RPA Helps Brief Congressional Staff on Transportation Bill

By Sean Jeans-Gail, VP of Gov’t Affairs + Policy

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The Urban Institute, in partnership with Congressman Jerry Nadler’s (D-NY-12) office, hosted a briefing for Congressional staffers on what final passage of the BUILD America 250 Act (BUILD 250) would mean for America’s transit and passenger rail. I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak on the panel, where I focused on what the legislation’s rail title and funding sections.

BUILD 250 was advanced by the House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure earlier this summer and is currently awaiting the House Ways and Means Committee to advance a financing component. Rail Passengers has been clear since the bill was unveiled that, while BUILD 250 does contain a lot of good policy ideas, the lack of guaranteed funding for passenger rail programs means it falls short of what passengers, states, workers, and communities need.

During the panel, the Urban Institute’s Yonah Freemark asked me what BUILD would mean for ability to launch new rail corridors, and I explored how the lack of guaranteed funding meant we would be returning to a pre-Bipartisan Infrastructure Law state of affairs, where states were left to fight over funding scraps while highway dollars continue to flood state coffers. A more detailed explanation of this dynamic was included in my May 19th writeup of the bill:

The $64 billion for rail programs in the BUILD America 250 Act marks a 38% decrease from the IIJA. This is still a lot more money than rail was receiving pre-IIJA and—given unified GOP control of Congress, and some positive policy developments in other sections of the bill—this could have been an acceptable level of investment (and in fact, that narrative is already emerging in the media).

However, the BUILD America 250 Act provides not a single dollar of dedicated funding for rail. That means it expects the Appropriations Committees to use the annual budgeting process to find around $13 billion per year for rail programs when appropriators have consistently struggled to stay above the $3 billion mark. This doesn’t account for the other transportation programs BUILD is expecting appropriators to find additional money.

Using the past five years of annual appropriations as a guidepost, we can expect this bill to represent more than an 80% reduction in funding for rail programs.

When asked to highlight a section of the bill that Rail Passengers supported, I discussed some the reforms to project delivery included in Subtitle E, where the bill’s drafters crafted policies designed to get projects to the construction phase faster. These commonsense reforms include:

• Pre-award authority to allow states to move ahead with work on a project prior to receiving a grant and be reimbursed later;
• Additional categorical exclusions (i.e. a defined list of low-impact actions that don’t require an environmental review) for projects that are located on existing rail lines;
• Directing the USDOT to work with industry stakeholders to recommend additional categorical exclusions for rail projects; and
• The creation of a State-railroad infrastructure project coordination and process standardization working group.

Urban Institute’s Amanda Hermans also presented research on the state-by-state breakdown on how BUILD 250’s would impact transit funding:

Using data on the distribution of federal formula program funds for transit between fiscal years 2022 and 2025, we estimated how much each state could lose in guaranteed FTA urban, rural, and State of Good Repair Grant funding under the BUILD Act. We estimate that each state would receive at least $10 million less in formula funds than they did under IIJA, and 22 states would lose at least $100 million. Unlike the national estimate above, these figures do not include discretionary programs, such as for new transit lines, which also face funding reductions.

The Georgetown Climate Center’s (GCC) James Bradbury explored the contents of his paper on the impacts of BUILD 250, “More Roads but Fewer Options”:

GCC’s analysis finds that BA250 could increase headwinds for the EV market. The bill’s proposed annual registration fees are expected to reduce the number of EV sales by at least tens of thousands — and potentially hundreds of thousands — of vehicles each year.

GCC also finds that, if past investment patterns continue, BA250 could make transportation more expensive, less safe and more polluting. This could mean: more investments in expanding roadways, in far greater proportion to investments in other transportation modes (e.g., rail, bus, bike and pedestrian). This could result in over a thousand more traffic fatalities each year, hundreds of additional dollars in annual transportation costs for every US household, and tens of millions of additional tons of climate pollution over the next decade (equivalent to emissions from 4 to 6 coal-fired power plants).

Many of the Congressional staff in attendance asked how this bill would help American families confront the rising cost of living. Most of the panelists were in agreement that it would not provide any meaningful relief, doubling down on a highway-dominated approach to transportation planning despite soaring gas prices.

As the surface transportation reauthorization conversation continues—in both the House and the Senate—Rail Passengers will continue to work with allied organizations to educate Members of Congress on the importance of meaningful investment in a better U.S. rail network.