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This week in Transportation: Shuster tries to carve out space for spending
Lawmakers on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will engage in an age-old debate this week: What role should the federal government have in transportation spending?
The committee's first full hearing under its new chairman, Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.), will be an examination of the "federal role in America's infrastructure."
The Pennsylvania lawmaker is a second-generation Transportation Committee chairman: his father, former Rep. Bud Shuster (R-Pa.), chaired the same body from 1995 until 2001.
The younger Shuster has indicated he will use the Wednesday hearing to try to convince staunch conservative members of his party to exempt transportation from their proposals to scale back spending.
“Transportation and infrastructure have long been recognized as federal responsibilities shared with the states," Shuster said in a statement.
Witnesses scheduled to testify will include U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue, Laborers’ International Union of North America General President Terry O’Sullivan and former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D), who is now co-chairman of an infrastructure group called Building America’s Future.
Transportation observers will also be watching President Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday to see how prominently transportation figures in his remarks to both chambers of Congress.
Obama has used previous State of the Union speeches to push for more infrastructure spending, and he first rolled out his proposal for a national network of high-speed railways at an earlier address.
The president has been less specific about transportation proposals in recent years, however, advocating for general infrastructure improvements like repairing existing roads and bridges.
