This week the Senate is making a last-minute effort to pass a long-term highway bill and avoid yet another short-term patch to federal road funding — potentially the 34th such fix lawmakers have had to make in six years. As Congress argues over which pockets of taxpayer money they can use to keep summer construction projects alive, you might think there might be another, more sweeping way to pay for our most crucial transportation network.
There is.
It goes by a lot of names — a fund, a financing authority — but the most common is the National Infrastructure Bank.
First proposed in the 1980s, the idea of a federal bank to finance road projects has never quite come to fruition, but it’s attracting enthusiasm from both sides in the current polarized political climate. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have proposed plans to create one, as has Lindsey Graham. Thought its origins lie with Democrats, the leading Senate and House proposals this year to launch a bank include several Republican champions. Past legislative proposals have generated support from groups as politically diverse as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO, both of which like the idea of a growth policy that creates new jobs and keeps goods flowing.
The details vary by proposal, but the principle is similar: Big highway and bridge projects are expensive, and the government can make them a lot cheaper by offering low-interest loans and other forms of financing. In some schemes the bank would replace direct federal funding. In others, it would supplement it.
But despite so much love from powerful players on both sides of the political aisle, the infrastructure bank maintains the unenviable status of being one of Washington’s perennial policy bridesmaids — “the next best idea for the last 25 years,” one transportation observer put it.
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