The 29-Cent Tax Built to Fix America's Locks

Chickamauga Lock, seven miles above Chattanooga on the Tennessee River, has been expanding since the year it opened.▸ The 1940 concrete reacts with its own aggregate — a slow chemical swelling engineers call alkali-aggregate reaction — and has stretched the structure a foot in length and four inches in height, according to the Army Corps of Engineers' Nashville District project manager, reported by Engineering News-Record. Congress authorized a replacement lock in 2003. As of a June 2024 Corps cost statement, the project totaled $954.4 million, with $417 million spent and the new chamber not expected to open until November 2027. That one lock is a fraction of a much larger bill: the deferred-maintenance backlog across the whole inland lock-and-dam system stood at $7.5 billion in the American Society of Civil Engineers' 2025 Report Card — and the fund built specifically to help pay it down got, by design, zero new construction dollars in the White House's most recent budget request.

Since 1978, commercial barge operators have paid a per-gallon fuel tax into the U.S. Treasury; since the Water Resources Development Act of 1986, those receipts have flowed into the Inland Waterways Trust Fund (IWTF), earmarked to help pay for construction and major rehabilitation on the roughly 11,000 miles of the nation's 25,000-mile inland-waterway network that carry the tax.▸ The rate has been 29 cents a gallon since April 2015, per the current IRS Form 720 instructions (Inland Waterways Fuel Use Tax, IRS No. 64) — up from 20 cents, an increase barge operators themselves lobbied for to keep the fund solvent.

The fund never pays the whole bill.▸ Ordinary operations and maintenance — dredging, minor repairs — comes entirely from the federal government's general fund; construction and major rehabilitation is cost-shared. That split has moved twice in barge operators' favor: the Water Resources Development Act of 2024 permanently cut the trust fund's construction-cost share from 35% to 25%, with general federal revenue absorbing the other 75% — a change the ASCE report card credits with letting the same trust-fund dollar support more projects. The Chickamauga project itself was funded under the prior 65/35 split, per ENR's reporting.

Even with a smaller required share, the trust fund still has to be tapped for construction to happen — and for three budget cycles running, the executive branch has proposed not tapping it at all.▸ Per the Congressional Research Service, "the most recent budget request to include IWTF monies was for FY2023." The FY2026 request was no different: it "proposed not utilizing funding from the Inland Waterway Trust Fund (IWTF) for inland waterway construction projects," according to CRS's line-by-line FY2026 appropriations report. Congress overrode that posture the way it has the two years prior — not by restoring the trust fund to the request, but by earmarking specific dollars to specific locks. The enacted FY2026 measure, P.L. 119-74, funded 219 Army Corps community-project and directed-spending items worth $1.827 billion; the two largest were both inland-waterway navigation locks — $213 million for Chickamauga Lock and $184 million for the Upper Ohio River project in Pennsylvania. Notably, CRS reports that neither the law nor its explanatory statement specified how much of that money, if any, is drawn from the trust fund itself rather than general revenue — so even the earmarks that did pass don't resolve whether the dedicated fund barge operators pay into is actually being used for its purpose.

The stakes of underfunding a lock aren't abstract.▸ Roughly 465 million tons of cargo worth more than $158 billion move on the inland system each year, representing about a third of U.S. GDP by ASCE's accounting, and 80% of the system's locks and dams already exceed their 50-year design life. In 2020 — the most recent year ASCE cites — locks recorded 9,147 periods of unavailability, averaging a 172-minute delay and touching 47% of vessels; drought on the Lower Mississippi in 2023 alone cost shippers an estimated $1 billion in losses, per ASCE's citation of Bloomberg reporting on the low-water crisis.

The people who move that freight are a small, specific workforce.▸ A 2025 study for the Maritime Transportation Research and Education Center — a U.S. DOT-funded Tier 1 University Transportation Center at the University of Arkansas — put nationwide direct inland-waterways transportation employment (captains, deckhands, engineers, mates, pilots, tankermen, steersmen) at 18,300 jobs, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Run those same BLS wage and employment figures through an IMPLAN economic-impact model, and the study estimates the sector supports 127,500 jobs in total once indirect and induced effects are counted, $10.2 billion in labor income, and $4.2 billion in tax revenue nationally — figures that include, not add to, the 18,300 direct jobs. The same study found inland towboat crews suffer far fewer injuries than their counterparts in trucking or rail: 1,145 tractor-trailer injuries and 96 rail injuries occur, per ASCE's citation of the same underlying data, for every one barge injury.

Dollar figures are drawn from the most recent editions of each cited source and are not adjusted to a common year; the Chickamauga cost estimate is as of a June 2024 Corps statement and may have changed since.