Business lobby calls on Congress for reliable infrastructure spending; diesel export ban slammed
by Kerry Picket · The Washington TimesThe current federal infrastructure law expires on Wednesday, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is sounding the alarm.
The Chamber warns that Congress must pass a multi-year reauthorization, not another round of stopgap patches, or risk stalling transportation and water projects that businesses and communities will depend on for years.
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“What we don’t want to see happen is kind of a long-term continuation of the old policy — like we have,” Neil Bradley, executive vice president, chief policy officer, and head of strategic advocacy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told The Advocates.
Mr. Bradley said the Chamber is a longtime supporter of maintaining a robust investment in roads, bridges, transit programs and water resources, and supports a traditional five-to-six-year reauthorization bill, which is consistent with how Congress has historically approached infrastructure funding.
“If we want to do new projects or if we want to keep projects moving, it’s important, rather than having kind of stopgap patches, that we actually have a good multi-year bill, because these are multi-year projects and people need to be able to plan,” he said.
U.S. fought terror abroad while Muslim Brotherhood infiltrated at home
An analysis from the Gatestone Institute lays out questions about why Washington’s counterterrorism efforts since 9/11 focused more on visible threats, such as terror cells and attacks, but ignored the slower Islamist infiltration by the Muslim Brotherhood that crept into universities, lobbying groups and politics.
Gatestone Institute’s Pierre Rehov suggested several concrete actions, all aimed at treating Islamist institutional influence with the same seriousness the U.S. has applied to Islamist violence.
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“Americans may not notice it right away, or now, but one day, unless actions are taken as soon as possible to prevent it, they may wake up one morning to find themselves under Islamic rule,” Mr. Rehov wrote.
The piece cited the 1991 Mohamed Akram memorandum, entered into evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial, as laying out this “civilization-jihadist” strategy explicitly.
Mr. Rehov also referenced the Council on American–Islamic Relations as an example of this mechanism — noting its founder’s prior ties to a group named in the 1991 memo, its unindicted co-conspirator status in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation case, and its political activity.
He said, “CAIR is also politically fluent. Its affiliate CAIR Action intervenes openly in elections. After Zohran Mamdani won New York’s Democratic mayoral primary, it publicly pressed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the House of Representatives Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to endorse him.”
The Washington Times reached out to CAIR for comment.
While Mr. Rehov credits the Trump administration with designating several Muslim Brotherhood chapters (Lebanese, Egyptian, Jordanian) as terrorist entities in 2025 and 2026, he said the U.S. should extend the “foreign terrorist organization” framework from abroad to at home.
He also suggested reviving and routinely enforcing existing disclosure laws, specifically Section 117, a law related to foreign gifts to universities.
Mr. Rehov also mentioned the Foreign Agents Registration Act. He criticizes the Justice Department’s February 2025 decision to narrow FARA enforcement to only espionage-like conduct and to disband the FBI unit that investigated foreign influence, saying this gutted “the main statutory tool for detecting foreign influence at home.”
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Finally, Mr. Rehov argues these actions must be done right away before irreversible damage happens to the U.S.
Free-market coalition to Trump: Diesel export ban would backfire
A coalition of 27 free-market organizations sent a letter to President Trump recently urging him not to impose an export ban on refined diesel/petroleum products.
The letter lauded the administration’s approach of reducing government intervention, which included tax cuts on drilling, immediate expensing and regulatory relief, which they say has strengthened U.S. energy production and benefited consumers.
However, they asked Mr. Trump not to impose an export ban similar to one considered under the Biden administration.
They said diesel is a global commodity, and its price is set by global market forces, not government mandates, and restricting exports would distort markets and disrupt established supply chains.
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They warn that an export ban would not deliver lasting relief and price drops would be short-lived and uneven across regions, adding that some areas could see sharp price increases.
As refiners adjust to lost export markets, the initial relief would fade, potentially leaving consumers worse off.
“Restricting exports would disrupt established supply chains, distort market signals, and interfere with refiners’ ability to respond efficiently to changing demand,” they wrote. “By restricting refiners’ access to global markets, an export ban would weaken the incentive to maximize diesel production, operate at higher utilization rates, and invest in additional refining capacity.”
The letter acknowledges high energy prices are a real concern, but said the root cause (disruption to Middle East energy flows) cannot be solved by a single policy or export controls.
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Instead, the coalition called for Congress to pass comprehensive permitting reform to make it faster and cheaper to build energy infrastructure, adding that the U.S. has not built a large-scale refinery in 50 years partly due to regulatory hurdles.
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Kerry Picket
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