With help from Tanya Snyder, Brianna Gurciullo and Jennifer Scholtes
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— House appropriators are getting ready to move their DOT spending bill, with plenty of wonky details to debate.
— The trucking industry was a huge beneficiary of the Paycheck Protection Program under the CARES Act, but other transportation sectors got help, too.
— Five more airlines have signed letters of intent for loans from the federal government.
IT’S WEDNESDAY: Thanks for tuning in to POLITICO’s Morning Transportation, your daily tipsheet on all things trains, planes, automobiles and ports. Get in touch with tips, feedback or song lyric suggestions at [email protected] or @samjmintz.
“So put me on a highway and show me a sign / And take it to the limit one more time.”
LISTEN HERE: Follow MT’s playlist on Spotify. What better way to start your day than with songs (picked by us and readers) about roads, railways, rivers and runways.
THE APPROPS WHEEL TURNS: The House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee approved its fiscal 2021 spending bill in a perfunctory markup on Monday, speeding the legislation along for full committee consideration. As our Tanya Snyder reports, the bill keeps funding at mostly static levels and would strip the department of some flexibility to move funds around.
Extra FEMA, TSA cash to come? Subcommittee Chair Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.) said that appropriators are ready to answer calls for more funding as TSA and FEMA continue to take on more work during the coronavirus pandemic. She said spending leaders are in talks about the extra tasks those agencies will have to handle in fiscal 2021 and are “prepared to address any additional needs.”
Filling the CBP fee shortfall: Roybal-Allard said her panel is also “monitoring” the need for more funding for Customs officers, since fee revenue has fallen during the pandemic.
T-HUD NEXT UP: The House’s Transportation-HUD spending bill was also released on Tuesday, ahead of a subcommittee markup scheduled for this morning. Our Brianna Gurciullo found that it contains a big pot of emergency pandemic funding for infrastructure, including $8 billion for a struggling Amtrak. The legislation also includes $78.7 billion in “budgetary resources” for surface transportation programs, in line with the House’s recently passed infrastructure package, H.R. 2 (116), per a committee summary.
Throwing shade: Jeff Davis of the Eno Center for Transportation tweeted — and House Republicans are circulating — that the fact that the T-HUD bill doesn’t achieve the levels envisioned in the House-passed infrastructure bill shows those goals are “impossible to achieve IRL.” But a Democratic congressional aide cautioned against viewing the T-HUD bill “as a sign that the levels in HR2 are not pragmatic,” saying it’s just tricky to write a spending bill in a transition year between two authorizations and with another big bill — the HEROES Act, H.R. 6800 (116) — still hanging out there.
In the weeds: Where the House infrastructure bill provided contract authority out of a trust fund, the T-HUD bill matched the levels, even though the bill hasn’t been enacted because it signals Democratic priorities. Programs funded with budget authority like Amtrak and Capital Investment Grants for transit are “murkier and more complicated” because they’re still subject to budget caps, the aide said. “So we picked levels that signaled our enthusiasm and the importance of those accounts but remained within our allocation,” the aide said. Brand new programs created in the infrastructure bill don’t appear in the appropriations bill either.
Next week will bring a committee report and a full committee markup of the bill, so stay tuned.
LOANS GALORE: The Paycheck Protection Program sent vast amounts of money to transportation companies, your host reports. The biggest beneficiary among the sectors we cover: trucking, which saw nearly 11,000 companies receive loans worth more than $4 billion in order to maintain more than 440,000 jobs.
Companies of note: Blade, the Uber-for-helicopters company providing air taxi trips to places like the Hamptons and Nantucket, received between $1 million and $2 million, according to Treasury Department data. Korean Air was another interesting recipient: Major U.S. airlines didn’t apply for this pot because they had their own funds from the CARES Act, but South Korea’s biggest carrier needed the help to keep paying its 500 employees in the U.S. And Proterra, a leading electric bus manufacturer, got between $5 million and $10 million.
LOANS, SOME MORE: Five more airlines are signaling that they may take federal loans in the next few months, signing a letter of intent with the Treasury Department this week, and adding their names to a list of 10 total carriers to do so. They have until September to finalize a decision on whether or not they’ll take the money.
THIS ONE PROBABLY WAS A DRONE: Reported drone strikes on aircraft are a frequent subject of controversy — lots of times, it’s hard to tell what a plane actually hit, and the drone industry has pushed back hard on reports that have often turned out to be false. But a small drone was “almost certainly the object that damaged a news helicopter flying over Los Angeles last year,” Bloomberg reported this week, citing a recent NTSB report. The agency’s trademark thorough approach found that materials used to make drones around the area of impact, and there was no biological evidence of bird remains.
THE DOT ALUMNI CLUB: A formidable group of bipartisan former DOT chiefs, along with former EPA heads, filed a legal brief this week criticizing the Trump administration’s revocation of California’s fuel economy waiver, Pro’s Alex Guillén reports.
On the list: Federico Peña, Rodney Slater, Norman Mineta, Ray LaHood and Anthony Foxx. They wrote that the the Trump administration’s revocation of California’s Clean Air Act waiver (Reg. 2060-AU09) “undermines the sound and consistent administration of our nation’s iconic environmental and energy law.”
Patricia Rojas-Ungar, formerly of the U.S. Travel Association and a homeland security staffer on the Hill, is joining the lobbying firm Strategic Marketing Innovations, where she’ll be a vice president working on homeland security and trade.
— “Covid-19 resurgence threatens travel rebound.” The Wall Street Journal.
— “Virus fears, regional spats snarl Arizona-Mexico route.” Associated Press.
— “eSkootr is a high-speed electric scooter racing series launching in 2021.” The Verge.
— “Post Office delivery trucks keep catching on fire.” Vice.
— “As it moves aggressively to restore confidence, Boeing flies into an uncertain future.” Washington Post.
DOT appropriations run out in 84 days. The FAA reauthorization expires in 1,180 days. Highway and transit policy is up for renewal in 84 days.
