Incoming Senators Float Gas Tax Holiday, but Lower Prices Rarely Follow
With the elections barely over, policymakers appear to be responding to voters and identifying solutions to help bring down prices. Â
The most recent example comes from the estimable @Keith_Laing at USA Today, collecting new and recent quotes from incoming Democratic Senators in favor of suspending the federal motor fuels excise taxes (currently 18.4 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon on highway diesel fuel).
The Senators listed include Talarico (D-TX), Andrews (D-SC), Hamilton (D-KS), Turek (D-IA), and El-Sayed (D-MI).
Proposals to suspend the gas tax are nothing new. But be wary that lower gas prices rarely flow from suspended gas taxes. Indeed, Eno has previously reported that because the federal motor fuel excise tax is levied when the fuel comes out of the refinery or pipeline tank farm and is loaded onto a truck to go to a service station, there is no guarantee that the wholesale fuel company or the retail service station won’t increase their price to eat up much, or all, of the savings provided by a fuel tax holiday.
Laing’s article mentions that any bill that suspends those taxes would, in the absence of any other fix, reduce the amount of money available for federal highway and mass transit projects, but doesn’t put a dollar amount on it. The motor fuels taxes bring in about $3 billion per month to the federal Highway Trust Fund, which is already running annual deficits that Congress has to print money to fill.
Congress is in the process of writing a new five-year surface transportation reauthorization bill (which is now five weeks overdue) and the biggest constraint on that bill is how much money will the motor fuel taxes bring into the Treasury over the next five years. A challenge associated withsuspending the gas tax is that Congress will need to increase deficit spending or reduce transportation funding to cover.
See Eno Transportation Weekly’s recent coverage of this issue:
- House Avoids Last-Minute Attempt to Suspend Gas Tax (Sept. 18, 2026)
- Round Up the Usual Suspects: Politicians Make Familiar Proposals to Counter High Fuel Prices (March 13, 2026)
