Sports seasons are suspended. Concerts and public gatherings are canceled. Millions of us are cooped up at home trying to stay healthy and stay sane.

But the work of teeing up the next generation of boondoggle highway projects doesn’t stop—not even for a global pandemic.

Two weeks ago, the Oregon Transportation Commission voted to move a proposed expansion of Interstate 5 through the heart of downtown Portland one step closer to construction. We criticized the then-$500 million (now somewhere north of $700 million) project in last year’s fifth edition of our annual Highway Boondoggles report, with my colleague Gideon Weissman writing that it would “constitute a step backward to the car-dependent policies of the past.”

Meanwhile, the highway lobby is using the opportunity presented by COVID-19 to attempt to lock in more spending on highway boondoggles, both now and in the future. The American Highway Users Alliance and American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) recently put out similar requests for emergency relief for state transportation agencies and the reauthorization of the main federal transportation law. AASHTO’s request called for $50 billion in funding to last through the end of fiscal 2021 and a doubling of spending over the next six years in reauthorization of the federal transportation law.