Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. CASSIDY. Madam Chair, the point of this amendment is to bring transparency and accountability to the process of awarding TIGER grants. Now, TIGER grants were created in 2009 with money from the stimulus bill to provide competitive grants that were to fund infrastructure projects and supposedly on a merit-based criteria.

There has been about $3.6 billion in TIGER grants awarded since 2009 going to States, local governments, and other entities for highway, transit, rail, and port authorities. DOT is currently reviewing grant applications to award $600 million for a sixth round of TIGER grant funding, applications due April 28, 2014.

Last month, the GAO reported numerous problems with the awarding of TIGER grants. The findings found in the report that DOT continued to accept specific applications for 30 days after the notice of funding availability deadline and did not notify the public. The DOT policy office did not follow its own guidelines and advanced projects with lower technical ratings instead of more highly-rated projects, providing no documentation or evidence of the factors that led to these decisions.

This leads me to why we are offering this amendment, again to bring transparency and accountability to the process of awarding TIGER grants.

In 2011, GAO recommended that DOT should develop a strategy to document decisions and work with Congress to disclose how it makes its decisions. The Government Accountability Office further recommended that the DOT limit the influence of geographic considerations and instead have a merit-based process. In their most recent report, the Government Accountability Office again made similar recommendations to provide transparency to the process.

Now, my amendment does not do away with TIGER grants. Private sector partners, State and local governments, metropolitan planning organizations, transit agencies in Louisiana and elsewhere have applied for these. This amendment will not prevent them from the opportunity to receive funding, nor do I wish to prevent consideration of the hundreds of applications that have been offered for this current cycle. However, this amendment requires that the Department of Transportation follow the Government Accountability Office recommendations to be transparent and objective in the management and decisionmaking process when selecting applications for funding under the TIGER grant program.

We cannot have DOT have a process which is suspected to be political and not merit-based when there are Federal tax dollars at stake and when communities in Louisiana and elsewhere with meritorious projects are having theirs not considered when those with less merit are receiving prioritization. That is wrong. It is not what we should be pushing. Again, I push this amendment to bring transparency and accountability to the awarding of TIGER grants.

With that, Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

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