President Donald Trump’s administration plans to spend a little more than $2 billion on the Federal Railroad Administration in 2021 compared to nearly $2.8 billion budgeted in 2020 and the nearly $2.9 billion spent in 2019. Federal fiscal years begin on Oct. 1 of the calendar year prior. The transportation department budget highlights are part of the larger budget proposal the Trump administration is proposing to Congress.
Amtrak will be hit particularly hard by the proposals with a reshuffling of dollars away from the passenger railroad’s Northeast Corridor and National Network Grants to a line item called “National Network Transformation Grants — Long Distance Routes” that will be funded to the tune of $550 million. Yet, the overall grants to Amtrak is project to fall from $2 billion in the 2020 budget, to just less than $1.5 billion in 2021.
Amtrak and FRA representatives did not immediately respond to a Trains emailed request for comment.
The Trump Administration budget would also zero out funding for State of Good Repair funds, Restoration and Enhancement Grants, and Magnetic Levitation, or MagLev, development, or $204 million less than in 2020’s budget for those three items.
Journalists in a Monday afternoon conference call with Transportation Department officials asked several questions about the New York City-area Gateway Project. The project, among other things, would add an additional tunnel bore between New York City and New Jersey to increase capacity on the Northeast Corridor for Amtrak and NJ Transit trains. Federal Transit Administration officials say that Gateway is among the projects that will be ranked in a report to be released later on Monday, but that no specific dollar amount will be tied to the project.
The FRA’s budget items also include $50 million in user fees to be paid by railroads for the benefit they receive from FRA’s work on railroading. FRA and Association of American Railroad representatives did not immediately respond to emailed requests for comment.
Another budget highlight for railroading is $8 million for an “Automated Track Inspection Program.” Railroads are privately, and with government agencies, developing better inspection methods, using aerial drones in certain cases. Trains has asked for FRA clarification on the line item.
More information is available online.
Stop subsidizing the highways and trucking industry. Airlines too. What is fair for one is fair for the other.
Note that the transportaion modes being subsdized are those that are least energy efficient? Curious, with global warming becoming of concern to some groups, but obviously not others. Guess the can is getting a few more kicks down the road.
Sorry to hear all of this, but at least they are getting focus away from just NEC and looking at the LD routes, which do need help. I have not yet had the new “improved” meals, but will be on Capitol Ltd and Cardinal in June so will find out. Diner had been downgraded a few years ago on CONO as they only served sandwich, chicken salad and micro pasta on the two trips I have taken. Not the regional cuisine that I remember reading about in the past. So maybe the meals on that route will be an improvement, will find out as I hope to ride that one later in summer. Poor Amtrak has been kicked all around ever since it was started, they try with the best they have, and the crews are awesome, friendly and helpful.
For Amtrak, the proposed funding cuts should not be a surprise, but expected. Why? Because current senior executive management at Amtrak has failed to offer a consistent, in-depth, comprehensive plan evidencing a viable policy.
In essence, Amtrak detracts its own long distance routes which comprise a national network that embraces and ties together inter-regional services. Rather than dissing current long distance routes for calling upon some cities en route at 3 AM, Amtrak has refused to acknowledge how the railroads used to schedule more than but one train per day; instead, by offering two daily trains that would cover such time gaps.
Amtrak’s anal focus exclusively upon the Northeast Corridor has been at the expense of all the other states west and south of the Potomac. Indeed, in defiance of the Passenger Rail Investment & Infrastructure Act of 2008 (PRIIA), Amtrak does not even charge the states along the NE Corridor for their twice per hour intercity trains between Washington-NYC-Boston; yet, aggressively overcharges all other states for its fully allocated costs, which happen to even defy GAAP (Generally Acceptable Accounting Principles).
To resolve this absurd politically manipulated provincial approach to a national passenger rail program, we need to have Congress eliminate Amtrak’s prohibitively costly false monopoly. Like Europe today, we must open-up all routes, corridors and long distance, to bidding by vetted private firms to operate passenger rail services within a competitive open access market, or, to secure designated routes.
Amtrak today keeps on changing its focus from becoming profitable, pushing cost recovery, eliminating long distance routes, etc, with no focus on an explicit plan to achieve reasonable goals, without sacrificing its national mandate. Since losing its only qualified, experienced railroaders in W. Graham Claytor and David Gunn, Amtrak’s direction has been adrift with no North Star direction to economically serve states.
M SINGER in his magnificently articulate post hits the two high points: (1) Trains 1 x daily don’t work out well for a number of reasons. (2) NEC vs. the national system is based on funny accounting.
Once daily? We wish we had 1 x daily. We’re supposed to believe 3 x weekly is rail service. (Or in Canada 2 x weekly for the Via Rail Canook.)
Still busy making America great again it seems. Whatever.
