Rep. Gosar Blocks $500 Million Obama Wanted for New, Wasteful Grant Program, Keeps Money in Highway Trust Fund

Statement

Today, U.S. Congressman Paul A. Gosar, D.D.S. (AZ-04) released the following statement after an his amendment prohibiting any funds from being used for the Federal Transit Administration's (FTA) proposed Rapid Growth Area Transit Program successfully passed the House and was attached to H.R. 2577, the Fiscal Year 2016 Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Act:

"With significant infrastructure needs, including road and bridge maintenance, now is not the time to be spending $500 million on a new discretionary bus transit program. In recent years, more and more resources have been sucked out of the highway trust fund and diverted to wasteful and unnecessary transit projects that only benefit a small fraction of Americans.

"Despite millions of dollars continuing to be pumped into utopian projects attempting to recreate a European style transit system, the bottom line is traffic congestion continues to worsen. The Highway Trust Fund is on the brink of insolvency yet the president wants to waste half a billion dollars on new buses for a few urban communities. I'm pleased my colleagues in the House joined me today in affirming that construction projects for our nation's porous infrastructure system are more important than an expensive, new discretionary grant program that will do little or nothing to reduce congestion ."

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