Calling it a “billion-dollar boondoggle,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) named a chronically over-budget and behind-schedule public transportation project in the nation’s capital as the winner of her latest Squeal Award highlighting waste and fraud in government spending.
The Purple Line extension of the Washington region’s public transportation subway system is designed to connect Maryland’s heavily populated inner suburbs through an East-West corridor.
Construction began in 2017 but the project—the biggest public infrastructure construction effort in Maryland history—has been plagued with delays, cost-overruns, and court fights.
First elected in 2014, Ernst has become the Senate’s most prominent foe of wasteful spending, a role previously fulfilled by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who was famously known among colleagues as “Dr. No” because of his stalwart opposition to pork barrel spending.
Coburn retired from the Senate the same year Ernst was first elected.
Ernst has also been a vocal critic of a controversial extension of the San Francisco region’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) public transportation subway system that has been championed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
The project would extend the BART system into nearby San Jose, the hub of the Silicon Valley high-tech region.
The Department of Transportation (DOT) is providing the Purple Line more than $910 million in tax-funded grants, as well as guaranteeing a loan of nearly $1.8 billion to keep the struggling subway project afloat.
“The intent of this provision, which I authored, is to establish an automatic alert system that will raise alarms about projects with ballooning budgets and missed deadlines, so that Congress and DOT can take whatever actions that may be necessary to prevent financially mis-managed projects from becoming billion-dollar boondoggles,” Ernst told Buttigieg.