Rep. Paul Ryan, the chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, said Thursday that there isn’t enough time for a long-term highway funding bill to pass Congress before the August recess, and that a shorter fix through the end of the year is likely.

Congress has already passed one short-term highway fix this year — a funding “patch” ends on July 31 — and there have been more than 20 similar fixes over the past decade. Both parties have expressed interest in a six-year bill funding the nation’s highways, but Ryan said the limited time left before the deadline isn’t adequate to make that happen.

“We will have to do an extension through the year this month because it is impossible to put in place a six-year financing package for highways in the next two weeks, and we’re trying to impress this point upon our colleagues,” Ryan said at a breakfast hosted by Politico. “We want a six-year highway bill, we want a long-term highway bill, we want to give states the ability to plan ahead, but that means we have to come up with a way to do long-term financing.”

For that financing, Ryan reiterated his opposition to raising the gasoline tax, which is how highway projects have long been funded. Ryan said the top plan, or “Plan A,” for financing long-term infrastructure improvements would be using tax repatriation on corporate profits overseas.

“That’s what our first preference is and we’re in discussions with our colleagues on how to do that,” Ryan said. “If we can’t get an agreement on that, then we go to a Plan B.” The Wisconsin Republican didn’t elaborate on what the backup plan would involve.

There seems to be growing bipartisan consensus behind the international tax plan. Sen. Chuck Schumer, the third-ranking Democrat in the upper chamber, and Republican Sen. Rob Portman released the framework of an international tax reform bill earlier this week that would allow the profits to fund the nation’s highways. Ryan applauded that framework, which he said follows what the House has been trying to do. Schumer, at a press conference Thursday afternoon, said he and other Democrats “couldn’t agree more” with Ryan that the tax reform should be “Plan A.”

At that press conference, however, Schumer, fellow Senate Democrats and Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx sharply criticized Republicans for the repeated short-term patches of the highway fund, and revealed a letter they sent to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell calling on him to release the Republican plan for the infrastructure spending. McConnell said Wednesday that the Senate could turn to highway legislation as soon as next week.

Though Schumer and his colleagues were critical of the repeated patches for the fund, the New York lawmaker left the door open for another short-term fix through the end of the year, but only if support is there to develop the tax reform plan as a way to finance the six-year package later.

“We don’t want to do a short-term bill, and so you’d need to see some broad support that people would have confidence that over the next three to four months we could actually get the international tax reform bill done,” Schumer said. “We’re beginning to see that support, but we would want to see some more support congeal over the next few weeks, and then I think a shorter-term proposal would be acceptable to people.”

There are other thorny issues that could make highway legislation a problem, however, namely the Export-Import Bank, which saw its charter expire at the end of June. Democrats have planned to attach a reauthorization of the bank’s charter to the highway bill, and McConnell has said he’ll allow that plan to go forward. But conservatives in the House, who fought for months to end the bank’s charter, are likely to put up a fight over attempts to reauthorize the bank, which could cause problems for the underlying highway bill.

“I don’t support attaching Ex-Im to anything, especially the highway bill,” Ryan said.

“I would rather the House put together a clean highway extension, send it to the Senate and call it a day.”

The other matter to be resolved in the next several weeks is how Congress will fund highway projects through the end of the year, which would cost about $8 billion. When asked for his short-term funding plan Thursday, Ryan simply said, “Stay tuned.”