Commenter, what makes you think that the Highway Trust Fund s solvent? It has been "borrowing" from the Treasury for the last two Transportation bills, from "future" "expected" revenues (in reality, this is just a different kind of "deficit spending").

No one in Congress will actually vote to raise "user fees" (gas taxes, diesel fuel taxes, excise taxes on tires, truck weight fees) to fund it fully without this fiscal shell game, so nothing has changed there.

There is no economic, fiscal, or political reality of any kind, other than pure political theater, to any of this infrastructure initiative nonsense and hoopla.

The federal deficits is ballooning from the tax cuts, and continued high long term war spending, even as the economy reaches full employment. This is causing long term interest rates to slowly but surely rise, raising costs of borrowing for such projects by both the public sector (for State and local "gubmint's", too) and/or private sector, and such construction takes increasingly scarce skilled workers from the private sector at a time of full employment, reduces private sector economic growth.

Of course as interest rates rise, it will cut into the ability to use "hidden" "deficit" spending to pay for such projects, by "borrowing" against future "Trust Fund" "revenues", because interest payments will rise, reducing funds available for projects.

This latest national transportation "policy" "decision", about "killing" the trans Hudson/Penn Station replacement tunnel, is probably just another Presidential "tweet-fart" which he probably came up with at around 5 am, due to his enlarged prostate, as a way to vent anger at whoever he was mad at, that day. So who really knows what will really happen, next week......