The Meaning of Is Isn’t

TEA21 allocates highway trust funds to the states among a plethora of programs, with a variety of complex formulae. It includes a new funding arrangement called revenue-aligned budget authority (RABA) which was a compromise between taking funding off-budget and simply leaving each year’s funds to the annual appropriations process. You may well think the whole thing is a monstrosity (We do) but it is United States law for 6-years. This Clinton-Gore administration hailed TEA21 as a great achievement, and has never argued for amending that law. It just wants to evade it!

The chronic dishonesty of this wretched bunch was put on display recently in the USDOT budget for FY2001. TEA21 might as well never have happened! The key RABA provision in the law was simply ignored. Treated as if it didn’t exist. The proposed USDOT budget is simply a grab-bag of goodies for its constituents – $9.1b for the ‘Livable Communities Initiative’ (whose main hallmark will be making communities less livable by squandering money on trolleys at the expense of roads), $1.6b for Congestion Mitigation & Air Quality Improvement (most of which does not help decongest or improve air), $719m for Community Transportation Enhancements (the ‘community’ adjective is always a warning label that the money will go to a phalange of the administration’s activist group supporters for stuff like an extension to a steam museum, or researching ‘alternatives’ to a road), $52m for Transportation Community (that giveaway again) & System Preservation (money to fight roads), a 37% increase in R&D (for Al Gore’s supporters in research campuses), 12 new trolley/rail lines (tribute to the 19th century rail fetish), $521m for Amtrak (which once again is let stay on the fed-teat). And surprise, surprise? Roads money was cut by hundreds of millions below TEA21 levels.

The key congressmen, Rep & Dem alike, have denounced the USDOT budget as an illegitimate effort to rewrite TEA21. In fact it is just a part of Al Gore’s election campaign – payoffs to supporters. These guys are incorrigible.