The next time you see President Donald Trump boarding Air Force One, you should know that he's about to take off in an aircraft that was built more than three decades ago and that the planned replacement for that iconic Boeing 747 is way behind schedule and over budget.
Ah, just another day for the federal bureaucracy, right? Well, no, not if you are Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who has been leading a valiant crusade against what she calls Billion-Dollar Boondoggles. Uncle Sam does these costly taxpayer ripoffs on the ground, in the air, and on the ocean.
Take the California's High-Speed Rail Project that developers promised would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco with an environmentally responsible alternative to Californians driving their cars and trucks. What do Californians and U.S. taxpayers have to show for it?
The project is years behind schedule and costs about $1.8 million every day. More than $11 billion has been spent to date toward an original projected completion cost of $33 billion. But not a single rail has been laid, and Ernst has been calling for an end to the federal funding of the California High-Speed Rail Project for at least six years.
The project’s price tag has tripled from $33 billion in 2008, to as much as $128 billion today. Folks, going nearly $100 billion over budget isn’t a rounding error, it’s a financial train wreck! More than $4 billion remains unspent of the $6.8 billion D.C. provided to the project, but applications are pending for another $216.6 million. This train is off the rails and needs to be stopped before it choo choo chews up any more tax dollars.
As Ricky Ricardo might say, Gov. Gavin Newsom, you got some splaining to do here!
But wait! There's more, a lot more, to the Boondoggle Express.
You will recall President Joe Biden's promise to spend $5 billion to build 500,000 Electric Vehicle (EV) charging stations. When he left office, 214 EV charging stations had been built, leaving the program with just 499,786 to go!
But that's far from all the EV madness of the Biden era. Check out Ernst's description of the Biden plan to convert the Post Office to EVs:
For example, the Biden administration announced plans in 2022 to spend nearly $10 billion to purchase tens of thousands of Next Generation Delivery Vehicles (NGDVs) for the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) by 2028. While the initial order for 50,000 trucks was placed three years ago, fewer than 100 trucks have been delivered.
The manufacturer claims, 'every day we strive to meet or exceed our customers’ needs,' yet it is only making one truck per day for the postal service. The company did not even 'produce a drivable prototype until months after the contract was awarded.' When the first vehicles were finally delivered, significant fixes were required before they were useable.
Despite the delays, USPS agreed to pay higher prices for the vehicles. The cost increase is ironic since $3 billion was provided for the purchase as part of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. The Postal Service refuses to provide details about the value of the current contract.
A person involved with the production admits, 'this is the bottom line: We don’t know how to make a damn truck.' This order needs to be canceled, with the unspent money marked “return to sender,” the taxpayers."
Calling DOGE, Calling DOGE! Actually, one suspects that Trump's Secretary of Commerce, former Wall Street investment guru Howard Lutnick, is already digging into the options available on this boondoggle as part of his assignment to fix the US Postal Service.
Then there are the ship-building boondoggles with the Navy and Coast Guard, Ernst continues. They have multiple shipbuilding projects going, and all of them are behind schedule and chalking up cost overruns.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) says the situations are so bad that "the design and construction processes can take so long that the ships they deliver are often equipped to face outdated threats."
Ernst points to a GAO report on the Navy's troubled frigate project to design and build as many as 20 new frigates to carry guided missiles and perform other roles as surface combat units. But guess what? The project's first ship is three years behind schedule, with a design that wasn't completed until a year into construction.
"Despite not being in shipshape, the Navy went overboard and issued contracts to build two more of the frigates," Ernst tell us, then notes that the Coast Guard has a similar problem with its project to design and build new two classes of cutters.
"Likewise, the Coast Guard’s Offshore Patrol Cutters are currently delayed by almost four years and are nearly $11 billion over budget. Its Polar Security Cutters are five years behind schedule and more than $2 billion over budget," she writes.
Ernst is co-chairman of the Senate DOGE Caucus, which is meeting today, February 27, with billionaire entrepreneur and chainsaw operator Elon Musk. The Iowa Republican has been fighting the good fight against waste, fraud, and abuse ever since first coming to the Senate in 2014.
It was fitting that Iowans sent her to the Senate that year because, as she was entering the great chamber, Sen. Tom "Dr. No" Coburn of Oklahoma, who gave America USASpending.gov, was headed out the door to fight cancer.
Ernst inherited Coburn's mantle as the Senate's greatest foe of waste, fraud, and abuse, and with the help of several of the Oklahoman's former investigators, has continued in the years since to do the work of the Lord. Mr. Musk would do well to give a close ear to everything the gentle lady from Iowa has to say in today's DOGE discussion.