On March 26, House Speaker John Boehner effectively killed the Senate deal to renew unemployment insurance before it had even passed the upper chamber. “I told the president I would consider this, as long as it was paid for,” he said, adding that his demand had “not been met." Boehner was right: The Senate deal contained a budget gimmick, known as pension smoothing, as a spending offset. It wasn’t truly paid for.

Three and half months later, House Republicans are set to use that exact budget gimmick as a spending offset to an infrastructure bill—and Boehner’s not complaining this time around.

The Highway Trust Fund, which funds projects for roads and mass transit, faces a $12 billion shortfall in 2015 and $164 billion shortfall over the next decade. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx has warned that the department will be unable to reimburse states for infrastructure projects starting sometime in August if Congress does not act. That would not just make our cracked roads and crumbling bridges even worse, but would put thousands of construction jobs at risk.

In response, the House and Senate have proposed a variety of ways to fill the funding gap—all of them bad ideas. With little time left to reach an agreement, policymakers have done what they do best: used the budget gimmick, pension smoothing, as a short-term patch. In less than a year, Congress will find itself in the same position once again.

Pension smoothing is a timing shift that allows companies to backload their pension contributions, boosting profits in the short term and increasing government revenues. But companies must make the full pension contributions eventually, reducing profits and government revenues in those years. In other words, it creates no savings in the long-run, as this chart from the Center for a Responsible Federal Budget demonstrates: