'Bad Case of Congress Brain'

by Sean Jeans-Gail | VP of Gov't Affairs | Rail Passengers Association

I was reading this week’s Eno Transportation article on the Federal Railroad Administration’s (FRA) long-distance service study, and it reminded me that we need a word for when “a fixation on the processes of a broken political system eclipses the material reality of the country that this political system is nominally trying to govern."

In the article, Eno Transportation’s Jeff Davis describes the Congressionally-mandated efforts solely in terms of profit and loss, chiding the law (Congress?) for ignoring the fact that these trains will not be operationally profitable, using per-passenger subsidy as his metric of choice.

Now, this isn't an example of technocratic thinking, because Davis doesn’t seem that interested in railroading as an industry, nor the history of passenger railroads in the U.S. (or at least any history that extends beyond Amtrak’s annual budget requests to Congress). People in the industry know that Amtrak's attempts to reduce losses through frequency cuts in the early 1990s were a disaster, and led to greater per-passenger losses on the routes where it was tried. Even today, the worst performing routes in Amtrak’s network are the two three-times-per-week trains, the Cardinal and the Sunset Limited. If we were interested in decreasing the per-passenger subsidy, the U.S. should focus on increased frequencies and spreading overhead administrative costs across a greater number of routes.

The article also disregards the significant capital costs of maintaining passenger rail corridors like the Northeast Corridor. Not for any philosophical or technical reasons, as far as I can tell, but simply because the current form of Congress’ budget process puts a bigger spotlight on discretionary funding choices for operating accounts.

And, ideally, a technocrat would ask themselves: “how can I most efficiently marshal the resources of the state to meet the needs of the people and communities which I serve that are not currently being provided by the market?” Davis’ article doesn’t bother with the benefits of the proposed expansion to the passenger rail network, which include: expanding access to the network to 45 million more Americans; expanding access to the network to 9 million more rural Americans, including 5 million rural residents living in areas of persistent poverty; adding 82 more Medical Centers onto the Amtrak network, while adding 5 million people who today have poor medical access to the network; and bringing 600 additional higher education institutions on-network.

Instead, Davis’ focuses on the burden the expanded network would place on Congressional appropriators in their annual battles over how to allocate discretionary spending. In another article on the discrepancy between the White House and Amtrak budget requests, Davis clarifies this mode of thought by writing that the President’s budget was written “here on Earth,” while Amtrak’s budget request “was apparently written elsewhere in the multiverse, where there is no Fiscal Responsibility Act and no spending caps.”

It's certrainly telling when the Fiscal Responsibility Act is more real to you than the hundreds of rural communities across the U.S. that have been using the FRA’s long-distance study sessions to communicate, forcefully, that they are too isolated, that they need help, and without better transportation connections to the rest of the country, many of these towns simply will not have a future.

However, I wouldn’t call it budgetocratic thinking, either. Davis is one of the best writers out there on the failures plaguing the Highway Trust Fund (HTF), so he knows better than anyone that Amtrak’s subsidy is miniscule when compared to highway subsidies. In his 2023 testimony to the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee, he highlighted the $272 billion in General Fund bailouts Congress directed to the HTF since 2008. He also noted that the HTF is projected to have a $40 billion revenue shortfall in 2029, with the deficit between revenue and spending steadily rising to $46 billion per year in 2032. It’s a great document that’s worth a read, and clearly demonstrates that Davis knows where the real budgetary crisis is centered—and it’s not Amtrak’s operational account.

It’s definitely not politicocratic thinking. The article doesn’t concern itself with how to successfully build a political coalition to support a national passenger rail program. It’s obvious that Congress, particularly the Senate, will not support a massive intercity passenger rail program that only benefits the Northeast, California, and the Chicago Hub. The earnest effort to expand and improve the Amtrak network throughout the Red counties is part of the grand political bargain that has allowed billions of federal dollars to be invested in addressing the state-of-good-repair backlog in the Northeast and to upgrade passenger rail service in Blue counties. Eliminating the parts of the Amtrak network that benefit rural Americans will not put the railroad on better political footing.

My best explanation for the article is that Davis has a bad case of Congress-brain. I suspect that term isn’t going to catch on, though. If you have a better idea, let me know in the comments.