The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), along with over 200 state transportation officials, has called for an immediate congressional action on the current shutdown of federal highway and transit programmes.

The US Government has recently stopped reimbursing states for highway and mass-transit projects administered by the Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Transit Administration following expiry of the funding programme’s current extension.

AASHTO president and Mississippi Department of Transportation executive director Larry Brown said the funding freeze means more than $153m a day in lost reimbursement payments for highway projects to the states.

“Congress has to move quickly to correct this by passing legislation and getting it signed into law. This is a bad situation and it’s only going to get worse,” Brown said.

The government stopped work on dozens of projects on federally owned lands and laid off nearly 2,000 federal workers on Monday 1 March following the funding freeze.