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At Philadelphia's 30th Street Station on Tuesday, lifelong government rail promoter Vice President Joe Biden unveiled a $53 billion high-speed train initiative and half-joked: "I'm like the ombudsman for Amtrak." As with most gaffetastic Biden-isms, the remark should prompt more heartburn than hilarity. Just who exactly is looking out for taxpayers when it comes to federal rail spending?
Vigorous independent oversight of public infrastructure binges is especially critical given the nation's long history of mass transit slush funds, cost overruns and union-monopolized construction projects to nowhere. Among the new projects championed by the Obama administration: a $10 billion New Jersey-to-New York commuter rail tunnel pushed by Senate Democrats that state officials won't pay for but believe everyone else in the nation should be forced to subsidize. When Biden talks about "seizing the future," he's talking about seizing your wallets for his party's electoral security.
Alas, the White House hostility toward vigilant taxpayer watchdogs rivals Michael Vick's. And the Obama administration's political abuse of the Amtrak inspector general's office, still under congressional investigation, is a recipe for yet more porkulus-style waste.
In June 2009, longtime veteran Amtrak inspector general Fred Weiderhold was abruptly "retired" -- just as the government-subsidized rail service faced mounting complaints about its meddling in financial audits and probes. He had blown the whistle on overzealous intrusion by the agency's Law Department into his investigations of $1.3 billion in rail stimulus money and exposed how Amtrak's legal counsel had usurped the watchdog's $5 million portion of federal stimulus dollars to hamstring his probes. Even more threatening to the Democratic attorneys' cabal, Weiderhold discovered that the federal rail bureaucracy was retaining outside law firms beyond the independent watchdog's reach and obstructing subpoenas issued to an outside financial adviser.
In September 2010, GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley and Rep. Darrell Issa released a report concluding that the Amtrak board removed the agency inspector general without required prior notice to Congress and despite the inspector general's effective track record of "exposing waste, fraud and abuse at the highest levels within Amtrak."
The Transportation Department's inspector general is now conducting its own independent probe of Weiderhold's removal. And two weeks ago, Issa revealed that the new Amtrak IG, Ted Alves, is risking his own neck by probing into whether Amtrak bureaucrats on a fishing expedition misused the e-mail system by searching for communiques between his office and Congress regarding the Weiderhold scandal.
Grassley is right: "Independence is the most important element for making the inspector general system work. If independence is compromised, either by an inspector general or by agency leaders, then taxpayers are left without a watchdog and a major opportunity for accountability in government is lost. When the system gets compromised, there need to be consequences in order to try to prevent it from happening again."
Amtrak's notorious book-cooking, however, has gone unabated. The agency was reprimanded during the Bush administration for misleading Congress about its solvency. But former employees faced no criminal charges for fudging the agency's profit-and-loss statements.
Compounding matters now, cronyism runs rampant in the federal rail bureaucracy. Biden's lobbyist son, Hunter, sits on the Amtrak board of directors. Amtrak Vice President Eleanor Acheson is a close pal of -- you guessed it -- Joe Biden. She oversees the very Law Department accused of interfering repeatedly with the taxpayer advocates in the inspector general's office. Acheson hired Biden's former Senate staffer Jonathan Meyer as her deputy general counsel. Meyer called it a "happy coincidence."
In another such fortuitous coincidence, one of the top beneficiaries of the new White House rail bailout is GE Transportation -- the leading manufacturer of diesel-electric locomotives. President Obama recently named GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt to head the new White House jobs council.
With Team Obama's social engineers and legal fixers steering the federal gravy train, the light at the end of the spending tunnel seems grimly dim.
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Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies" (Regnery 2010).
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February 9, 2011 @ 9:27 am
I get the feeling that our Inspector General concept has been badly damaged since Obama and his Chicago cohorts came into office. Once you “take down” the only independent watchdogs in our government, then, you can do whatever you want without worrying about consequences. This case is not the first Inspector General person to be removed since Obama came into office.
This whole high-speed rail idea is a farce anyway. This country is not a good candidate for high speed rail usage because of how large it is and how diverse the population is across the country, as compared to Japan where most of their people depend on rail to start with, and can leverage such a system. And, besides that, AMTRAK cannot keep its current system up and running on “low speed” rails, let alone a rail foundation that has to be built and stay basically intact always for a high speed train running at speeds over 150 mph.
February 9, 2011 @ 11:21 am
Put a House-appointed special prosecutor on Biden and cohorts- and if the trail leads to criminal acts, indict them. One and all.
February 9, 2011 @ 11:59 am
Even the Chinese have voiced a concern about the costs of high speed rail service. They are rethinking putting so much emphasis on getting people from one place to another with bullet pace!
Anytime our government comes up with a figure like $53 billion dollars for high speed rail…hold on to your wallet! Have you ever seen government come in on budget….ever? That $53 billion, I can assure you, will cost $100 billion or more when all is said and done.
I am a former County Commissioner that has experienced what I am talking about first hand. My Public Works Director was an Empire builder. He would get contract after contract for road improvements for his department, authorized by my predecessor. His contracted amount for these projects was always under those submitted by outside contractors. One, I remember vividly, was for $289,000 dollars. The closest private contractor bid was $312,000. So, naturally, he was awarded the project. I was selected as Budget Officer for the County immediately following my election. As his invoices and receipts started to mount, I began noticing over-runs, double charges, and additional costs. The total amount that project cost the taxpayers of my County was $512,000. When I called him publicly on this fact, he abruptly retired! He knew I was on to his scam!
February 9, 2011 @ 2:50 pm
The fact is that all transportation endures ONLY because it suckles on the taxpayers you know whats. The airlines are only marginally profitable and that’s after the taxpayers have provided air traffic control and ground facilities and infrastructure. Trucks and buses could not survive if the taxpayers didn’t spend massive amounts on roads and highways. Boats and barges couldn’t make it if the government didn’t maintain navigable streams. So why is it that we always expect railroading, and more specifically, passenger railroading to make a profit or go away?
I vote for replacing all government roads, highways, waterways and air traffic support with private companies. If they can make a profit, fine. Otherwise, let them disappear. I’d just as soon keep the money I pay in taxes that goes to these boondoggles. And when I use transportation, I’ll pay the toll, fare, or actual shipping cost for the amount I actually use.
February 9, 2011 @ 1:03 pm
As any rational engineer, or economist, will tell you, the only thing that really matters is door-to-door time, and how much does it cost. Rather doubtful if any city-pair in the USA really qualifies. Of course you can skew the numbers if you up the cost of alternatives by an order of magnitude. But look around the world, even where high speed rail is effective, the distances are less than 300 miles. High speed rail can, and does, fill a niche between 150 and 300 miles, but only where the independent motor vehicle is economically burdened. Would any private company craete an economic model that could attract private, non-susidized capital, for a high speed rail from NY to Chicago? Or any other city-pair?
Pingback: The Antiplanner :: High-Speed Train Wreck :: http://ti.org/antiplanner
February 10, 2011 @ 7:51 am
Right! A special prosecutor with Ken Starr credentials needs to be appointed to look deeply into the whole Biden clan and their cronies. But don’t expect anything like justice until we, as a nation, get rid of Obama and Holder.
The whole high speed rail thing sounds to me to be a clone of Kennedys pork and over run crony rewarding “Big Dig” mess that ran out of steam only because they ran out of room to dig.