After years of soaring costs and an affordability crisis, the last thing Americans need is a bloated highway bill that wastes taxpayers’ dollars while imposing higher costs on consumers. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what’s getting kicked around the halls of Congress right now: a pork-filled monstrosity masquerading as a highway bill.
The legislation in question is the deceptively named “BUILD America 250 Act,” a massive $580-billion surface transportation bill. It’s supposed to fund roads and bridges, but instead is jampacked with new regulations, bureaucracy, and waste as politicians keep tacking on boondoggles. Exhibit A: the Railway Safety Act.
Despite its name, the act doesn’t improve railway safety but does impose a slew of new mandates and costs. It would impose draconian standards on America’s railroads and lock in older technologies, thereby discouraging the very innovation that has made these railroads the most efficient in the world.
Another unnecessary feature, increases in crew sizes (a giveaway to unions), is an additional cost that will be passed on to consumers. As costs mount, some businesses choose to ship by truck rather than rail, which means more congestion on the very highways the bill is supposed to fix.
Between shifting freight to slower road networks and slowing existing rail freight due to regulatory compliance, the Railway Safety Act will also delay time-sensitive and perishable cargo, including food, medicine, and other essentials on which families rely.
And what does the country receive in exchange for all these downsides? No proven safety benefit. In fact, while proponents of the act point to the 2023 disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, as justification for this regulatory overreach, industry experts say the act’s central provision wouldn’t even have prevented the derailment.
This is a perfect example of how politicians impose permanent, yet entirely ineffective, economy-wide costs in the name of preventing harm. It is legislating by tragedy, and the people who will quietly pay for it are ordinary American families.
But the Railway Safety Act is far from the only problem in the bill. At more than half a trillion dollars, the legislation will drive the federal deficit even higher, right when Washington should be cutting spending, not expanding it. Not only is this shackling future generations with debt, but it’s also fueling the inflation fire, imposing a real cost on Americans today.
And much of this massive spending strays well outside the traditional, defensible core of a highway bill, the roads and bridges on which Americans actually drive. Instead, the legislation is filled with mission creep.
Programs for neighborhood "safe streets," for “resilience,” for equity, for wildlife crossings, and a wide array of discretionary grants may each have their advocates, but they belong to a far broader agenda than a focused highway reauthorization. Folding them in lets Washington grow under the popular banner of "infrastructure" while the actual pavement only gets the scraps that remain.
The bill also directly reaches into drivers' wallets. It creates a new federal vehicle registration fee and conscripts notoriously inefficient state motor vehicle departments to collect and remit the fee to Washington, turning the states into federal tax collectors. Not only does the law deputize state-level bureaucracy, but it’ll also subsidize the inefficiency, too.
It authorizes $104 million for those same DMVs to build out the administration of new electric vehicle fees, which is to say it spends nine figures expanding the worst of state-level government. Families who have waited in a DMV line can imagine how efficiently that will run.
Finally, the bill continues the practice of awarding contracts based on race and "disadvantage" rather than merit, complete with the goals and reporting requirements that enforce it. Once again, this’ll be more red tape and additional compliance costs.
When the government tilts the field away from the best work at the best price, taxpayers foot the bill and the principle of equal treatment suffers. Competitive, merit-based bidding is how families get the best bang for their buck—which is what elected representatives owe to America’s hard-working taxpayers.
Taken together, the bill as currently written would raise the cost of living, expand the bureaucracy, and steer money away from the roads it is meant to maintain. The Railway Safety Act would arguably do the most damage of all. American families, still climbing out from under years of inflation, deserve legislation that would reduce—not increase—costs. Now, that would be worthy of America’s 250th anniversary.
E.J. Antoni, Ph.D., is chief economist at the Heritage Foundation and a senior fellow at Unleash Prosperity.