House and Senate negotiators have released a final version of the so-called “mini-bus” appropriations bill that will roll three funding bills into one: Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration; Commerce, Justice, Science; and Transportation and Housing and Urban Development. The bill will also provide a short-term extension of the nine remaining appropriations bills, which are currently operating under a previous short-term extension that expires on Friday.

Here are a few transportation-related provisions that caught our eye. We'll post more as we find them.

The Highway Trust Fund has been tip-toeing on the edge of insolvency for since 2008, as it fails to bring in adequate gasoline tax revenues to pay for all that Congress hopes to fund through the nation's transportation program. We were delighted earlier this year when the House announced it would only support funding levels commensurate with expected gas tax revenues. But their commitment to fiscal austerity in the transportation program was apparently short-lived.

The current appropriations bill would spend the HTF down to essentially zero, a precarious position for future years. And drawing the levels down so low is what made it necessary for Congress to transfer $34.5 billion from the Treasury to the HTF when revenues fell short of projections. Congress is at it again.

Solvency of Highway Trust Fund. – The conferees acknowledge this obligation limitation will deplete almost all resources from the Highway Trust Fund by the end of fiscal year 2012, causing the FHWA to begin cash management procedures that may result in States not receiving timely reimbursement of highway construction expenses. Further, without enactment of a new surface transportation authorization bill with large amounts of additional revenues this year, the Highway Trust Fund will be unable to support a highway program in fiscal year 2013. The conferees strongly urge the committees of jurisdiction to enact surface transportation legislation that provides substantial long-term funding to continue the federal-aid highways program.

The appropriations committee is willing to “acknowledge” the problem, but quickly passes the buck to the authorizers to come up with more cash for future years.

But the authorizers aren't doing any better. In the Senate, the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee passed a $109 billion reauthorization bill that would fund two years of transportation spending by – you guessed it – essentially drawing down the HTF balance to zero (and that’s assuming the $12 billion in offsets the Senate is still searching for materializes). A letter just today from House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica (R-FL) to Senate EPW Committee Chairwomen Barbara Boxer (D-CA) indicates that the Senate bill “will essentially bankrupt the Highway Trust Fund and make it impossible to provide any funding for fiscal year 2014.” (See TCS’ analysis of this bill). The House, for its part, is preparing to explore a different but equally unsustainable and unrelated way to “pay” for an increase in transportation spending: highly speculative revenues from off-shore or Arctic drilling.

In the end, it’s a big game of kick the can. The appropriators kick the can to the authorizers. The authorizers kick the can down the road a couple of years. In the meantime, solutions don’t seem to be high on the priority list and the same deficit spending mentality that got us into our current mess seems to be winning the day.

The Essential Air Service (EAS) is a program that TCS has long argued needs to be severely chopped. Unfortunately, the FY2012 spending bill only slightly decreases the program’s funding level to $193 million for FY2012 (down from $200 million in 2011). But even this decrease is potentially fleeting, as the bill also contains a provision requiring the Secretary of Transportation to transfer funds from other programs if the funding provided by Congress is not sufficient to pay for the EAS.

From the bill:

That if the funds under this heading are insufficient to meet the costs of the essential air service program in the current fiscal year, the Secretary shall transfer such sums as may be necessary to carry out the essential air service program from any available amounts appropriated to or directly administered by the Office of the Secretary for such fiscal year.

Congress did include some minor reforms to the program in their FY2012 appropriations bills:

• Arbitrarily restricts which airports can receive EAS subsidies. No airport can receive EAS subsidies under this bill unless they were receiving EAS subsidies in the previous fiscal year (2010) or had received a 90-day notice of termination of service that the Secretary rejected and required service to continue.

What this does is lock in a list of airports that can receive EAS subsidies. These reforms fall short for several reasons. First, they only apply to FY2012 and will have to be included in every appropriations bill going forward to remain in force. The proper place to make changes to EAS is in the FAA reauthorization bill. Second, this is an arbitrary line to draw, without consideration of whether the cities that were receiving subsidies are the ones that should continue to receive them in the future. Third, it locks taxpayers into a program that will cost around $200 million each year (the current cost of the program), which will likely grow as costs grow. This change does nothing to reign in the growth in costs.

• Forbids cost-sharing. This eliminates an excellent way to reduce costs and hold the line on future program increases.

• Waives the 15-seat requirement. Previously, carriers were required to use planes with 15 or more seats unless the local community agreed to smaller planes. This requirement was especially ridiculous because the determination as to whether airlines needed to use a 15-seat aircraft was based on whether there were 11 or more boardings at an airport in the period from 1975-1986. Eliminating this requirement could have positive benefits in terms of reduced taxpayer costs, assuming the savings of flying smaller planes is passed on to taxpayers.

It is clear that Congress understands that the EAS program has serious flaws. Instead of tweaking the program at the edges, Congress should just acknowledge that the program has outlived its useful life and simply end it or scale it back significantly. The program remains popular because it spreads subsidies far and wide, shielding it from the level of Congressional scrutiny it deserves.