The Center for Public Integrity

Last September, city fathers in Dubuque, Iowa, lured three members of the White House cabinet to the banks of the Mississippi River on the same day they welcomed officials from one the world’s biggest corporations, IBM. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, accompanied by a host of aides, all climbed aboard the city’s green trolley car. Among their stops: Dubuque’s renovated harbor area, and then the historic millwork district — once the nation’s largest — and the nearby Roshek building, a depression-era department store undergoing a grand remodel.

Meanwhile, Dubuque’s private sector guest, IBM, was over at the convention center announcing plans to make the city a living laboratory for its Smarter Planet program. Up to 1,300 new IBM employees will begin fielding tech service calls later this year at the Roshek building, and the company hopes those workers will also be able to enjoy the fruits of a sweeping partnership between IBM and its host city — a partnership aimed at creating an integrated transportation system involving smart new bus routes, pedestrian-friendly streets, and arterial roads to take trucks out of neighborhoods.

It sounds positively idyllic, but there is, of course, a catch. In order to begin turning this vision into a reality, Dubuque wants a federal investment of $50 million. The economic returns would be 50 to one, officials maintain. And while that’s impressive, federal transportation policy has rarely been geared to reward such things, let alone Dubuque’s partnerships among local and state government and the business community. Instead, the process of seizing federal transportation dollars has often been a political free-for-all, with some of the biggest fights in Washington, D.C.

More than 50 years ago President Dwight Eisenhower sought to build an interconnected national transportation network bigger than any region or state could possibly construct alone. Recognizing every legislator’s desire to deliver funds to local projects, the Bureau of Public Roads shrewdly decided to bind scores of them together in a comprehensive illustrated guide to help sell Eisenhower’s vision. Quickly, “The Yellow Book” found its way to the desks of the U.S. Congress, satisfying districts throughout the country while creating an interstate highway system that, according to President Bill Clinton, “did more to bring Americans together than any other law of this century.”

Decades later, though, America’s surface transportation system — like the funding and policy decisions behind it — desperately lacks any sort of national vision. More than a hundred disparate federal programs constitute a maze through which billions of dollars pass in and out of Washington each year, chaotically making their way back to America’s cities and towns.

On its best days, the federal transportation system serves as the backbone of America’s economy. On its worst days — and there have been plenty of those recently — the system pumps massive sums of money into disjointed, low-priority, and often ill-defined projects. But in two weeks –— on October 1, to be precise — the system will cease to do any of those things. Instead, it will essentially go broke. Worse, the entire governing structure for the nation’s transportation system will expire. And rather than fix it, Congress is fighting over how long to wait before acting.

The Center for Public Integrity began working on this project late in the spring after the second of two bipartisan commissions released its report on the future of America’s federal transportation policy. That transportation system, according to the first commission’s report, has been stuck “pursuing no discernible national interests” other than “political imperatives.”

“The American people can no longer tolerate more ‘business as usual’ in the surface transportation arena,’” the commission strongly stated.

Experts from across the political spectrum agree that the nation needs to take bold action in passing a robust transportation bill. But the prospects for that continue to stand at risk of being weighed down by congressional earmarking, a lack of well-defined goals, and the individual needs of hundreds of interests nationwide.

In June, Center reporters Matthew Lewis and Aaron Mehta began analyzing thousands of lobbying disclosure forms through the Senate Office of Public Records to discover as many public and private interests as possible that are lobbying on the reauthorization of America’s transportation policy, the current iteration of which is set to expire on October 1.

In addition, our reporters conducted dozens of interviews, attended transportation conferences in three states, and completed an exhaustive literature search of congressional hearings, scholarly reports, and government records.