Potential swing states cash in with DOT’s latest grant round
Some states that may be competitive in November's election — including Florida, Pennsylvania and Texas — raked in millions in infrastructure grants awarded Wednesday by the Department of Transportation, while blue states like New York got comparatively little.
Though the department says politics plays no role in these decisions, this round of annual discretionary "BUILD grant" awards for infrastructure projects saw the most money go to Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania, which together hold 87 electoral votes combined in the presidential race. Congress ordered that the money be split evenly between rural and urban areas for this round, which could account for at least some of the way the figures broke down.
Texas — where President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden are polling roughly even as of Sept. 9, according to Morning Consult — received two awards worth $25 million each to reconstruct an existing interchange in the Odessa-Midland area and for rail capacity improvements between Fort Worth and Dallas. Florida got $49 million and Pennsylvania got $46 million.
Arizona, Minnesota and North Carolina — all important swing states — led the pack too, with more than 10 percent of the $1 billion haul among them.
A DOT spokesperson defended the grant award process, saying it’s thorough and originates with career staff, not political appointees. The person noted that the department received more than 650 applications from all 50 states, adding up to more than $9 billion in requests for a $1 billion pot of money.
“Each and every project application and award is reviewed extensively and rated by a team of career officials within the department,” said the spokesperson. “No state receives special treatment from the department.“
Rural areas were awarded just over half the total grant amount, in accordance with a statutory requirement in the fiscal 2020 appropriations law, H.R. 1865 (116). Transit projects got $118 million, with about one-third of that amount going to rural areas, a continuation of a preference in Trump’s DOT for road projects over transit that has been a major shift from the previous administration, which created the grant program under a different name during the stimulus.
The non-swing state of Kentucky — represented in the Senate by DOT Secretary Elaine Chao’s husband, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — netted the eighth biggest award total at $38 million, despite ranking 26th by population.
The losers: Reliably Democratic states took a beating. New Jersey, the state with the greatest population density, got nothing. So did Hawaii, Delaware, Vermont and the District of Columbia, all Democratic strongholds. New York received $1.4 million for a street improvement project in an upstate Republican district. California managed to net $36 million — 3.6 percent of the grant total for a state with 11.9 percent of the nation’s population.
The DOT spokesperson highlighted other awards that have gone to heavily Democratic areas on Chao's watch. Those included two transit grants as part of a separate program announced this week — $1.2 billion for San Francisco and $929 million for Minneapolis — which, together, represent more than twice as much spending as the entire BUILD grant program.
The little guys: Coincidentally or not, Iowa, with less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, received 4.6 percent of the BUILD grant cash. Maine, with just 0.4 percent of the nation's population, received 4.5 percent of the money for six bridge projects, primarily in the rural part of the state whose independently counted electoral vote Trump won by 10 points in 2016.
The Kentucky connection: Chao has been accused of potential favoritism toward her husband’s state, as reported by POLITICO, an issue that has been the subject of a congressional investigation. Kentucky received $38 million for three road projects.