Having just made a cross-country trip on Amtrak from Atlanta to LA via Washington, DC and Chicago, I have experienced the service of The Crescent, The Capitol Limited and The Southwest Chief. Unfortunately, as I live overseas I was not aware of Amtrak downgrading ‘dining opportunities’ on the eastern and southern routes. Having bought a first-class sleeper for the entire trip, I was appalled by the ‘flexible options’ on the Crescent and Capitol Limited. In both cases, dining amounted to one staff member seating in a full dining car with kitchen slipping a plate of a dubious casserole into a microwave. So, I gather our ex-Delta Airline CEO is trying to do the airline trick that the railroads were doing in the 1960’s. Turn off the service, get volumes down and then discontinue the service. Of course this was the dude who came up with the idea of cutting the Southwest Chief into two: terminating the train at Dodge City, Kansas in the middle of the night, chucking the passengers into buses for a miserable trip to ABQ and then putting them on a downgraded train for LA. Fortunately the congressional reps from KS, CO and NM sorted our Delta dude out for the moment. I was fortunate to have an excellent crew on my Chicago-LA sector and the dining car was just fine but I can only wonder how this will be rundown in the near future. Amtrak’s management and the Congressional micromanagement have turned Amtrak into joke. Compared to rail services in Europe, China, Australia, and Japan, the USA is slipping into the Banana Republic category. Lord have mercy.
Yikes! Who in congress hates rail and especially Amtrak? Or is it just anti rail service lobbying by airlines, autos, and highway contractors? State rail improvements have boosted ridership in critical areas. Why do we see such opposition to interstate rail services? Who benefits or profits? The entire west is grossly under served yet has the most gorgeous scenic routes in all of the U.S. Yet California Zephyr cars are nearly 75 years old now and barely able to keep just 2 trainsets operating. The Coast Daylight is equally deprived, one train per day in each direction to serve a population of 40 million! Mrs. Mitch is not much help…
Indeed, it hurts a given agency to lose that much money and has the dual role of looking like a massive fat trimming or colossal blow to the layperson.
I used to work budget for an agency that a $900m cut would have amounted to less than a 5 percent cut to our budget. And we only accounted for half a percent of the entire budget. People can’t wrap their brains around the scale of that business.
Various countries over the years have neniged on debt obligation…the French after 1789, the Russians post 1917, Argentina, etc. lately. The one thing everyone must understand is that the reason the US can borrow money so cheaply, from China and elsewhere on the market, is what is called “the full faith and credit of the US Treasury.” That idiomatic term looms large where both individuals buying T-Bonds and governments looking to bank secure returns turn. Unfortunately, this standard has come under periodic attack with deficit budgets, threatened government shutdowns, and the like, all avoidable.
The best metaphor for the budget “process” is to tour a sausage works..bratwurst anyone? Amtrak, et.al., represent the trimmings on the floor.
Charles Landey,
There’s one thing about this deficit spending that no one seems to understand, with our debt being purchased by mostly foreign entities…we technically have everyone world wide over a barrel. Should we decide to stop paying interest on that debt, let alone just stop paying it at all, the entire world would be thrown into such a tizzy that the Great Depression would seem like a day at the Circus, yet none of our elected officials have yet to try this tactic, especially with China. As for the DoT budget, you can bet by the time Congress get done with everything nothing will have changed as much as DT would like, he already agreed to spending limits for the 2020-2021 budget year when negotiating the 2019-2020 budget and Congress is probably going to hold him to the coals on those amounts or at least as close to them as they would like.
In DeeCee the Transportation budget is pennies. It’s like if I get a monthly utility bill for $150.65 and by mistake write out a check $150.66. Why even talk about this? The Transportation budget will be referred to a Congressional committee which will fill in the amount and the details, while the overall budget will be a race toward bankruptcy ten thousand times bigger.
Every president since Nixon, both parties, proposes a cut to Transportation as if to make a statement, while the annual deficit and the accumulated debt spiral out of control. Then some Committee Chair in Congress restores the Transportation money and life goes on until the next fiscal year and the same thing happens. Congress restores funds for current operations (Amtrak, local transit, whatever the voters ride on between now and the next election) while long-term capital planning is ignored.
I get that people on this Forum – myself included – care about infrastructure and care about transportation. In my own job (before retirement) I wrestled with a budget for my little operation that was tiny compared to the organization’s overall expenditures. It was what I had to work with, I get that. The organization tossed around hundreds of millions when I would be turned down for a needed increase barely larger than my own salary. I get that, we each deeply care about our own little corner of the world, our own tiny slice of the big pizza. I get that. Just don’t count on the mentally disabled clowns in the White House Budget Office, either party, to listen. They’re too busy bankrupting America to care about the Gateway Tunnels.