We are repeatedly told that it’s a bridge too far for Congress to require states to fix it first—to prioritize repairing their existing infrastructure before building new roadway capacity. Yet that’s the exact approach laid out in the House’s bipartisan INVEST Act proposal in the last reauthorization cycle.
One of the most common objections to repair-first transportation policy is that Congress cannot require states to prioritize maintaining existing roads before they build new ones. But why not?
As Congress works toward the next surface transportation reauthorization, lawmakers don’t need to start from scratch. They already have a blueprint from the negotiations that produced the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) in 2021.
In 2020, the House passed the INVEST Act, which included bipartisan provisions authored by Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-IL) and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI). Those provisions demonstrated that prioritizing maintenance isn’t just good policy—it is a politically viable approach with bipartisan backing.
Congress has both the authority and the proven legislative model for repair-first policy.
How the INVEST Act prioritized repair like never before
The INVEST in America Act was dramatically strengthened by a bipartisan amendment from Rep. García and Rep. Gallagher, who came together to codify new repair requirements that had never been included in a federal transportation bill. With that in place, the INVEST Act’s impressive final provisions included three core requirements:
First, it required transportation agencies to develop a maintenance plan for any new capacity they wanted to build to prove they had the means to maintain it. If a state wanted to widen a highway or add new lanes, it would have to publicly demonstrate how it planned to maintain the new infrastructure while also taking care of the roads and bridges it already owned. This is a minimum level of fiscal prudence that most voters are astonished to learn is not required in the federal program. Transit agencies are already expected to plan for long-term maintenance, and roads should not be treated differently.
Second, the amendment required states to use travel-demand models with a demonstrated record of accuracy when evaluating highway expansion projects. These models forecast future traffic volumes and estimate whether adding lanes or building new roads will reduce congestion enough to justify investment. Since these forecasts heavily influence decisions, their accuracy matters. Yet many traditional models assume steady traffic growth and overstate the benefits of highway expansion while overlooking induced demand and long-term maintenance costs. The amendment sought to improve decision making by requiring states to ground their investment decisions in more concrete evidence rather than these assumptions.
Third, the amendment required a more complete accounting of project benefits and costs. Instead of evaluating projects primarily on expected congestion reduction, states would need to consider a broader set of outcomes, including safety, greenhouse gas emissions, access to jobs and essential services, and other performance measures established in the bill. In practice, highway expansion projects are often justified by projections that promise faster travel times or reduced congestion, even though evidence shows those benefits are short-lived. As a result, projects that increase emissions, create barriers for people walking or biking, or consume limited transportation dollars that could have been used to repair existing infrastructure can still move forward because congestion reduction is treated as the overriding priority. The amendment sought to ensure that transportation investments are evaluated based on their full range of impacts, not just their ability to move more vehicles.
The Senate scrapped it all
Despite the progress made in the House, the INVEST Act never became law. The Senate pursued a different path with its own transportation reauthorization proposal, which utterly failed to include key reforms like prioritizing repair, improving project evaluation, or addressing emissions and equity outcomes. Unfortunately, that Senate framework became the basis for the IIJA, which largely carried forward the policy structure of the 2015 FAST Act rather than adopting the House’s more ambitious reforms.
The House’s current reauthorization proposal, the Build America 250 Act , fails to move the needle on prioritizing repair. It’s a far cry from what the House proposed (and approved!) in 2020 with the INVEST Act.
The BUILD Act preserves the status quo that has produced a system too big to maintain without borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars from our grandchildren. States retain broad flexibility to spend federal dollars on repair, expansion, or new construction, and the bill does not require meaningful progress toward reducing maintenance backlogs before adding new capacity. State DOTs and asphalt and concrete manufacturers win, and voters and the traveling public lose. Again.
This matters because despite historic amounts of funding being poured into America’s transportation system, the share of roads in poor condition has only declined by 3 percentage points between 2018 and 2024. States have failed to make meaningful improvements in reducing the share of the maintenance backlog, which is increasingly expensive to maintain. Simply increasing transportation funding without requiring states to prioritize repair over expansion will not fix the problem.
2026’s BUILD Act misses the same opportunity
Rep. García recently proposed an amendment to the BUILD Act that would have incorporated the same principles requiring greater accountability that he helped to advance in the INVEST Act, but it failed on a voice vote. (Rep. Mike Gallagher left the House in 2024.)
The cheap lip service continues: Congress continues talking about the importance of repair. Transportation agencies routinely say that maintaining existing infrastructure is a priority. Yet the federal program still allows states to expand systems they cannot afford to maintain. Instead of spending on highway expansion, we could invest in viable transportation alternatives that give households options when gas prices rise and other household costs increase. We could reduce future maintenance liabilities instead of increasing them.
The lesson from looking back at the INVEST Act is that fixing what we have first isn’t controversial, but common sense. Requiring agencies to explain how they will maintain new infrastructure, justify expansion with accurate analysis, and consider broader public outcomes is responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars.
The Senate now has another opportunity to prioritize repair. INVEST offers them a clear starting point, but the Senate can go further and deliver what voters actually want: fixing it first.
The post “Fix it first” was common sense in 2020. Now Congress calls it radical. appeared first on Transportation For America.
