Editor’s note: This story is part of Governing’s ongoing Q&A series “In the Weeds.” The series features experts whose knowledge can provide new insights and solutions for state and local government officials across the country. Have an expert you think should be featured? Email Web Editor Natalie Delgadillo at ndelgadillo@governing.com.President Donald Trump released a proposed budget earlier this month, and the news was not good for passenger rail service and public transit. Among other things, the proposal would cut funding for Amtrak by 13.5 percent and shrink the Capital Investment Grants program, which provides federal funding for new transit projects, by half. At the same time, the Surface Transportation Board is considering a proposed merger between Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific, two of the biggest freight railroads in the U.S. Together, these railroads run close to half the freight in the country. The potential merger is significant because freight railroads own most of the tracks used by passenger trains. And while they’re required by law to give passenger trains priority on the tracks, they don’t always comply, leading to passenger delays. Advocates fear a conglomerate would have even more power to sideline passenger rail, while exerting more sway over how the passenger rail network develops.
But despite some looming challenges, passenger rail enjoys more political support now than it has in decades, says Jim Mathews, president and CEO of the Rail Passengers Association, an advocacy group that was integral to the founding of Amtrak in 1971. Mathews recently spoke with Governing about the state of passenger rail, the NS-UP merger, and the politics of public transit. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Governing: From your point of view as an advocate, where do things stand with passenger rail today compared with five years ago or 10 years ago?
Jim Mathews: Well, five versus 10 years is an interesting breakpoint. I have two different answers. Over the long term, I think passenger rail is in a much better place, probably the best place it has been for more than half a century. We’re in a place where the general public, whether they’re Republicans, Democrats, or uncommitted, sees the value of passenger rail. They want to use it. They want federal investment and state investment in it. They want to ride the trains, and they see it as a viable alternative.
When I came into this job 12 years ago, there was a legitimate conversation to have about, should we even have an Amtrak? We have succeeded in changing that conversation. Now we’re not saying, “Let’s get rid of Amtrak, let’s get rid of passenger trains, let’s just drive everywhere.” Now, even those who oppose Amtrak will say, “Why can’t we make Amtrak better? Why does it suck so much?” That’s a funny answer, but it really is progress. We’re at a place where the opposing forces want to make it better, those who support it want to make it better, and they just disagree on how to make it better. It’s part of the landscape in a way that it wasn’t more than 10 years ago.
(Courtesy of the Rail Passengers Association)
The Trump administration’s recently proposed budget would cut funding for passenger rail and public transit. Just this week the Department of Transportation announced that the federal government would invest $4.7 billion in the Northeast Corridor, the busiest passenger rail corridor in the country. How can people make sense of the federal government’s approach to Amtrak and passenger rail at the moment?
Boy, making sense, huh? It’s hard to make a coherent picture out of a lot of this. Last year the Trump budget was surprisingly decent. It was a cut. It was not what we had seen under the Biden administration. But it was not coming after Amtrak with a machete. This year we’re seeing pretty distinct cuts. We’re seeing a 13.5 percent cut for overall Amtrak funding. The Northeast Corridor takes a cut. The national network takes a slightly smaller cut. But the thing that really bothers me is the discretionary funding for the Federal-State Partnership for Intercity Passenger Rail, FSP. It’s gone. It’s zeroed.
What does that do and what would cutting it mean?
Fed-State was the primary capital investment program that came out of the IIJA. It contained the Corridor Identification and Development Program. [Note: The program helps regions plan for new intercity rail service.] This was the vehicle for delivering large amounts of capital investment in infrastructure that’s been neglected for six or seven decades, sometimes more. It’s vitally needed. It’s not necessarily Amtrak money, it’s competitive grants. States can go after it, groups of counties and transit authorities can go after it, and there were a lot of grants awarded. Bridges and tunnels and sidings and all the basic, boring, nuts-and-bolts stuff that keeps stuff going.
We all know that we are so behind the curve on infrastructure investment, and FSP was the way you got after that. To zero that program is just such a reverse-course move. It’s just dumb. This was a program that had very strong bipartisan support. Republicans liked it when the money was coming to their states. A lot more of that national FSP money was going to red states. And every time there was a Notice of Funding Opportunity, it was oversubscribed. This was not a program where people said, “Ah, we don’t care about this.”
What else in the proposed budget is a major concern to you?
The Federal Transit Administration has a program called Capital Investment Grants which has been around for quite a long time. It’s a very popular and useful program, which provides money for new transit construction projects. They cut that nearly in half. We’ve got the World Cup coming. Why are we cutting transit funding?
