Highwaymen take over the Transportation Department

The WaPo reveals why mass transit gets the shaft on the national level

Posted by Tom Philpott at 4:47 AM on 20 Mar 2008

Read more about: Department of Transportation | public transportation | placemaking

I have a couple of things to add about the Washington Post article pointed to by Ryan Avent in his smart recent post about mass transit.

The article, by Lyndsey Layton and Spencer S. Hsu, is a superb and important piece of work, but it's maddeningly written; it buries key and even shocking information.

The theme is the takeover of the Department of Transportation by neocon ideologues with ties to the highway industry. Evidently, they're using the department as a tool to gut mass transit projects and hand the proceeds over to their friends in the highway-building industry.

This is crony capitalism at its most fragrant, complete with a Cheney connection.

One of the piece's main subjects is one D.J. Gribbin, the DOT's general counsel and liaison to the White House."

Here's some background on Gribbin:

Gribbin, 44, grew up well connected to the Republican Party. His father was a longtime aide to Vice President Cheney and a former head of Halliburton's Washington office. The younger Gribbin worked as a lobbyist for the National Federation of Independent Business and as a national field director for the Christian Coalition under Ralph Reed. For six months in 2005, he moved his wife and seven children to Guatemala, where they performed missionary work.

It gets better. The guy bounces between the highway industry and the DOT, from which perch he tosses goodies to his old friends. Get this:

[Gibbin] came to the department in 2003 from Koch Industries, which has a road-building subsidiary and is owned by a prominent donor to Republican and libertarian causes. As general counsel at the Federal Highway Administration, he wrote a report to Congress praising private-public partnerships, citing a study he commissioned on the benefits of tolling while he was at Koch.

There's more:

That report also included ideas attributed to Macquarie Holdings, a major toll-road builder based in Australia. Gribbin left the federal government in 2005 to work at Macquarie, where he earned $265,000. He returned to the DOT last year as general counsel.

Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, Gribbins' boss, has similar cozy ties to industry:

She served as federal highway administrator from 2001 to 2005, then worked as a senior vice president at HDR, a construction firm with several tolling projects, where she was paid a salary and bonus of $225,833 to craft its public policy. She returned to federal government as transportation secretary in 2006.

What effect does all of this have on mass transit? Not a good one. These industry-fattened ideologues are using their power to privatize the road system while icing mass transit. Get this:

The number of major new rail and bus projects on track for federal funding dropped from 48 in 2001 to 17 in 2007, even as transit ridership hit a 50-year high last year and demand for new service is soaring.

People, oil is settling in above $100/barrel and ice caps are melting. Can someone explain why this isn't a massive scandal, with frog marches and Congressional hearings?

For story: Highwaymen take over the Transportation Department
12 Comments | Post a Comment

Because Dems lubs them some highways

Umm, how about because Dems are equal opportunity offenders in the spend-our-children's- inheritance-on-pavement sweepstakes?

The best thing that could happen in America with respect to USDOT is if we could sell the entire interstate system to some foolish Chinese or Russian investment fund, because the system is an asset perched on the brink of an abyss and it will, with remarkable speed, plunge to worse-than- worthlessness, because it is so fantastically expensive to maintain. The tolls would be a form of carbon taxation and the money realized from the sale could be used to fund a mass transit system. The sooner we can get all heavy vehicles -- the thousands of trucks who pound the highways daily, delivering plastic crap across long distances while changing the climate with every mile -- the better.

The little pissants in the Bush DOT may have the wrong motivations and no real awareness of the underlying catastrophe we face, but still, the privatization of the interstates would be a good outcome.

The 5% Project

by JMG at 6:56 AM on 20 Mar 2008

Ok, JMG....

...but privatization in this context means "public-private partnerships," in which taxpayers foot much of the bill while the cronies pocket the profits. By diverting public funds to these schemes, we get regressive roads taxes and no investment in public transport -- a worse-case scenario unless you own shares in a highway company. If we want to build out mass transit, we can't let these thugs loot what's left of the public purse (the part that hasn't gone up in smoke in Iraq).

As for the dems, anyone have any info on HRC's or Obama's records re: mass transit? It would be interesting to look at how the DOT fared under Bill Clinton. I would be surprised if that rascal didn't staff it with a bunch of highwaymen as well. Groan.

Victual Reality

by Tom Philpott at 7:41 AM on 20 Mar 2008

Tom, only under Carter was it "good"

Only under Carter did nonhighway infrastructure spending exceed highway federal spending, check out this Clinton era report on infrastructure spending --see figure 1. Figure 3 (page 23 if you're using abobe) shows it was highest for Carter and Reagan's first term, but was consistently, I would say from eyeballing it, about one quarter of highway expenditures. According to figure 4, there was a one-time spike in rail spending in the first Reagan administration -- maybe legislated during Carter years?

by Jon Rynn at 8:02 AM on 20 Mar 2008

Obama suports smart growth, mass transit, cycling

From http://www.barackobama.com/issues/pdf/EnvironmentFactShee ...

