As Congress considers the future of the Highway Trust Fund, ITIF joined a coalition led by the Competitive Enterprise Institute urging Congress to prioritize restoring the longstanding users-pay/users-benefit principle. Further increasing the reliance of the Highway Trust Fund on revenue streams untethered from use, as well as general fund bailouts, would not only fail to address the core fiscal challenges of the present, it would threaten the future health of America’s highways. Instead, Congress should prioritize protecting and strengthening the users-pay principle in the 2020 surface transportation reauthorization and support the development of a nationwide, interoperable road usage charge pilot.
