According to the latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office, Americans are set to pay over $80 billion more in gas taxes thanks to new transportation policies implemented under the Trump administration. The kicker? This won’t fix the Highway Trust Fund’s insolvency problem, and it will cost Americans more to deliver the same terrible outcomes on safety, maintenance, emissions, and access.
Each year, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects anticipated tax information for important federal programs, detailing their fiscal status, trust fund balances, and tax revenues. One of those balances the CBO makes projections for is the Highway Trust Fund.
Early last year, the CBO made projections for the balance of the Highway Trust Fund that took into account assumptions about policies that were put into place during the Biden administration. They assumed that, with strong adoption of more fuel-efficient vehicles in line with that administration’s policy to support EV adoption, gas tax revenues would decline over time as people purchase less gas, peaking in 2026 with $44.2 billion in tax revenue before dipping down to just under $38 billion in 2035. In terms of solvency, they found that the Highway Trust Fund would reach a balance of zero dollars at some point in 2028 (though the Mass Transit Account would hit zero first in 2027).
However, a lot has changed since that last round of projections. Since day one, the Trump administration has made the rollback of what it considers to be “woke” transportation policy a core part of its agenda. With cancelled grants, delayed programs and projects, and significant rollbacks of market-shaping regulations pushed in both legislation and rulemaking, there isn’t a path the administration hasn’t pursued to enact its agenda. Many of those decisions, such as the recent repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Endangerment Finding, were made with the justification that the targeted programs and regulations ultimately constituted expensive bloat that imposed costs on both the government and consumer.
At USDOT, rollbacks were powerful, effectively eliminating CAFE fuel economy standards. EV programs like NEVI and the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure program have been frozen, left in limbo, or outright cancelled. Beyond EVs, recurring grant terminations for everything from the nation’s largest public transportation project to projects that build multi-use paths deemed “hostile to motor vehicles” have led to cancellations, uncertainty, and delays nationwide. Congress has followed the administration’s lead, greenlighting the agenda with its own transportation rescissions made in the annual appropriations process and the budget reconciliation bill.
These decisions can make a major difference in people’s choices over time, but they’ve already started to have an impact. People are paying more in federal taxes. And the CBO believes that trend will continue.
Comparing newly released data from February 2026 to January 2025 projections, Americans paid over $55 million more in taxes to the Highway Trust Fund than the CBO previously projected for 2025, likely in part due to the aforementioned policies introduced by the Trump administration aimed at decreasing the efficiency of future vehicles, slowing the expansion of other transportation options, and making people drive more.
Now, the CBO projects that those same policies will result in Americans paying more in taxes—over $80 billion more over the next ten years. Instead of revenues declining with the adoption of new, more efficient vehicles, the CBO now projects that revenues for the Highway Trust Fund will actually increase. Highway tax revenues are projected to rise from $44.2 billion in 2025 to nearly $52 billion in 2035, signaling the CBO’s belief that Americans will be driving more and purchasing more gasoline, thus paying more in federal gas taxes.
In terms of the Highway Trust Fund’s insolvency, little would change. With most of the revenue increases coming in the 2030s, the additional revenue would only delay insolvency by a few weeks before the balance hits zero in 2028, barely making a dent in the looming insolvency problem.
Some think tanks and other interest groups are praising the increase in anticipated taxes as a good thing, with the Highway Trust Fund inching marginally closer to solvency without having to address the cost increases for highway projects with diminishing returns. While $80 billion is a lot of money, it is just a drop in the bucket compared to the rampant spending on highway programs out of the trust fund. Even with the new revenue, the Highway Trust Fund would still require hundreds of billions more, likely from general fund dollars, to pay for spending. More importantly, how does that money matter when the Highway Trust Fund itself is directed toward a program that produces such bad outcomes for safety, maintenance, and emissions?
It’s worth considering what the actual result of these new policies from the administration will look like for the average person. Arguably, the result won’t be noticeable, for all the wrong reasons.
Life will be no different. When you need to get somewhere, people will likely drive, get stuck in traffic, and, in doing so, lose a concerning portion of their time to gridlock and paycheck to gas and insurance bills. The (incredibly expensive) cars most people buy will be less fuel-efficient, causing their transportation costs to increase.
Thanks to our misplaced transportation safety priorities, thousands will continue to die in crashes annually, and even more will be seriously injured. The existing trends will cruise along, as there has been no structural change to how we approach transportation. Nearly 60% of the Highway Trust Fund’s tax revenue comes from the gasoline taxes that people effectively pay for every time they are at the pump. And gas isn’t getting any cheaper in 2026. When Americans are getting increasingly annoyed with just how expensive daily life is, we are now moving our transportation policy to be even more extractive of Americans, expecting them to pay for literally hundreds of billions more gallons of gas just to get around. But hey, at least you paid for a few extra weeks of solvency for the Highway Trust Fund.
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