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LaHood: ‘Sequester is dumb,’ next highway bill needs to be longer

Outgoing Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood — though a lame duck — hasn’t been sitting idly since announcing he wouldn’t be staying in President Barack Obama’s cabinet for the second term.

With sequestration cuts looming Friday, LaHood took the opportunity Wednesday when speaking to members of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials to say that sequestration “is a meat axe approach” and will prevent the country from moving forward with needed infrastructure investment.

“We’re all in this together. Sequester is a dumb idea,” LaHood said. “It will not work. It will not work in helping us reaching our goals to improve America’s transportation. It just won’t.”

That followed LaHood — the only Republican in Obama’s cabinet in the first term — challenging AASHTO members to leave transportation and the country as a whole better than the way it was found, which means setting partisanship aside, he said.

“We must put aside our differences and give our kids and our grandkids a country that’s better than the one we left,” LaHood said. “We inherited the interstate system, thanks to generations of people with foresight. What are we going to leave the next generation?”

The challenge the country faces at present, LaHood said, is figuring out how to pay for needed infrastructure improvements. Though the highway reauthorization funding bill passed last summer was considered a long-term bill — two years — LaHood said future bills should be longer and more comprehensive.

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