Ranking Member DeLauro Statement at the Fiscal Year 2024 Budget Request for the Department of Transportation Hearing

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03), Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee, delivered the following remarks at the Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, and Related AgenciesSubcommittee's hearing on the Fiscal Year 2024 budget request for the Department of Transportation:

Thank you, so much, Mr. Chairman. It is wonderful to be with you on the dias..and Ranking Member Quigley this morning. And thank you, Secretary Buttigieg, for being with us today.

You know this, we all know this on this committee: our transportation infrastructure is central to the health and wellbeing of all our communities. It connects everyone—in urban, suburban, and rural areas—to their jobs, schools, grocery stores, and the care that they depend on. And the work that your department and this subcommittee do ensures every American has access to reliable, safe, and efficient transportation.

As you will testify, "Our transportation system is at a turning point." Because together with Congress over the past two years, you have done so much to repair our transportation infrastructure, but progress must continue.

In the 2023 government funding package, this committee made robust investments in the safety and the durability of our transportation. We invested in airports, highways, transit, passenger rail, and port systems. We included $3.6 billion to ensure safe air travel and for vehicle and highway safety programs. We cut emissions, improved resiliency, and addressed inequities, while creating and sustaining tens of thousands of jobs. We fought the climate crisis and generated economic opportunities for working- and middle-class families.

And we made strong investments in our districts through Community Projects. We included an overwhelming majority of requests from Democrats and Republicans through DOT—a total of 773 projects. These projects meet the urgent needs of so many of our constituents.

To build on this success, the President's request for DOT includes $27.8 billion in discretionary funding to create a safer, more equitable, and more modern transportation system. I would like to touch on just a few of these programs important to my community in Connecticut.

To make our rail infrastructure safer and more efficient, the request increases funding for Amtrak's Northeast Corridor, including for the Hudson Tunnels to meet the needs of our nation's busiest and most complex rail corridor. And you increase funding through the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements (CRISI) program to make significant advancements to the safety of our rail network.

You also plan to make important investments to address the roadway safety crisis, including with critical funding that would accelerate the development of—and this is an area I've written to you about—the use of female dummies in crash testing. This will start to fight the gender inequity among vehicle safety and crash victims.

And this budget also builds upon and helps actualize the critical investments in the President's Historic Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Before I conclude, I would like to mention my worry over some of my Republican colleagues' calls for drastic cuts to government funding. Yesterday, Speaker McCarthy introduced a bill to cut funding back to the 2022 level and to impose caps for the next 10 years. Please let's not make a mistake, caps are just more cuts.

And as you mention in your letter to me on the impact of these cuts, they would set our progress back significantly. Let me read some of them to you:

• Following the catastrophic derailments in eastern Ohio and West Virginia, rail safety jobs would be dramatically reduced, with 11,000 fewer safety inspection days, and 30,000 fewer miles of track which is inspected annually.
• After recent near-misses, our air travel would come to a halt with 125 Air Traffic Control Towers shutting down, impacting one-third of all U.S. Airports.

These cuts would be devastating. The safety of our communities and our transportation infrastructure depends on strong investments which, in a bipartisan way, we have been able to do in the last two years—in 2022 and 2023. They should continue to move in that direction.

Thank you again, Secretary Buttigieg, for all your work. With that, Chairman Cole, and Ranking Member Quigley, I yield back