Highway-Transit Bill Put on a New Route

Unable to settle on a compromise spending level, Republican leaders and the White House switched gears Tuesday and decided to initiate formal House-Senate talks on a huge highway and transit spending bill.

Lawmakers emerging from a GOP leadership meeting with White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. said they would turn to House and Senate negotiators to reach a deal on the six-year highway bill that has eluded them for months.

Congressional aides said the White House made some concessions during the weekend, agreeing to a new $275-billion ceiling. That apparently remains too low for lawmakers wanting more money to fix the nation’s roads and boost home-state economies.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), hoping to avoid a confrontation with the White House and possibly President Bush’s first veto, has tried to reach an agreement with the administration on an overall spending number before turning over the massive bill to congressional negotiators to work out the details.

“The speaker is not interested in going to conference until we get that agreement,” House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) said earlier Tuesday.

But Rep. Thomas E. Petri (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Transportation subcommittee on highways, said House leaders, unable to get that agreement, decided on a different course. “To do one thing in isolation is almost counterproductive,” he said of the leadership talks.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) is expected to try to name Republican and Democratic participants this week to a formal negotiating conference.

The 1998-2003 highway bill, funded at $218 billion, expired in September and has had to be extended three times since then to keep federal money flowing to the states while Congress works on the new bill.

The Senate passed a $318-billion bill this year, while the House, under pressure from a White House veto threat, agreed on $275 billion last month. The White House has said, however, that the real cost of the House bill would be $284 billion.

The White House originally said it would not accept anything over $256 billion, but House and Senate aides said that in staff discussions over the weekend, White House officials indicated they would accept a bill that did not exceed $275 billion.