Question:
How can one person like Walker or Kasich make the decision to kill the HSR projects on their own? My understanding is that there were hundreds (or more) people involved in making the decisions to initiate and write the grant proposals in the first place at many levels of government. How can one person quash something that was begun long before the November elections? :huh:
To be accurate, the projects were killed by the US DOT, not by either governor.
Both incoming governors pledged to stop the projects once they took office. To do that would have required the state legislatures to agree, either actively or passively. While it is possible that the legislatures might not have permitted the projects to be halted, and it is even possible that one or both of the incoming governors may have changed his mind, it was probable that sometime early next year both projects were going to be stopped by the states. However, neither state had formally cancelled the work. At this point it was only threats by the incoming governors.
With both state grants in jeopardy, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood decided to act on his own and withdraw the grants now. He did that for purely political reasons. Come January, the new congress will be far less friendly to the administration than the existing congress. Although the grants for high speed rail had been appropriated, most of the funds for both Ohio and Wisconsin had not been legally committed in the sense that formal contracts had been executed and money was flowing (an embarrassed US DOT essentially said the contract secretly signed with Wisconsin the weekend before the election was null and void). If either or both states backed out, the funds allocated could be unappropriated by congress and used for some other unrelated purpose, or even just not spent at all. Cancellation by the states would not happen until sometime next year.
The administration did not want to wait until next year to deal with two states giving back $1.2 billion of HSR grants given the likelihood that their relationship with congress in 2011 may not be so amicable. That $1.2 billion could become a political football between the new congress and the administration. Yes, the President has veto power over congressional actions, but in the give and take world of a mixed-party government, the $1.2 billion could become a pawn and be taken in exchange for the administration getting something else. To prevent the possibility that congress could pull that $1.2 billion from the HSR program, they took the money from Ohio and Wisconsin without waiting for state cancellations (assuming both were a lost cause) and quickly redirected it to other states. They now want to get that $1.2 billion formally committed by contract to the other states as quickly as possible to prevent it from going into play with the next congress.
While the underlying reason the projects in both states were cancelled was the stance of both incoming governors, the actual cancellation was not an action taken by either state. It was a unilateral action taken by the US Department of Transportation and Secretary LaHood.
