Subject: POLITICO's Morning Transportation, presented by Norwegian Air: Senate THUD appropriations may carry on through Monday — D.C. delegation meets with WMATA head — TPP mostly a ‘meh’ for automotive industry, report says
From: Morning Transportation <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 May 2016 08:03:28 -0600

By Martine Powers | 05/19/2016 10:00 AM EDT

With help from Jennifer Scholtes, Lauren Gardner and Heather Caygle 

APPROPRIATIONS CARRY ON: Will Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell be able to adhere to his tight timeline for the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development bill and get it all wrapped up today? Or will proceedings carry over to next week? Either way, expect more roll-call votes on amendments today, as well as on cloture on the substitute to the bill.

A few amendments of note: Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) wants TSA to use "all existing resources and technology" to increase the efficiency of the airport screening process. No word on whether Sen. Richard Blumenthal's oppositional trucking measure will get any traction on the floor. And Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) wants Congress to defund Amtrak ... and the Federal Highway Administration ... and rail and transit grants ... and "national infrastructure investments" ... 

On the House side, the Appropriations subcommittee that sets DOT spending passed its bill by voice vote. Lauren Gardner's dispatch: "The bill includes a handful of policy riders to relax hours of service and meal and rest break rules for commercial truck drivers. The subcommittee's ranking Democrat, David Price of North Carolina, said he will offer amendments during full committee markup to remove those 'problematic' provisions from the legislation, which he otherwise supports."

IN TSA CRISIS, HOUSE HOMES IN ON LOCAL FLEXIBILITY: House Republicans are finalizing a plan to hand over more independence to local TSA directors in a move that they hope will help the agency cut down on airport security wait times. After meeting with airline executives and airport authority leaders, our Jennifer Scholtes reports, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mike McCaul (R-Texas) said he and others on the committee plan to introduce a bill next week to tackle the "line of non-communication centralized here in Washington" that he believes is preventing local TSA administrators from moving more nimbly to find effective solutions to the airport wait time crisis.

"We believe that if they work together in a partnership, they can identify peak times and identify what needs to be done from a staffing perspective," McCaul said. "The flexibility issue is a huge issue. ... The local director doesn't have the discretion of where to staff the TSA officers. We believe that would go a long way in fixing this in the short term."

IT'S THURSDAY: Good morning and thanks for tuning into POLITICO's Morning Transportation, your daily tipsheet on all things trains, planes, automobiles and ports.

Fun fact: Today is #NationalMayRayDay, a holiday aimed at encouraging people worldwide to step outside and soak up the sun. Unless you live in Washington. In that case, you're doomed to days of sad drizzle and just-slightly-too-cold-for-comfort weather ... apparently. Commiserate:[email-masked] or @martinepowers.

"Money's just something you throw / Off the back of a train."

CONTINUED CALLS FOR WAIVED BAGGAGE FEES: Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) is adding his voice to a recent call from Sens. Ed Markey and Richard Blumenthal for airlines to drop their checked baggage fees for the summer to help cut down security wait lines. (MT readers may recall our initial reaction: bit.ly/1Tqh1A8.) "It is essential to make it easier for more passengers to check their luggage to help prevent long delays at security checkpoints," Durbin wrote in his letter to Airlines for America. "I hope your members will voluntarily do their part by suspending baggage fees during the busiest months of the travel season."

FWIW: They may not be waiving baggage fees, but American Airlines says it's spending $4 million on private contractors to help manage security lines, according to the Associated Press.

FUNNY YOU SHOULD MENTION THAT ... : Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.) has been pushing for the Senate to take up his bill that would force the agency to work with private companies on PreCheck sign-ups - "I urge my colleagues in the Senate to act swiftly to remedy this problem," he declared this week - but the Senate Commerce Committee clapped back (politely), asserting that the problem lies in his own chamber. In a tweet on Wednesday, Senate Commerce pointed out that Katko's measure was incorporated into the Senate FAA reauthorization bill, which has not been taken up by the House while it tries to round up enough votes for its own embattled FAA bill. @SenateCommerce: "@RepJohnKatko's excellent TSA
 #PreCheck bill to address long lines becomes law if the House passes the Senate #FAA bill." Katko retweeted it.

