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Dear Friend –
Should the federal government keep track of projects that are a billion dollars over budget or behind schedule?
Let me know what you think:
All aboard! Taxpayers are being taken for a ride on the Biden Boondoggle Express.
While the president likes to boast that his $1 trillion “infrastructure” bill is building a better America, the truth is Bidenomics and bureaucratic bungling are busting budgets and postponing completion of projects across the country.
Remember the California High-Speed Train I called out before? Sold to taxpayers at a price of $33 billion and a completion date of 2020, this train still hasn’t left the station. Construction is costing about $1.8 million a day and it won’t be completed for another decade. The total price has skyrocketed to $128 billion— that’s nearly $100 billion more than the original price tag!
The Obama/Biden administration committed $3.5 billion for this gravy train as a “shovel ready” project more than a decade ago. President Trump stopped payment, saving nearly $1 billion. Now, the Biden administration has restored that money and even added another $50 million more, praising the project as an example of President Biden’s “build back better” approach. Then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi even celebrated how passage of the Biden bill would help to bring the high-cost, high-speed train into San Francisco.
That’s not to be confused with Pelosi’s infamous San Francisco subway earmark the Democrats’ inserted into their partisan “COVID” relief bill, which Republicans successfully derailed. Biden is “building that back” too, at the outrageous price of more than $1 billion per mile! Completion of the 6.5-mile subway extension was promised by 2026 at a price of nearly $4.7 billion. It’s now been delayed for a decade while the cost has doubled to more than $9.3 billion. While the subway keeps digging itself deeper in a hole, President Biden is pledging as much as $4.6 billion of taxpayer support, including $500 million, in his bloated budget.
These are just two Biden Boondoggles, but there are many more in the making. In fact, you don’t have to travel very far from where these other two gravy trains are being planned to run into yet another!
At $5.15 billion per mile, the 1.3-mile extension of San Francisco’s rail service, the Caltrain, is on track to be one of the costliest transit projects in the world, and the planners are expecting Biden to bankroll half of the costs! The price has ballooned from $3.9 billion in 2016 to $6.7 billion today. While the cost is increasing, Caltrain is experiencing one of the dramatic declines in ridership in the nation. Nevertheless, the Biden administration has given the project the green light to receive taxpayer dollars. To make sure that happens, more than $1.7 million is being spent on hired lobbyists. Construction will not be completed for another decade, a schedule the local media is already calling “ambitious.”
Folks, your tax dollars would go a whole lot further if they were spent more wisely. The president has a kind of reverse Midas touch. But instead of turning to gold, the cost of everything he touches—and we all know he can’t keep his hands to himself—increases faster than the price of gold. And each of these Golden State gravy trains are guaranteed to receive golden tickets aboard Biden’s Boondoggle Express.
For this horrible track record, I am awarding my April 2023 Squeal Award to President Biden.
To hold the president accountable, I successfully inserted a provision into his infrastructure bill requiring the Department of Transportation to keep track of projects being paid for by taxpayers that are a billion dollars over budget or behind schedule (predictably, the list itself is behind schedule).
Now, I am introducing the bipartisan Billion Dollar Boondoggle Act that would expand these transparency requirements to every taxpayer-funded project along with the Put the Brakes on Boondoggles Act that would bring each of these runaway trains to a squealing halt.
Squeal Award: President Biden
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Thank you!
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