GOP Rep. Bill Shuster, transportation panel chairman, to retire

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Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA), Chairman, House T&I Committee, holds up strips of paper air traffic controllers currently use, as he speaks at President Donald Trump’s event announcing the Air Traffic Control Reform Initiative in the East Room of the White House, on Monday, June 5, 2017.

Pennsylvania Rep. Bill Shuster, the powerful Republican chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, says he won’t run for re-election.

Shuster says he wants to focus his time and energy on working with President Donald Trump on legislation to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build roads, bridges and other infrastructure.

He said in a statement that he’ll spend his final year in office “focusing 100 percent on working with President Trump and my Republican and Democratic colleagues in both chambers to pass a much needed infrastructure bill to rebuild America.”

Shuster was bound to leave the powerful position at the end of this term anyway because of GOP rules limiting him to six years as chairman of the committee.

His central Pennsylvania district is safely Republican.