Increasing federal taxing and spending is the wrong way to go. That approach would exacerbate the current problems of federal aid, and it would probably make the Byzantine sprawl of top-down mandates and complex allocation formulas even worse.

There’s no pressing policy reason to increase the tax. The trust fund has plenty of money to fund highway priorities that the federal government needs to address — especially if federal money were spent more efficiently.

This CBO report describes the status of the Highway Trust Fund and options that the Congress might consider to address the imbalance between revenues and spending from the fund.

Lawmakers looking for additional revenue to replenish the trust fund should devise permanent provisions that conform to the trust fund’s long-standing, user-pays principle. One option to fix the trust fund is to raise the gas tax while offsetting that tax increase with an equal reduction in another tax.

Congress's options for the Highway Trust Fund.

The Administration’s proposal is funded by supplementing current revenues from the Highway Trust Fund in combination with a 14 percent transition tax on the up to $2 trillion of untaxed foreign earnings that U.S. companies have accumulated overseas. This will prevent Trust Fund insolvency for six years and increase investments to meet national economic goals.