating President Eisenhower's commitment to building a solid, well-maintained interstate highway system.
  

The President’s budget choices request for workers and their unions could not be clearer: when it comes to cuts, he asks the most of working families.

Bush Budget for Amtrack

Amtrak is government chartered corporation, established in 1970 by the Rail Passenger Service Act, which is partially funded by the federal government to provide railroad passenger service. Amtrak serves vital national interests that should be supported with adequate long term public investments. Inadequate funding and an ideological drive to dismantle and privatize the system, however, have placed the national passenger rail system in a precarious state. The President's budget proposals only exacerbate this crisis.

• The Administration's FY 2003 budget funds Amtrak at $521 million - less than half the $1.2 billion needed to sustain the national system including the Northeast Corridor, long-distance trains, Railroad Retirement costs and the 25,000 jobs Amtrak supports.
  
• The Bush Budget not only neglects Amtrak's needs but also ignores the passenger rail carrier's $5.8 billion capital improvement backlog resulting from years of neglect. Amtrak has recently cut $285 million in capital and operating expenditures at the expense of 1,500 jobs and much needed system enhancements and improvements.
  
• Amtrak's CEO recently announced that the railroad will begin plans to shutdown its entire long-distance train operations unless it receives the full $1.2 billion in FY 2003. If this occurs - as it may, under the Bush Budget plan - 7.9 million passengers will suffer through lost service and 7,000 Amtrak workers will lose their jobs.

Bush Proposals for Air Traffic Control

The Bush budget references a plan to privatize the air traffic control system, which has always operated as an inherently governmental function.

• Privatization of the air traffic control system would jeopardize the safety and security of the U.S. system. As the tragic events of Sept. 11th painfully taught us, nothing is more important in air transport than establishing and maintaining the highest degree of security possible in all aspects of the air travel system, including air traffic control.
  
  
• The desire to cut costs and the unbridled belief in "the market," which underlies the drive to privatize most public services, is wholly inconsistent with establishing and maintaining security of the air traffic control system. Moreover, there is abundant evidence that deregulation and privatization of air traffic control often neither save money nor provide security or greater efficiencies in the provision of services.
  
  
• It is nothing short of ironic that the President would push ahead with plans to privatize air traffic control at the same time Congress has decided that national security considerations required federalizing of airport baggage screening.