Costa Mesa : Rep. Anderson Urges Road Fund Protection

Highway projects financed through the Federal Highway Trust Fund should be exempt from federal budget cuts, the chairman of a key transportation subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives said at a luncheon Thursday in Costa Mesa.

That is because the money simply goes back into the trust fund and cannot be tapped for items such as defense, said Rep. Glenn M. Anderson (D-Long Beach), chairman of the House surface transportation subcommittee.

Anderson said trust fund dollars “may be used only for their stated purposes. So cutting highway spending by a dollar does not allow domestic or defense spending to be increased by that dollar. Nor does it bring us a dollar closer to balancing the budget.”

Anderson said the highway programs are considered as part of the budget-cutting process “so that the green-eyeshade budget types can cut funding to make it look like they have a smaller deficit. . . . The Administration . . . every president back to Lyndon Johnson, wants to fool the American people. They want to cook the books.”