EGYPTAIR PLANE CRASHES OVER MEDITERRANEAN: The Guardian reports that the missing EgyptAir flight MS804 sent a distress signal that was received two hours before the time of the airplane's last radar contact over the Mediterranean. The flight, which took off from Paris' Charles de Gaulle Airport on Wednesday night, was headed to Cairo with 66 people on board. Search and rescue efforts are underway. According to EgyptAir, the captain of the flight has 6,275 flying hours, and the plane was manufactured in 2003.

MOSTLY A 'MEH' FOR AUTOS: The U.S. International Trade Commission released its long-awaited report on the Trans-Pacific Partnership on Wednesday, and their forecast about the agreement's effects on the automotive industry is mostly a draw. From our friends over at Pro Trade: "The TPP would ... have a mixed effect on employment in the U.S. auto sector, the commission says. It projects that employment in passenger vehicle assembly would rise 0.3 percent by 2032 as exports increase, but jobs in auto parts production would fall by the same amount over that period. ... 

"That might make it hard for the White House to overcome concerns that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and other Democrats have raised about the agreement's automotive 'rules-of-origin,' which determine how much automakers in Japan and other TPP countries would be allowed to use parts made in non-TPP countries like China and still qualify for U.S. auto tariff cuts under the pact. Clinton and union groups like the United Auto Workers have argued that the rules-of-origin are too lax."

DEFINITELY NOT ALL-ABOARD: The Agenda's Michael Grunwald took a long-haul trip into the world of high-speed rail - with new insights about the legislative reaction to the growing acknowledgement that the California High-Speed Rail Authority plans to swap out the first segment of the project, and delay the construction timeline by four years. "The four-year delay is sure to spark new doubts about whether the state's - and perhaps the nation's - most controversial and expensive infrastructure project will ever reach its destination," Grunwald writes. "State and federal officials downplayed the shift in the timetable, saying it partly reflected more ambitious plans for the Central Valley work,
 and in any case merely ratified construction realities on the ground."

'A whoops-a-daisy vibe': "Meanwhile, the choice to start in the middle, in the sparsely populated and economically depressed Central Valley rather than the dense metropolitan areas to the north and south, has been ridiculed as a recipe for a high-priced train to nowhere. The first segment is actually designed to terminate in an empty lot north of Bakersfield. And the authority recently reversed its plans for its second segment, abruptly announcing that it will head north instead of south - understandable given the engineering challenge of tunneling through mountains en route to Los Angeles, but projecting a bit of a whoops-a-daisy vibe. 'It's like a Saturday Night Live skit,' [state
 legislator Jim] Patterson said."

- Patterson, a Fresno Republican: "Four years? It just shows that something deep inside this project has gone terribly wrong. ... The time is coming where we're going to have to call a halt."

- Jeff Morales, CEO of the California High-Speed Rail Authority: "Early on, there was a vision, but no clear sense of how to implement that vision. ... We have that now, and we're moving ahead aggressively."

- FRA head Sarah Feinberg: "We're just doing due diligence, but everything about California high-speed rail gets magnified and overblown."

Read the full story here. 

** Presented by Norwegian Air: Affordable fares to Europe for every consumer - that's the vision of Norwegian. With an $18.5 billion order for new Boeing airplanes, not only does Norwegian support the American economy, it helps to create and support over 100,000 American jobs in the United States. Get the facts: openourskies.com **

STILL WAITING ON SAFETRACK: We're still waiting on an announcement for a final schedule for the SafeTrack repair project announced by WMATA earlier this month. The original version was supposed to get approval early this week, but the Federal Transit Administration's additional demands complicated the process. When asked by a reporter Wednesday about his expected release of the final schedule, General Manager Paul Wiedefeld said, "As soon as possible."

