Congress Ready to Approve Energy, Highway Measures

After years of tortuous negotiations, Congress is poised to pass energy and highway bills that are designed to show its concern about high fuel costs and traffic congestion -- but that also have prompted criticism about excessive spending and pork-barrel politics.

The highway bill costs $286.5 billion -- $2.5 billion above the target set by the White House -- and contains thousands of projects sought by lawmakers for their districts.

The energy bill provides for at least $11.5 billion in tax breaks. President Bush had favored $6.7 billion in tax breaks.

Nevertheless, Bush is expected to sign both bills.

With lawmakers preparing for their summer recess, the president and the Republican-controlled Congress are eager to promote the bills -- along with passage early Thursday of Bush’s top trade initiative, the Central American Free Trade Agreement -- as among their major achievements for the year.

The House approved the energy bill Thursday and had been expected to pass the highway bill. But a last-minute obstacle -- an obscure six-line provision, inserted by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), one of the conferees on the measure, that would reopen a long-closed 11,500-foot runway on an Air Force base in Montana -- delayed passage until at least this morning.

The Senate is expected to pass the energy and highway bills today.

Supporters call the bills important to the nation’s economic growth. But critics question whether Congress has forgotten the federal budget deficit.

Predicting that the highway bill will set a record for lawmakers’ projects -- more than 5,000 of them -- Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said, “It’s kind of an ignominious achievement for Republicans.”

Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a budget watchdog group in Arlington, Va., said Bush’s intention to sign both bills, even though they are more costly than he wanted, “demonstrates how difficult it will be to stick with the optimistic assumptions in the budget. The trick with both bills was to exceed the president’s budget but not by enough to attract a veto.... A billion here, a billion there.... When does it become real money these days?”

Addressing the cost of the highway bill, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan noted Thursday that lawmakers had “come significantly down” from spending that was previously proposed.

Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Texas), who presided over the drafting of the energy bill, defended the measure’s tax breaks and its other spending items.

Barton said he considered the bill’s estimated price tag worth it, given its aim of stimulating domestic energy production and conservation. The measure’s cost is about $13 billion over 10 years, and perhaps substantially more if Congress allocates funds for many of the programs authorized by the bill.

The highway bill would fund highway, mass transit and traffic safety projects through 2009. Its approval would come nearly two years after the expiration of the last big transportation measure, which provided $218 billion over six years.

The legislation guarantees that by 2008, every state will get back at least 92 cents for every dollar it pays in gas taxes. California is now guaranteed 90.5 cents for every dollar it sends to Washington. The bill would permit California to implement a state law allowing single occupants of high-mileage hybrid vehicles to use carpool lanes, said one of its sponsors, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks).

With lawmakers receiving copies of the bill only a few hours before it was to come before the House, few details were immediately available. The bill funds a variety of transportation projects, including new roads, bridges, sidewalk improvements and parking facilities.

Included in the bill is $130 million to help pay for extending a northbound carpool lane on the San Diego Freeway through the Sepulveda Pass, a notorious Los Angeles bottleneck. Also included is $155 million to separate street and rail traffic in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. The bill also includes $2.3 million for landscaping along the Ronald Reagan Freeway in Simi Valley and $2 million for “pedestrian enhancements” on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles.

The House passed the 1,725-page energy bill, a Bush priority since 2001, by a vote of 275 to 156.

It includes a range of measures designed to increase and diversify fuel sources, and in turn, stabilize fuel price spikes and supply shortages.

Among the provisions: tax breaks and other incentives to increase domestic production of oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear power, as well as energy conservation. It also would extend daylight saving time, require greater amounts of corn-based ethanol in the gasoline supply, and give federal regulators final say over the location of liquefied natural gas terminals.

Critics said the bill would do little to provide immediate relief from high gasoline prices or reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil, citing its failure to increase vehicle miles-per-gallon requirements.

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy projected that the bill would save only about 100,000 barrels per day, “less than one-half of 1%” of oil demand in 2020, while reducing electricity use by 2% by 2020.

“To Americans who are paying record prices for gasoline, don’t look for any relief in this legislation,” said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles).

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) added: “In 2005, we should be talking about the new agenda for the future of American energy. Instead, we have created a bill that is more appropriate for 1905 -- focusing on coal and oil.”

But Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), who supported the measure, said: “This is not a perfect bill, but it is a solid beginning to developing an energy strategy for the 21st century.”

White House spokesman McClellan said the measure would address the “root causes” of high energy prices, but acknowledged it would provide no immediate relief at the pump. “We didn’t get into this overnight, and we’re not going to get out of it overnight,” he said.

Like the highway bill, the energy bill drew criticism for its cost. A coalition of taxpayer watchdog groups said in a letter to lawmakers that the bill is “chock full of wasteful, unnecessary pork projects.”

Among the items in the bill: $36 million for demonstration projects to convert sugar to ethanol fuel; a federal loan of up to $80 million to fix problems at an experimental power plant in Alaska; $1.25 billion for building an experimental nuclear reactor in Idaho that could produce hydrogen; $500 million for research on “ultra-deepwater” drilling; and $1 billion in “coastal impact assistance” to energy-producing states, mostly on the Gulf Coast.

During Thursday’s debate, Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) took to the House floor to cheer what he called a “huge win for ... soybean growers” in his state: extension of a tax incentive to them to promote the production of more biodiesel, a fuel that can be produced from soybeans.

Keith Ashdown, an official at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington-based budget watchdog group, said the bill was driven by politics. “Republicans wanted to give the president a much-needed victory, and Democrats wanted to inoculate themselves from attacks of being soft on rising gas prices.”

Dingell said that many of the subsidies in the bill would spur development of domestic energy sources: “Are we overpaying in some of the particulars? Probably. Should this make us reject the entire incentives package that, taken as a whole, will spur significant and broad-based energy development? No.”