(The Mobile Register posted the following story by Sean Reilly on its website on February 5.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — To rail buffs of a certain age, the sight of the Sunset Limited rumbling along the Mobile waterfront may trigger a pleasurable flashback to the day when trains set the standard for traveling elegance.
The Bush administration takes a less sentimental view. In budget documents released this week, White House number-crunchers ranked the Sunset — which runs from Los Angeles to Orlando, Fla., and provides Mobile’s only passenger service — as among the top money-losers in Amtrak’s long-distance fleet.
Although a Bush spokeswoman stopped short of saying the train should go, the administration’s budget blueprint calls for the elimination of “underused and inefficient” routes. That goal is only a single para graph in the administration’s $2.23 trillion draft spending plan for the fiscal year 2004, but it underscores the dilemmas that loom for members of Congress who will write the final version.
“These are just always very tough decisions,” said U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Mobile, a new member of the Senate Budget Committee. “I always try to represent the interests of my state; I also understand that if programs can’t be justified, they’re going to be in trouble.”
The decisions promise to be exceptionally hard this year. Apart from defense and homeland security, spending increases for most items would be modest at best under the president’s plan.
With the White House predicting a record budget deficit of more than $300 billion, lawmakers can pump more money into popular programs only at the risk of adding to the red ink. At the same time, the administration is targeting some initiatives that lawmakers have stoutly defended in the past
Long before Bush, for example, lawmakers were stepping in to save Amtrak from the axes of White House budget cutters. One reason the government-created railroad loses so much money, experts say, is that members of Congress force it to keep running unprofitable routes through their states. According to administration figures, the Sunset Limited lost $347 on every passenger it carried in 2001.
Also on the White House chopping block is a program that provides federal loan guarantees to encourage commercial shipbuilding. In the last few years, both Atlantic Marine Inc., and Bender Shipbuilding & Repair Co. in Mobile have benefited.
But the program can carry a costly downside. Taxpayers, for example, have had to pay $187 million to cover the 2001 collapse of a ballyhooed cruise ship project at Northrop Grumman Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula. When the White House first tried to end funding for the loan guarantee program that same year, however, Gulf Coast lawmakers successfully led the resistance.
In other areas, lobbyists for state governments were struggling to determine Tuesday whether the president’s spending plan would ease or aggravate the fiscal crises already gripping most states, including Alabama.
“It could be our greatest dream or it could be our worst nightmare,” said Alysoun McLaughlin, a lobbyist for the National Conference of State Legislatures in Washington, D.C.
Among the proposals that so far have generated the most study: The White House wants to restructure Medicaid, the giant health insurance program for the poor that is one of the biggest single expenses for both state and federal governments.
Although participating states would get more money at first, McLaughlin and other analysts are concerned the tradeoff could be a long-term drop in funding from Washington.
In general, because Republicans now control both houses of Congress, independent observers say Bush now enjoys improved odds of winning acceptance of much of his spending agenda.
The outcome probably won’t be known until this fall. One key player will be U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Tuscaloosa, who chairs a transportation spending panel that helps decide how much money Amtrak will get.
“The administration’s proposal is not unjustified,” Shelby said in a prepared response to a question about funding for the Sunset Limited. “Taxpayers are spending enormous amounts of money to operate several lines that carry very few passengers. I believe we should evaluate all routes to determine which we can feasibly maintain.”
But at a House Budget Committee meeting Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Jo Bonner, R-Mobile, objected to the administration’s bid to cut dredging money for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has a district office in Mobile.
In a brief exchange with White House budget director Mitch Daniels, Bonner said he was “disappointed” by the administration’s third attempt in as many years to reduce funding for the corps’ civil works program. Some rural areas that don’t have access to an interstate highway are close to a river system, Bonner said.
“If it’s not managed, if it’s not maintained appropriately, then we’re putting a nail in the coffin of hope to those economies there,” Bonner said.
Daniels offered no assurances that he would change his mind.
Bonner’s tone was far removed from the vehement protests registered last year by his predecessor, now-retired U.S. Rep. Sonny Callahan, R-Mobile. Confronted by a similar White House spending proposal at the time, Callahan denounced Daniels’ office as an “axis of evil.”
As of the end of last year, the corps’ district office employed 671 people in Mobile and Irvington, spokeswoman Jan Shelby said last week.
She had no further information on a Bush initiative revealed last fall that could shift much of the agency’s workload to private firms. At corps headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, spokesman David Hewitt referred questions on that subject to the Department of the Army. Officials there could not be reached for comment.