Senator Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) is introducing legislation to expose “boondoggle” government projects that have run over budget or gone at least five years behind schedule.
Ernst is introducing the Billion Dollar Boondoggle Act Thursday and highlighting some of the worst examples of government waste her bill seeks to expose, National Review has learned.
The bill would require the Office of Management and Budget to issue guidance to agencies asking them to submit information on the projects covered by her legislation. The project reports would include the federal share of its total cost, the contractors and grant recipients involved, an explanation for its delayed completion, and a current cost estimate of the project.
“No surprise that Washington is years late, and a billion dollars over budget on its latest bloated project,” Ernst said. “I am slamming the brakes on the runaway crazy trains and unplugging the short-circuiting EV fleets. It is a bad day to be a government boondoggle!”
Ernst is underscoring the failures of several taxpayer-funded rail projects in her “squeal” award accompanying the legislation. California’s much-delayed high speed rail project’s costs have exploded from an estimated $33 billion at its conception in 2008 to $128 billion today. Its completion date was delayed from 2020 to 2033 and tracks have yet to be built. Another example Ernst focuses on is Maryland’s purple line, a rail project billions over budget and five years behind schedule. Costs have jumped from $5.6 billion to about $10 billion and the purple line is expected to open in 2027 after originally being slated to open in 2022.
Struggling government projects were also featured in Ernst’s recommendations to the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency as methods for cutting the federal budget. Billionaire Elon Musk, head of DOGE, has set an ambitious goal of cutting $2 trillion from the budget. Musk has admitted DOGE is unlikely to find $2 trillion of cuts, but expressed optimism about reducing the budget by half that total.
Ernst is chair of the Senate DOGE caucus and has pushed for DOGE measures such as selling hardly used federal real estate and tacking Covid-19 fraud. Republican lawmakers have enthusiastically endorsed Musk’s plans for DOGE to overhaul the administrative state through mass layoffs and cutting line items from the budget.
The Biden administration’s $7.5 billion program to built a network of electric vehicle chargers and $42 billion expand broadband are spotlighted in Ernst’s letter to DOGE. Three years after enactment, only seven EV stations had been built, according to the Washington Post. Now, 214 chargers have been built in 12 states with the EV money, according to the Associated Press. Not one person has been connected to the internet through the $42 billion program to date.