Build More Livable and Sustainable Communities:
- Reform Federal Transportation Funding: Barack Obama will re-evaluate the transportation funding
process to ensure that smart growth considerations are taken into account and he will also re-commit
federal resources to public mass transportation projects across the country.
- Require States to Plan for Energy Conservation: Barack Obama will require governors and local
leaders in our metropolitan areas to make "energy conservation" a required part of their planning for
the expenditure of federal transportation funds.

by racc at 8:47 AM on 20 Mar 2008

racc --

While I'm sure that Obama or Clinton would be a vast improvement over Bush (maybe they would even revert Federal funding share of light rail projects back to 80% from the 50% that Bush moved it to), as far as I can tell these are just the sort of required comments that they and most major environmental groups say in order to cover all of their bases. I think that they all need to be pushed.

by Jon Rynn at 8:57 AM on 20 Mar 2008

Neoconmen again?

Corporatists are now abandoning the neocon title, it has been shamed. Why does the NYT keep Kristol on? To display the neoconman clown.

Follow the money and the same people are at both ends. Call them what you like.

They need to be investigated, tried, and incarcerated.

Besides the massive amount of bridge repair and replacement, what is urgently needed in highway funding?

What is needed is massive buildout of bike lanes alonside existing roads. Widen the pavement a few feet and safe bike lanes are inexpensive.

Saving wear and tear on highways.

How about burying utility cables in wells beneath the bike lanes, with removable concrete covers? Saving that endless expensive trenching ultimately payed for by rising utility rates for all of us.

That way power lines (that carry internet and smart grid switching) can be inexpensively moved off poles where ever increasing storms are making the grid too vulnerable.

These are the sorts of initiatives that the trillion wasted on oil wars, the trillion wasted on wall street bailouts, and the trillion in corporate welfare, would be better spent on.

It will be 6 trillion wasted at least over the next 8 years on similar corruption unless we make them spend a fraction of that on energy, transportation, and agriculture policy reform.

GHG/inflation fighting renewable energy and conservation, backed by direct subsidy diversion will pay for that investment many times over with economic revival.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

by amazingdrx at 10:17 AM on 20 Mar 2008

Industry capture

Capture by industry seems to be a tragically common feature in environmentally relevant ministries in rich countries.

a sibilant intake of breath

by sindark at 10:38 AM on 20 Mar 2008

Hardly

Unless you think "capture" could be used to describe the relationship between "Kristin" and Eliot Spitzer, you can hardly call the relationship of DOT and the highway lobby an instance of "capture."

The 5% Project

by JMG at 11:50 AM on 20 Mar 2008

Love it or leave it JMG

"The best thing that could happen in America with respect to USDOT is if we could sell the entire interstate system to some foolish Chinese or Russian investment fund"

Move to russia or china then, if you don't like public ownership of highway systems. Oops their systems are wholly owned by the state and disasters. Good choice on new management though.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

by amazingdrx at 12:01 PM on 20 Mar 2008

Jingo much?

Gee Doc, I was going to respond by noting the jingoism of your response, but energybulletin.net had an interview with Kunstler that sums it (and the attitude behind a "love it or leave it" comment) up nicely:

Next American City: Lewis Mumford once commented that "the current American way of life is founded not just on motor transportation, but on the religion of the motorcar, and the sacrifices that people are prepared to make for this religion stand outside the realm of rational criticism."
Today the religion of the motorcar remains strong. Is there any hope of changing course in the coming years, or are we doomed to repeat the auto-centered planning mistakes of recent decades?
James Howard Kunstler: I don't think we're going to have to make a whole lot of further accommodations to the automobile. I'm serenely convinced that the automobile is going to be a diminishing presence in our lives. We're not going to come up with any "miracle" or "rescue remedy" for the petroleum scarcity problem.
I think you're going to see an interesting political problem arise, where motoring simply becomes an elite activity again and will be greatly resented by the masses of Americans.
That's the second half of the Mumford question. The first half has a lot to do with what I call the "psychology of previous investment." The investment we've made now in the happy motoring life is so enormous that no matter what reality is telling us about it, we're probably going to see a big campaign to sustain the unsustainable at all costs. I maintain that this will probably work out as a gigantic exercise in futility and a further waste of our remaining resources. We're probably going to campaign to keep suburbia going, but it's not going to pay off for us, and it's really basically a waste of our time and our resources.

The 5% Project

by JMG at 12:29 PM on 20 Mar 2008

Common Sense

After decades of ideologues running what should be a market driven effort -- transportation -- common sense is prevailing.

The problem is not lack of choo-choo trains -- but lack of will to build the needed roads into the exurbs and unclog arteries. If it takes private business to do that, and exchanges taxes for tolls...then so be it.

by jabailo at 3:40 PM on 20 Mar 2008

Why is this news?

The "highwaymen" have been in control of the the DoT from the beginning. Did no one see "Who Framed Rodger Rabbit"? Look it up, here's a good place to start: http://marthabianco.com/kennedy_rogerrabbit.pdf

by ethanshattuck at 12:23 PM on 25 Mar 2008

ADVERTISING POLICY

You are not logged in. Thus, you cannot post a comment. If you have an account, log in. If you don't have an account, well, by all means go make one! Meet you back here in five.