House Transportation Committee Blasts Transportation Stimulus

The Newspaper
by The Newspaper

One of President Obama’s signature achievements, passage of $812 billion in stimulus funds at the height of the recession, was labeled a failure by the chairman of the US House Transportation Committee, which had jurisdiction over about eight percent of the projects funded. In a hearing yesterday, Representative John Mica (R-Florida) explained that the money did not end up going to needed infrastructure projects.

“This will go down in history as one of the greatest failures of a government program to stimulate the economy that mankind has ever created,” Mica said. “This is a trillion-dollar lesson.”

Initially, the idea behind the stimulus was to create a $250 billion package with the most of the funding going toward infrastructure projects. The total amount of the package more than tripled, but the funds for infrastructure dwindled to just $64.1 billion. Of that amount, only $27.1 billion went to highways and bridges.

“I could not be more frustrated by the results that I see,” Mica said. “The total stimulus package was $787 billion and that’s been re-evaluated to over $800 billion, and still we have a stagnating economy…. Many of the jobs created were very temporary jobs.”

Committee Democrats defended the stimulus, suggesting the economy would have been in far worse shape had the money not been spent. Mica cited administrative problems with the spending. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) audited how effectively the Department of Transportation (DOT) disbursed grants, particularly for the high-speed rail and “TIGER” grants. Over $9.5 billion was handed out based on vague criteria.

“DOT cannot definitively demonstrate the basis for its award selections, particularly the reasons why recommended projects were selected for half the awards over highly recommended ones,” Phillip R. Herr, director of physical infrastructure for GAO, testified. “Developing internal documentation is a key part of accountability for decisions, and DOT guidance states that officials should explain how discretionary grant projects were selected when projects with the highest priority in a technical review were not funded. The absence of documentation can give rise to challenges to the integrity of the decisions made, and DOT is vulnerable to criticism that projects were selected for reasons other than merit.”

GAO also noted DOT’s failure to measure the potential for long-term benefits when selecting projects.

[Courtesy: Thenewspaper.com]

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  • Carlisimo Carlisimo on May 05, 2011

    I’m in structural engineering and followed this pretty closely (after all, commercial projects had all but disappeared at that point). I won’t comment on how most of the money was spent, but I have to say any money going towards infrastructure feels more like deferred maintenance that was long overdue. And it did keep us afloat – a huge number of the companies in our industry (including architects, contractors, and all sorts of designers and other specialists) had cut the bone and only survived thanks to government work. (The commercial sector is picking up again, as of the first quarter of this year.) One issue was the emphasis on “shovel ready” projects. That made new projects nearly impossible: the design process is not that fast! It takes traffic engineers a while to lay stuff out (you can’t just add roads or lanes on a whim – it usually just moves the traffic jam), maybe another year for the roads and bridges to be designed and detailed, and THEN you can break out the shovels. So most of the money went to projects that were already designed. That includes a lot of maintenance. Important stuff, and it does give us designers some work, but it’s hard to feel like the stimulus bill actually created new infrastructure. And of course, there were tons of pork projects. Things that felt good to someone and ensured that the bill would pass, but weren’t all that important. The new lanes on 405 in Los Angeles, for example; they’ll just shift the traffic jam a few miles. A federal building here in San Francisco will be renovated to be more energy efficient and safer – not truly a waste of money, but you could argue that it’s makework. I’m a fan of high speed rail, but here in California it’s been bogged down by NIMBYism in one or two affluent neighborhoods. Big waste of time. At least it’s being managed by competent agencies; my company is involved on a project that isn’t. Just to make things worse, rightfully distrustful politicians have put so much oversight on some of these projects that the designers and builders are working under a crushing bureaucracy. They’re so obsessed with stopping government waste that we’re spending 10% of our time (and money) filling out paperwork proving that we’re not wasting government money! Blowing it all on a new electrical grid wouldn’t have helped me any, but I think it would’ve been more useful.

  • Mike Kelley Mike Kelley on May 09, 2011

    Here in Montana, quite a bit of the "stimulus" money seems to have gone for construction of bike paths. Here is a 50 mile long stretch from Missoula to Hamilton: http://www.mainstreetstevensville.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=107:transporation&catid=62:relocation&Itemid=87 As you can imagine, bike riding is a very seasonal activity here and these paths will be little used. Given our $1.5 trillion yearly deficits since 2008, spending billions on trivial crap like this is inexcusable.

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