A federal mileage-based user fee is still years away, and there’s very little political support for a federal gas tax hike.
Republicans and Democrats are eager to pass some sort of infrastructure bill. They also might be converging on a means of paying for it. On Thursday, Axios reported that several prominent Democrats have endorsed the idea of increasing user fees to help pay for any new infrastructure spending. “User fees have to be part of the mix,” Sen. Mark Warner (D–Va.) told the publication. Warner’s comments match those of Sen. Tom Carper (D–Del.), chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (which handles most infrastructure issues), who said at a Brookings Institution event in April that “things that are worth having are worth paying for and those that use roads, highways, and bridges have an obligation to help pay for them.” User fees—like tolls to pay for highways and public transit fares—have been a mainstay of Republicans’ infrastructure proposals. A $536 billion spending plan released by GOP Sens. Pat Toomey (R–Penn.), Roger Wicker (R–Miss.), John Barrasso (R–Wyo.), and Shelley Moore Capito (R–W. Va.) in April calls for collecting user fees on electric vehicles and redirecting already-approved federal spending. Axios reports that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D–Ariz.) has also endorsed the idea of user fees. Support for the concept of user fee–funded infrastructure is far from universal, however. President Joe Biden, in keeping with his pledge to not raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000 a year, has rejected the idea of paying for his $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan with user fees, including a federal gas tax hike.
