managed by the Secretary of the Treasury. The most significant features were:
- Repayable advances from the General Fund to the Highway Trust Fund were authorized to be made as might be needed to meet expenditure demands on the Trust Fund in excess of available balances during a fiscal year. However, this feature was suspended by the next one.
- Before the apportionment of the Interstate authorizations for any fiscal year, the Secretary of the Treasury had to determine that anticipated revenues to be credited to the Trust Fund by the end of the fiscal year would be adequate to meet the expenditure requirements. If deficits were projected, then the Interstate apportionment had to be reduced to meet anticipated revenues. This feature placed the program on a “pay-as-you-go” basis by permitting apportionments to be made only to the extent that revenues would be available to reimburse obligations and by prohibiting the Trust Fund from entering into a deficit condition.
A charming relic of another age. Although an orthotropic steel deck for structural safety is concealed by careful design, this covered bridge at West Cornwalk, Conn., makes the motorist a bit nostalgic.
The provision in the 1956 Act for short-term loan provisions from the General Fund of the Treasury was in effect nullified by the pay-as-you-go requirement added to the Act before final passage.
However, in 1958 the United States found itself in the grip of an extended economic recession, and one way to hasten recovery seemed to be through an acceleration of the Federal-aid highway program. For this and other reasons, the 1958 Highway Act increased the annual Interstate authorizations. It also set aside the pay-as-you-go provision of the 1956 Act for 2 years and directed apportionment to the States of the full amounts, but these provisions were not matched by a commensurate provision for the necessary additional revenue.
The effect of the 1958 Act was that the Federal-aid program annual expenditures exceeded annual Trust Fund revenue, making it necessary for the BPR to institute reimbursement planning. This was a new procedure establishing a limitation on the total dollar amount of Federal-aid project obligations that could be incurred in a given year, regardless of the unobligated balance of apportionments that were available to the States. This new program control was to insure that obligations incurred by the States did not exceed the amounts that could be subsequently paid from currently available Highway Trust Fund revenues when work was done and the States claimed reimbursement for the Federal share.
In 1961 the pay-as-you-go principle was reinstated.
The Highway Trust Fund is not a physical depository in which its dedicated revenues are actually deposited. It exists only in the accounting records of the U.S. Treasury. Estimated Trust Fund revenues are transferred by an accounting transaction from the General Fund to the Trust Fund early in each month and then adjusted later on the basis of the actual tax receipts.
It is important to recognize that even though the Highway Trust Fund was created specifically to finance the Federal-aid highway program, the revenues that accrue to the Trust Fund cannot be used to pay any of the costs of the highway program until they are made available for expenditure by enactment of appropriations acts by Congress as was the case before the creation of the Trust Fund. The budget
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