American Steel for American Roads

The problem

The Highway Trust Fund no longer pays for itself. Under the Congressional Budget Office’s February 2026 baseline for the Fund’s accounts, the Mass Transit Account is exhausted in fiscal year 2027 and the Highway Account in fiscal year 2028; the cumulative shortfall by 2036 is approximately $295 billion. The Fund’s own receipts — principally the federal fuel taxes — no longer cover the commitments Congress has charged against them, and the difference is structural, not cyclical: it widens every year of the baseline.

Since 2008, the gap has been closed not by the Fund’s revenue design but by roughly $275 billion of General Fund transfers, each enacted after the fact and each requiring its own legislative act. Solvency by exception has consequences beyond the arithmetic. A fund balanced by episodic rescue cannot offer states and transit agencies a stable planning horizon; every transfer is debated on its own politics rather than on the Fund’s condition, and the question is never settled — only postponed to the next exhaustion date, which the baseline now places inside the current authorization period.

At the same time, federal revenue with a direct material relationship to the Fund’s purpose flows, by default, somewhere else. Tariff collections are not assigned to any program: the Congressional Research Service states the default plainly — they “are put in the general fund of the U.S. Treasury and are not allocated to a specific fund.” Among those collections are the duties on imported steel and iron levied since 2018 — revenue drawn from the primary material input of the bridges, rails, and reinforced structures the Highway Trust Fund exists to finance. No provision of current law connects the two. The problem this Act addresses is therefore narrow and specific: a real, existing, automatically collected revenue stream with a defined relationship to surface transportation is, by statutory silence, unavailable to the fund that needs it.

The proposed solution

The solution takes money the federal government already collects and sends it to a different account. Every dollar raised by the tariffs on imported steel and iron would be deposited into the Highway Trust Fund instead of the Treasury’s general fund — automatically, as it is collected, under a standing rule that needs no further vote, no annual appropriation, and no emergency legislation when the Fund runs low.

Nothing else changes. The tariffs themselves are untouched: the same goods, at the same rates, collected the same way at the border. No driver, importer, or agency takes on a new form, a new payment, or a new obligation. The deposit is simply measured by what the tariffs actually bring in — so it rises and falls with trade, and if the tariffs themselves were ever lifted, the deposit would end with them. There is no forecast to miss and no promised figure to fall short of; the Fund receives what is collected, when it is collected.

What this buys is a change of kind, not just of amount. In place of solvency by exception — a rescue negotiated each time the Fund approaches empty — the Fund gains a continuous, visible contribution to its balance that transportation agencies can see and plan against. The proposal does not claim to close the whole gap, and it is not presented as doing so. It is one span of a bridge: this Title pairs it with a transitional charge on the vehicles the fuel tax cannot reach, and with a tested long-term replacement for the fuel tax itself. The steel dedication is the span that can be built first, out of material already on hand.

The legislative proposal

Part 1 of Subtitle A is a named Act in its own right: Sec. 701 provides that it “may be cited as the ‘American Steel for American Roads Act’.” Its entire operative content is a single section, Sec. 702, and that section does one thing: it dedicates a revenue stream that the federal government already collects to the Highway Trust Fund, permanently and automatically.

The mechanism has four working parts. First, an override: the dedication operates “notwithstanding any other provision of law” — the default rule, under which customs duties flow to the general fund of the Treasury, is displaced for this stream. Second, a measure: the amount deposited equals the revenues collected from the specified tariffs — the dedication is measured by actual collections, not by an appropriated figure. Third, a defined stream: tariffs and duties on articles of steel and iron imported into the United States under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 (19 U.S.C. 1862) — the national-security tariff authority under which steel duties have been levied since 2018. Fourth, a destination: the Highway Trust Fund itself.

What changes against current law

Under current law, nothing connects this revenue to surface transportation. The Highway Trust Fund has been sustained since 2008 not by its own receipts but by roughly $275 billion of General Fund transfers enacted after the fact, each requiring its own legislative act. Section 702 replaces that pattern, for this one stream, with a standing rule: the money moves as it is collected, without further legislation. What the section does not do is equally part of the proposal. It sets no rate — the size of the stream is whatever the underlying section 232 duties produce. It contains no estimate of yield, no sunset, and no division of the deposit between the Fund’s Highway Account and Mass Transit Account; on each of those points the bill is silent, and this paper does not fill the silence.

The operative language is Sec. 702, quoted in full:

Three features of the drafting carry the policy. The verb is mandatory — “shall deposit” — so the transfer is a rule of law, not an authorization awaiting appropriation. The deposit is of “an amount equivalent to” collections, which ties the Fund’s receipt to measured revenue rather than to a forecast. And the stream is defined by the tariff authority rather than by named products, so the dedication follows the section 232 steel program as it exists from time to time — expanding or contracting with it, and expiring in effect if the underlying duties do. That linkage is the Act’s strength and its exposure, and the data case below takes it in that order.