President Joe Biden on Monday unveiled more than $16 billion in new grants for passenger rail projects that will benefit an Amtrak route well-traveled by the commander in chief.
The president, speaking at the Amtrak Bear Maintenance Shops, outlined how the grants will "overhaul" trains and infrastructure across 25 rail projects along the Northeast Corridor.
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Dating back to his years in the Senate, Biden has logged more miles riding Amtrak than any other lawmaker, well over 1 million miles.
The funding itself, $16.4 billion appropriated through Biden's bipartisan infrastructure law, "will upgrade aging infrastructure on the nation’s most heavily traveled rail corridor to increase train speeds, reduce passenger delays, and create good-paying union jobs," according to the White House.
White House officials were also quick to criticize recent Republican appropriations efforts, claiming that the House GOP spending packages would "slash support for infrastructure in communities across the country, while at the same time adding billions to the deficit with give-aways to wealthy tax cheats."
Officials say that Republicans' infrastructure funding bill would shrink Amtrak funding by $1 billion, cut aviation research funding by more than 20%, and "make 85% cuts to requested funding for major transit construction projects" aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The president's critics, on the other hand, heartily attacked the administration's decision to solely focus grants on the Northeast.
“The Biden administration continues to unfairly divert taxpayer dollars away from the majority of the country to bloated, over-budget, blue-state projects," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the ranking member on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, said in a statement. "Congress wrote the law for these grant programs to be competitively bid in all states, not to backfill the Gateway Program."
Cruz and other congressional Republicans have pressed the Biden administration for information on how Amtrak and rail companies can avoid wasteful spending of any of Biden’s infrastructure grants.
For months, the president has centered his reelection push on "Bidenomics," the reclaimed name for his collective economic platform, and urged voters to help him "finish the job" of building the economy from the bottom up and middle out.
Still, across that same time, Biden's economic polling has only continued to dip further into the red. As of Monday, a RealClearPolitics polling aggregate shows just 38% of the country approving of his economic stewardship, a low point for his three years in the White House.
Perhaps even more concerning for the president is his faltering support among black voters, a critical component of his 2020 winning coalition.
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Biden still holds 53% support from black and Latino voters in key swing states, according to a September poll analysis from the New York Times and Siena College. However, that figure marks a sharp decline from the 70% of nonwhite voters who supported him in 2020.
Senior Democratic officials and lawmakers have quietly urged the president to shift his campaign pitch away from the economy and instead focus on the threat former President Donald Trump and "extreme MAGA Republicans" pose to electoral stability and Biden's own legislative accomplishments.