The Transportation Department predicts the highway account will be broke by September. Washington's next cliff

Washington now is facing a new crisis: the highway cliff.

Sometime in the next four months, the Highway Trust Fund — which pays for infrastructure projects across the nation — will run dry. And this slow-moving Congress, in the throes of a heated election year, has to figure out a way to fill the coffers or risk halting construction projects across the country.


The Department of Transportation estimates the fund’s highway account will be broke by the end of August, but that could change without warning. There aren’t many good options for lawmakers — particularly Republicans, who are loath to approve big-money projects, don’t much like shifting money around and are sure to resist even a minimal hike in the gas tax.

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Few things rile up voters more than political stumbles leaving them stuck in traffic. Just ask New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. And the timing couldn’t be worse, with funding slated to run out just months before voters head to the ballot box to vote in a critical election — providing the electorate with a fresh example of congressional dysfunction.

“It’s a crisis, it is,” said Rep. Reid Ribble (R-Wis.), a member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. “The Highway Trust Fund goes insolvent in July or sometime around there, and so we’ve got to figure out how we’re going to fund it.”

Highway policy is pricey, complicated and fraught with regional tensions, and the process of rebuilding the trust fund could rattle the power hierarchies within the Capitol. It has bedeviled Speaker John Boehner before. Just two short years ago, the Ohio Republican proposed tying road projects to tax revenue from oil drilling. The idea failed to get momentum and blew up in his face.

This time, the situation is far more dire. Not only is the government’s authority to keep spending on transportation projects set to expire on Sept. 30 but the funding is running dry.

Multiple committees have jurisdiction, and even the most senior lawmakers charged with spearheading transportation policy say the decision-making process is parked in the posh leadership suites in the Capitol.

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Senior House GOP leadership aides readily admit that this is one of the main hurdles standing between them and the 2014 elections. The looming debate illustrates that, regardless of their plan to keep this year drama free, Republicans will not be able to avoid some legislative battles that threaten to expose deep fissures in their party.

There are a few options, but none are easy and they all come with a price tag likely to reach into the billions.

One possibility is that Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) could decide to rewrite the highway bill — and its funding mechanisms. It’s a long shot — if not impossible — during this overtly political year.

They can also simply transfer money from the government’s general fund to keep the highway trust fund operational. But Boehner virtually ruled that out, and fiscal conservatives don’t want to approve another “bailout” after tens of billions of dollars have been transferred to road and bridge projects in recent years.

Or they can hop on a well-worn Washington path: a short-term patch that would kick the issue into the lame-duck period after the election, or into early 2015. Even that half measure would cost in the billions. Punting the issue to the lame-duck period would complicate efforts during the post-election session to move on immigration reform or President Barack Obama’s push to create fast-track trade authority.

“Everybody that I hear from says that we probably can’t pass a bill and it’s going to have to be put off with some temporary patch,” said Rep. John Duncan (R-Tenn.), a member of the Transportation Committee who has served in Congress since 1988. “So that would not surprise me.”

A yearlong patch would need upward of $10 billion, and returning to the tradition of six-year bills would cost $95 billion. And that’s just to keep current spending levels, which nearly all politicians agree are not nearly high enough.

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Of course, the Senate and White House have their own ideas. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said Wednesday she would release a bill “early next week” that will include a small inflationary budget increase. The White House released its four-year, $302 billion legislative proposal this week, but it stands no chance in the Republican House.

Meanwhile, House Republicans have no idea what they will do.

The situation is incredibly complicated in the House. The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is charged with writing the policy, and the Ways and Means Committee is supposed to find out how to pay for it. There’s chatter of moving parts of Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp’s tax bill to pay for the pricey highway extension. The idea of allowing American companies to bring back cash they’ve parked overseas at a lower tax rate — called repatriation — is gaining some steam among lawmakers.

Still, the issue was not discussed at the Ways and Means Committee’s weekly lunch Wednesday despite a deadline looming this summer.

A number of political complications are also hovering above this process. Transportation Chairman Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) faces a primary challenge on May 20. Camp (R-Mich.), who is retiring at the end of the current Congress, was recently stymied when he put out his tax reform proposal and might not be inclined to move pieces of it.

And the Transportation Committee — and Boehner — are keenly aware how this ended up last time.

A policy bill from then-Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) didn’t win enough support to even make it to the floor for a vote. Mica’s bill would have eventually cut transit funding out of the federal equation, drawing the ire of suburban Republicans who represent millions of commuters around the country that rely on subway and bus systems to get to and from work. Other regional issues came into play, like a ban on double-decker horse carriages, which riled Western lawmakers.

House leaders tried to build support for the bill by paying for it with revenue from expanded oil drilling, but that wasn’t enough to move the needle. Lawmakers eventually passed a shell bill that included language streamlining the approval process for transportation projects and went to a conference with the Senate that yielded a bill modeled largely on the upper chamber’s version.

Mica isn’t Transportation chairman anymore after reaching his term limit. One of his right-hand men during that 2012 fight was Shuster, who now has the reins and is trying to avoid a similar fate.