I’ll tell you why: Because transit funding mostly goes to blue places. That’s a terrible way to make policy. You already have transit systems that have been struggling to recover from COVID because a lot of people stopped commuting. The transit guys are finally getting up off their knees after getting beaten, and just as soon as they’re on their feet it’s like, hey, let’s take a two-by-four and smack them in the head again. I just don’t get it.
You mentioned that it’s not the case that Republicans hate rail and Democrats love it. But you do have this dynamic to a certain degree. Just yesterday U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas came out against federal funding for a light-rail project in Austin. How do you read the politics of this stuff at the moment? How likely do you think these budget cuts are?
First of all, there’s the old cliche that the White House proposes and Congress disposes. That’s true for every presidential budget. I think that will be true here as well. There’s just too much support in Congress for passenger rail. But the Republican support for passenger rail tends to focus mostly on long-distance intercity passenger rail — a place like Montana or Idaho, where you have these very rural, isolated places, and this is a way for people to get out of those places and connect to the larger economy.
To address the larger dynamic, there have been waves of Republicans who have come after passenger rail since day one, since 1971 when Amtrak was born. Congresses have repeatedly said, “We want passenger rail.” They’ve said it sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly, sometimes with large majorities, sometimes with slim majorities, but we have had steady support in Congress at varying levels of funding since day one. It is too valuable for too many places for it to die.
How would the Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern merger affect passenger rail? I don’t think a lot of people are following it, but what is really at stake?
Do you have four or five hours? The entire passenger rail network of the United States and any future growth is at stake. It is hard to overstate how big a deal this is going to be if it were to come to pass.
Currently, 69 corridors are being studied for the launch of future service in the United States through the Corridor ID Program, the pipeline of future rail programs. Within the Corridor ID Program, about 49 percent of those 69 corridors would be swallowed up by UP and NS as a combined entity. Stop and think about what that means. That is a single company effectively having a veto over half of the growth being planned in U.S. passenger rail. [Note: Because they own the tracks, freight companies often demand infrastructure investments from Amtrak or host states before they agree to operate new service. It took years for the Southern Rail Commission to negotiate with CSX and Norfolk Southern over the details of Gulf Coast passenger service that relaunched last year.] That’s astonishing. Sixty-three percent of Amtrak riders would be contained within the UP-NS umbrella. Talk about concentrated power.
One of the biggest problems with long-distance trains specifically, but sometimes on state-supported trains too, is late trains. There’s really long freight trains that get in the way of Amtrak trains so the Amtrak trains are late, which is, by the way, illegal. People forget that. I see the misperception online all the time: Well those are freight tracks so those trains can go first. No, that is illegal. Both UP and NS were dragged before either regulatory authorities or federal courts because it was illegal. What you’re doing is combining the two railroads with records for freight train interference and putting them in one big railroad.
You said passenger rail is in a better place than it has been for 50 years or so. What do you think it would take to get it to a place that’s really good? In China they’re building high-speed rail at a rate we can’t even dream of. Do you think in the future the U.S. is going to really make a concerted investment in expanding the network, expanding service? Is that what you’re aiming toward?
I would say an immediate priority is we need an IIJA 2.0. If you look at what IIJA did, it was $96.7 billion over five years. That’s what we’ve actually gotten out of it for passenger rail, versus $28.8 billion over nearly a decade before that. IIJA basically delivered three times more money over five years than regular appropriations did across nearly a decade. That was transformational investment to begin — not finish, but begin — reversing nearly half a century of infrastructure neglect. That’s crucial. We did it in 2021 and I think we can do it again, because Republicans and Democrats back home want it. So I think that’s possible.
On the larger scale, when you said the Chinese are investing at levels that we can’t dream of — why not? Why can’t we dream of that? This administration just proposed an over $1 trillion Pentagon budget. To do what the Chinese have done would cost us something around $205 billion to $225 billion over five to eight years. That’s a lot of money. But it’s not crazy in the context of a federal budget.
Part of the reason why the Chinese did what they did is because they made it a public policy priority. They said, “This is something that’s important to us,” so they built 1,500 miles of high-speed rail every single year for over a decade. And here they are, running very fast and very affordable trains. So people move around, and when people move around they generate economic benefits. This isn’t about, “Let’s just build really expensive trains.” This is about removing friction from an economy and letting people move around and do what they’ve got to do and spend money when they get there. If we decided as a country we wanted to do that, we could do that.
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