Schoolhouse Rock and Next Year’s Rail Bill

by Jim Mathews / President & CEO

I’ll admit it: I’m a Gen-X’er, a child of the 1970s. I’ve bribed people to hide pictures of me wearing skinny ties and even skinnier jeans. My friends and I waited up until midnight on a hot summer night in August of 1981 to watch this brand-new thing called “MTV” showing quirky music videos of European rock bands I’d never heard of. And I grew up glued to Saturday morning cartoons peppered with Schoolhouse Rock civics lessons – including one of the most famous ones, 1975's “I’m Just A Bill,” tracing the path of a bill through Congress to become a law.

As 2025 ends and a really consequential 2026 legislative calendar looms, all of us could do worse than to go back and re-watch I’m Just A Bill. (You can do just that by clicking here.) The historic five-year Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, expires at the end of next September. Congress – well, some parts of it, anyway – is trying to write the law that replaces it.

Offices on both sides are asking us for help and we’re doing our best to provide it, just as we did when the IIJA was coming together in 2021. But there will be a lot of twists and turns, and there will be a few key moments next Spring and Summer when we’ll need all of YOU to raise your voices. Remember, that’s our strength: 127,000 members, donors, and supporters all around the country telling members of Congress that passenger rail and transit are important to them. That is NOT nothing.

If you didn’t click the link above to re-watch I’m Just A Bill (c’mon, it’s three minutes, you know you want to!), it opens with our plucky little bill -- about rail crossings! -- sitting on the Capitol steps lamenting that he has had many ups and downs, twists and turns, trips to committee, trips out of committee, and is in consideration with “a lot of other bills.” That’s a pretty good summation of how 2026 is likely to play out in Congress: with midterms looming and re-election campaigns beginning in earnest by the Summer, the window for influencing the IIJA’s replacement (a process called “reauthorization”) will be small and a lot of others will be jostling for attention at the same time.

Next Spring and Summer, you’ll probably get emails from us asking you to call your member of Congress, or to use our tools to help you write an email to that office, or some other call to action. Five years ago, thousands of you stepped up to do that and I’m hoping you’ll do it again. Because this time the stakes are even higher.

IIJA gave us $66 billion for passenger rail, but through an unusual mechanism – advance appropriations. That’s a really important distinction. Like the FAST Act before it, the IIJA is the surface transportation authorization bill. Authorization is the five-year policy bill, in which Congress decides what’s important, what should be funded, and at what levels. But even though there are dollar amounts in that authorization, they’re basically just recommendations. Actual dollars come from appropriations; and that’s a different set of congressional committees. That’s one reason why some of the IIJA provisions never appeared...because they were authorized at high levels, but the appropriators didn’t hand out money at those levels.

But, crucially, the IIJA included $66 billion in advance appropriations – money that was appropriated (not just authorized) in advance. And was therefore “guaranteed.” That funding mechanism is routine in military procurement and has been for decades, in part because that’s how you make sure things like F/A-18 fighter jet production doesn’t go through boom-and-bust cycles. IIJA was the first time we got that kind of stability for passenger rail, and it made – and is making – a tremendous difference in getting programs underway.

House Transportation & Infrastructure Chair Sam Graves (R-Mo.) says this time around he wants “a traditional highway bill,” which is what the surface reauthorization had been for decades before the FAST Act passed in December of 2015. Five years of relative investment stability has made it practical for private industry to invest in our passenger-rail capacity, with car-builders opening sophisticated U.S. manufacturing facilities, bridges and tunnels neglected for as long as 100 years getting repaired and replaced, new rolling stock joining the Amtrak fleet to replace decades-old coaches, and pipeline funding given to states and authorities for nearly 70 new train routes across the country in the Federal Railroad Administration’s Corridor Identification Program.

A “traditional highway bill” would almost certainly bring all of that progress to a screeching halt. Worse, it would bake in that delay for another five years, legislating yet another “bust” in a destructive boom-and-bust cycle. We’ve spent some 15 years painstakingly reassembling an industrial base in the U.S. to build railcars and equipment. It’s one reason why it has taken so long to order and deliver new railcars; we had to wait until we rebuilt the supply chain to start delivering new trains.

Upcoming orders could be delivered more quickly and directly if this supply-chain remains intact. If we let it ebb away again, we’ll be right back in that same old dysfunctional and overly expensive place where we have to build a whole new supply-chain before we can order new coaches and sleepers. And that’s just one example of the kinds of things that are at risk if reauthorization goes badly. New corridors, new routes, new extensions? All history.

Congressional offices on both sides of the aisle have been asking what we think about this problem, and we’ve reiterated how important it is to keep investing, to recognize that the IIJA’s $66 billion in advance appropriations was a downpayment and not just a one-off. A very short summary of our answers to Congress on reauthorization can be found by clicking on this link. We call it our Reauthorization Blueprint, and it’s going to guide all of our conversations with the House, the Senate, the Administration, and Amtrak.

I’m Just A Bill ends with our little bill about school buses stopping at grade crossings, still lounging on the Capitol steps, getting the long-awaited news from the congressman who originally wrote him: “He signed you, Bill. Now...you’re a LAW!” With your help, we hope we can get our new rail bill turned into a law.