As it happens, Wiedefeld was on the Hill on Wednesday, talking to the D.C. delegation about improvements to the Metro and a long-term strategy on securing additional funding from Congress to help foot the cost of operations. "We think we all acknowledge we won't get that from this House," Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said after the meeting, according to WAMU. "We talked about both the need for a greater operating subsidy and also using all of our political friendships and connections to catalyze, not by ourselves, a long-term funding stream from the greater region."

E-CIGS GET THE BOOT FROM CHECKED BAGGAGE: The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration has issued a final rule banning electronic cigarettes and other battery-operated smoking devices from aircraft checked baggage in an effort to lower the risk of in-flight fires. E-cigs are still allowed on carry-ons, but passengers and crew won't be allowed to recharge the batteries on flights - and, of course, they still won't be allowed to use the devices on the plane.

#ThrowbackThursday: This is a great opportunity to remind us all of that epic GIF from February of Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) vaping at a T&I markup (http://bit.ly/1L69VPw) to support the use of e-cigarettes on planes.

SELF-DRIVING PIPELINE? Consumer Watchdog, the California-based organization frequently standing in opposition to Google, is calling on NHTSA to establish new standards that would prevent NHTSA administrators from taking lucrative positions with Silicon Valley automotive tech companies after departing the public sector. They want new NHTSA execs to sign a written commitment that they will not work as employees or consultants for companies working on self-driving cars for at least seven years after leaving the government, nothing that four former NHTSA officials are now working for Google's self-driving car shop.

"Slam shut the revolving door that has become the reward for taking a top job at NHTSA," wrote John M. Simpson of Consumer Watchdog. "Failure to do so will leave the public with the troubling perception that the revised autonomous vehicle policies expected to be released in July have been crafted with an eye focused on your future employment prospects rather than on the public interest."

DEUTSCHLAND REBATE: The German government has given the OK to a plan that would subsidize the cost of electric vehicles sold in Germany, the economy and energy minister announced Wednesday. Consumers buying fully electric vehicles will receive a €4,000 rebate, while those purchasing hybrids will be reimbursed with €3,000. (Electric vehicles must be priced at under €60,000 for a basic model; aka Tesla buyers need not apply.) Half of the reimbursement will come from the government, and the other half from the automotive industry," Kalina Oroschakoff reports. 

THE AUTOBAHN (SPEED READ):

- "Puerto Rico Governor Puts Road Agency Under Emergency Decree." The Associated Press.

- "Group Seeks to Pave Way for Nationwide Adoption of Driverless Cars." The Wall Street Journal.

- "Ford is Using Factory Emissions to Make Car Parts." Fortune.

- "Tesla Plans to Sell $2 Billion of Stock." The Wall Street Journal.

- Austin's face-off with Uber and Lyft won't hurt its bid for $40 million "smart city" grant, Foxx says. Mass Transit Magazine.

- "Memo to Cities: Most Cyclists Are Working-Class Immigrants, Not Hipsters." Governing Magazine.

THE COUNTDOWN: DOT appropriations run out in 136 days. The FAA reauthorization expires in 58 days. The 2016 presidential election is in 173 days. Highway and transit policy is up for renewal in 1,598 days.

** Presented by Norwegian Air: Norwegian is committed to affordable flights to Europe for every American. Norwegian's economic impact on the tourism, hospitality, and travel industries, along with its $18.5 billion order for new Boeing airplanes, help create and support tens of thousands of American jobs. Norwegian has the most US-based crew of any foreign airline, with plans for hundreds more, allowing it to provide communities like Ft. Lauderdale and Oakland their only nonstop scheduled flights to Europe.

Providing reliable, much-needed service is at the heart of Norwegian's mission and when airlines compete, consumers win. Get the facts on Norwegian Air International by visiting openourskies.com

American crew. American jobs. American planes. That's Norwegian. **

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