It spent years tinkering with a concession law, during which time no new federal roads were handed over to private management.
In January the government suspended a long-awaited concession of 2, 600 km of federal roads on the ground that returns to investors of nearly 13%, the ceiling set by the government's audit court, would be too generous.
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Federal spending on roads and bridges to repair and expand the nation's infrastructure.
Several initiatives unveiled in the president's speech would provide tax breaks for area businesses, along with federal funds for rebuilding roads and bridges damaged by the storm and the flooding that followed.
Investing in a new stimulus package, including federal contracts to build roads and such, might end with employed people being rehired, said James Sherk, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.
Since Mr Bush took office, the number of days when Texan cities have exceeded federal ozone standards has doubled, and Houston and Dallas currently face federal deadlines to make sharp cuts in air pollution or risk losing federal money for their roads.
Additionally, a number of states were chatting up the idea as expenses to maintain roads increased and federal funds declined.
When the federal government got involved in roads, it learned a lesson from the railways, where rapacious private railroad-builders had regularly put their own interests ahead of the country's.
Bridges and roads have quite strong federal controls on the use of cement and making concrete.
The federal government has been involved in roads since before the first world war, and began to build them seriously in the 1920s.
Not only is it worth 30 cents a day to you, but it takes money out of the federal highway fund that goes to rebuilding roads and bridges.
Many of Mr Murkowski's own proposals for boosting the state economy, such as a plan to increase logging in the Tongass National Forest, require the federal Forest Service to spend millions building new roads.
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His approval ratings have dipped, and the Washington power-broker has been spending rather more time in Texas than he used to: opening a new office, announcing money for new roads, posing for photographs to celebrate federal funding for new military hardware.
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The Monitor prevented the Virginia from gaining control of the Hampton Roads, Virginia port, thus maintaining a federal blockade of the area around Norfolk, Virginia.
On the other hand, even my Republican friends who complain the most about government spending have supported federally financed roads, and clean energy projects, and federal offices for the folks back home.
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The more roads and drivers a state has, the more federal money it receives, explains Judith Rodin of the Rockefeller Foundation, which funds infrastructure research.
Out of this 18%, about 6% would cover state and local governments (police, fire, schools, roads), and 12% would go to the federal government.
The federal government says authorities can use electronic surveillance to track vehicles on public roads without a warrant, citing a 1983 Supreme Court ruling that declared there is no reasonable expectation of privacy there.
Texas has almost no federal land, so its wide-open spaces tend to be criss-crossed by more roads.
Less than 0.1% of vehicles on American roads burn the fuel today and the percentage sagged slightly from 2005 to 2010, when federal policies encouraging their use waned.
The president said the federal government would also undertake a "comprehensive recovery effort" to rebuild devastated communities and restore infrastructure, including roads and bridges wiped out by Katrina, an effort he said would take years.
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