GAO Sees Flaws in DOT’s Grants Process
This story appears in the April 18 print edition of Transport Topics.
The Government Accountability Office last week issued two reports that found flaws in the Transportation Department’s process for awarding $9.5 billion in federal stimulus grants, drawing sharp criticism from some Republican members of Congress.
GAO said the award process for $1.5 billion in infrastructure program grants in 2009 “could benefit from increased performance focus and better documentation of key decisions,” and $8 billion in high-speed rail funds last year needed “clearer reasons for awards decisions.”
The GAO’s high-speed rail report said the reasons for selecting projects “were typically vague” and that without detailed records, the DOT’s Federal Railroad Administration “leaves itself vulnerable to criticism over the integrity of those decisions.”
House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) made such a criticism in an April 11 statement.
“The rationale for the administration’s awards of billions of dollars under a failed high-speed rail program remains shrouded in mystery,” said Mica, who requested both reports.
“Billions of dollars in rejected grants have been returned,” Mica’s April 11 statement noted. “It is critical that there be transparency for why these projects were selected in the first place.”
Among the states that rejected the funds are Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin, where voters elected Republican governors last November, nine months after the administration announced the high-speed rail funding.
Florida turned back $2.2 billion that was intended to speed up trains between Orlando and Tampa, with the eventual goal of 168-mile-per-hour service, far slower than European and Asian trains that run as fast as 270 miles an hour.
Mica, who said he “couldn’t imagine a worse beginning to a U.S. high-speed rail effort,” has previously criticized the Obama administration’s passenger-rail strategy, which he described as “squandering limited resources on dozens of slow-speed rail projects.”
When asked for comment on both reports, DOT spokeswoman Brie Sachse stated in an e-mail that the agency was “extremely pleased that GAO’s review of the project-selection process concluded that DOT followed good grant-making practices.”
The GAO report on Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery grants — which are better known as TIGER grants — zeroed in on 51 applications, noting that $549 million was given to 25 projects that were simply “recommended,” while 64 other projects that were “highly recommended” received no money, whereas 26 others were awarded $950 million.
“DOT cannot definitively demonstrate the basis for its award selections, particularly the reasons why ‘recommended’ projects were selected over ‘highly recommended’ ones,” the report said.
Sachse’s message defended the selection process for the $1.5 billion projects funded under the TIGER grants as “fair and thorough.”
Republicans such as Rep. John Duncan of Tennessee, who is the chairman of the Transportation Committee’s highways and transit subcommittee, had a different view.
“GAO found that the administration’s project selections for $1.5 billion in TIGER stimulus grants also lacked transparency,” Duncan said in the April 11 statement. “Congress and the American people should not be forced to deduce why these programs were funded.”
