The Federal Times reports that Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood said Wednesday the department has a backlog between $80 billion and $100 billion in high-priority infrastructure improvement projects that it cannot afford to fund.

“For a decade, we’ve really ignored infrastructure,” LaHood told the Senate Budget Committee. “We just haven’t put the resources into it. There’s a lot of lousy bridges and roads that need to be constructed.”

LaHood said the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery, or TIGER, grant program received applications for projects totaling $60 billion. But it had only $1.5 billion to award as part of last year’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

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