Watching the highway bill — a $284 billion, six-year behemoth salted with special road projects for lawmakers and enough extra dough to win the buy-in of most states — slog through the House a couple of weeks ago left me wistful for the old days. Specifically, the days before the mid-1990s, when the federal dollars spent on highways actually served some clearly defined national purpose.

This year’s huge surface transportation legislation contains far more pork than policy. Aside from some obligatory pilot programs that experiment with new kinds of toll roads or private financing, the measures passed by the House and pending in the Senate seek to fulfill no overarching vision. Their main goal: Divide the spoils of the federal Highway Trust Fund — the pot of money filled by federal gas taxes — in such a way that wins enough votes for passage.

Which is a shame, because we could use a visionary right about now, someone who could be as impassioned about reducing congestion and the smog it creates as President Dwight D. Eisenhower was about building the Interstate highways. Or someone who cares about putting transportation dollars to best use as much as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan cared about countering the ill effects of the Interstate system.

Indeed, if the current state of federal transportation policy contains the remnants of any vision, it’s the one put forward by Moynihan, the New York senator and polymath who wrote the big highway bill of 1991. Moynihan had been fascinated by transportation issues since 1939 when, as a 12-year-old, he was transfixed by a vision put forth by General Motors at the New York World’s Fair. Its “Futurama” exhibit foretold brilliant ribbons of highway connecting large metropolises, even replacing slums with green parkway vistas.

But the Interstate that ultimately came into being also ruined urban neighborhoods, or bypassed entire towns, leaving them to wither. The car culture it promoted led to gridlock and smog. In 1960 Moynihan wrote “New Roads and Urban Chaos,” which described the failures of that vision. Much of his long political career was spent fighting to repair the damage.

In 1991, Moynihan won states new freedom to spend trust fund dollars not only on roads but also on transit, smog control and even bike paths, to help compensate for the damage done by the Interstate.

Today there are some folks out there thinking big thoughts about transportation policy these days — they’re just not in positions of power. One is Gabriel Roth, who had this to say in a March 17 report for the libertarian Cato Institute: “There is no longer any role for the federal government in the construction and financing of roads.”

Roth goes further than President Ronald Reagan, who once unsuccessfully proposed handing to states all road programs except the Interstate system. It’s been more than a decade now since the Interstate system was completed, so Roth says the states should now take over the job of building and maintaining all highways. State officials, he says, know best how to solve their unique transportation problems. And they could do it more cheaply, with less overhead.

Roth would literally phase out the sacred Highway Trust Fund.

There is no question that the trust fund has expanded far beyond its original purpose of building the Interstate. Moynihan added those smog clean-up programs and bike trails, among other things. Then, of course, there are the earmarks — tens of billions of dollars that lawmakers love to bring home for local projects.

Along with that expansion we’ve seen the gradual erosion of an idea that was fundamental to building the Interstate system — that some states should rightly pay more into the fund than they get out of it. A national highway system, after all, benefits all citizens.

Today, when Mississippi lawmakers ask why they should be subsidizing New York subways, they make a fair point. The trust fund, Roth says, has become “a slush fund.”

So do any elected officials share such visionary thinking? Yes and no. Back in the 107th Congress, Sen. James M. Inhofe, R-Okla., introduced a bill that would have turned the Highway Trust Fund over to the states. It got no cosponsors.

That bold gesture was made, however, before Inhofe got the gavel of the Senate Environment and Public Works panel. Now he is in charge of moving this year’s highway bill.

You also might think President Bush would embrace Roth’s argument for killing a bloated federal program and turning it over to the states. Is the vision too bold? Bush — who wants to end tyranny and spread democracy worldwide, send a human to Mars and overhaul Social Security — is hardly timid when it comes to the vision thing.

But as much as some of his allies might like him to say “tear down that Highway Trust Fund,” Bush knows better than to stand in the way of lawmakers feeding from the trough.

Fiddle with the Social Security trust fund if you must. But mess with Congress’ road and transit money, and you will feel the real third rail of American politics.

Mike Mills is CQ’s executive editor for electronic publishing. Next week’s CQ Roundtable: Courts & the Law, by Kenneth Jost.