Last week, while many of us were occupied with beating back the flawed ridership report, we got some bad news from Congress as well. The House Subcommittee on Transportation voted to fund only $1.4 billion for high speed rail in FY 2011, below the $4 billion they approved last year and below the $2.5 billion that was ultimately approved for FY 2010, although $400 million above President Obama’s proposed $1 billion amount. This came at the same time as the subcommittee increased highway spending by a whopping $4 billion above the president’s recommendation. The subcommittee also failed to properly fund Amtrak, including the investment in new fleet vehicles.

The National Association of Railroad Passengers slammed the move:

“When you have multiple objectives, it makes sense to give priority to programs that address them,” said Ross Capon, president of the National Association of Railroad Passengers. “We appreciate that the subcommittee has strengthened passenger train investment compared with the Administration’s budget request, but the rail levels fall short when considering the sharp growth in proposed highway investment and the public interest in promoting transportation that is energy efficient and environmentally benign and which gives Americans expanded travel choices that they want and need. Today’s action is the first step in a long process, which people interested in balanced transportation investment should work to influence.”

In short, Congress isn’t stepping up to lead the push for more HSR funding. Sure, many members of Congress wrote to the president in April to call on Obama to lead the push for a permanent HSR funding source, which he ought to do. But Congress needs to at minimum sustain the level of HSR funding approved in the 2010 budget for 2011 and future years. Moving backward like this, especially to waste more money on highways, isn’t a smart move – especially when 25 states submitted HSR funding applications, indicating nationwide interest in HSR money.

While we remain confident that we can get the money back later on in the process, it’s another sign of Washington D.C.’s failure to provide for long-term project development. Mike Signer writes about this over at the Huffington Post today, calling the US a “nation of pilot projects”:

That two solar plants are heralded as helping America “win the race for a clean economy” is the same pattern we’ve seen elsewhere in the collision between the clean economy campaign and today’s toxic budgetary and political environment. We saw the pattern in high-speed rail. As PPI’s Mark Reutter has noted, the administration announced $8 billion in stimulus funds that would go to a handful of projects. But without additional administration pressure, those funds are only being followed by $1 billion of congressional authorization. As 100 members of Congress wrote the president recently, “[G]iven budget constraints, we cannot continue to rely on general authorizations and appropriations to finance high-speed rail. We need to identify a dedicated revenue source for high-speed rail, and we need your help to do that.”…

The ambitions are noble and the rhetoric stirring, but the question is whether we really are shaping a future here — or just a set of ambitious but singular pilot projects.

Yes, there is too little money in annual authorizations for serious infrastructure. But as infrastructure expert Norm Anderson has recently written for PPI, “The financing issue — not a surprise for anyone in the infrastructure business — is the number one problem facing the industry.”

This is all the more reason the administration should follow the stirring rhetoric about competitiveness and “writing our destiny” by creating a new institution, such as an infrastructure bank of the type proposed by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and supported by the president in the past, that would create a long-term funding source and the energy for true national policy.

A national infrastructure bank would be an excellent solution to these issues, along with direct, long-term federal direct grant funding to HSR and other passenger rail projects.

The alternative is that the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress will leave a lot of pilot projects across the landscape that were promising, but were never completed or never led to the kind of long-term infrastructure development because both the White House and Congress got cold feet because of misguided, Hooverite concerns about the deficit.

I’m still confident that Congress will eventually approve a long-term funding source for HSR. But this backsliding isn’t helping matters. We’ll need to redouble our efforts to ensure that Congress remains committed to finishing HSR, and not just tantalizing us with a glimpse of what could be.