Federal Gas Tax Suspension Would Offer Modest Savings at the Pump

The federal gasoline tax has held at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993 and is not indexed to inflation, meaning its purchasing power for infrastructure funding has declined significantly over three decades. Revenue flows into the Highway Trust Fund, which finances federal highway construction and transit programs; a suspension would reduce that stream unless Congress provided an offset. The concept of a federal gas tax holiday gained notable traction during the fuel price surge of 2022, when several lawmakers proposed temporary suspensions. Economists have broadly questioned the mechanism, citing evidence from state-level experiments that a portion of any tax relief tends to be captured by suppliers rather than reflected in lower retail prices.