By around late 1973, work on the project restarted. Builders sought funds from the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973 to pay for construction. At that time, plans called for the completion of the highway's westbound lanes west of 150th Street, as well as the sections of the freeway along Rockaway Boulevard and in Nassau County. Rockaway Boulevard would have also been relocated and modernized. However, the federal government refused to approve the funding, and the money was instead distributed among projects in Arkansas; Indiana; and Fort Worth, Texas. This further delayed the construction of the Nassau Expressway. By then, the unbuilt segment in Nassau was called the "phantom expressway" because it had been in the planning stages for decades. The right-of-way for the unbuilt expressway became an unused, rodent-infested "wasteland". Meanwhile, Rockaway Turnpike was carrying five times the number of cars it had been built to accommodate.