NPR reported on Friday that Thump’s Department of Transportation has changed how it will allocates money for highways, airports and public transit.
No surprise there. The newsworthy thing is that DOT will prioritize communities with high birth and marriage rates.
OK, sure… there should be a nexus between census population data and transit funding — but considering the current backlog of bridge repairs and under-served passengers, future population growth should be a planning footnote, not a directive.
This is a crude attempt to divert funding to big (Democratic) cities to rural Red states. But it also looks like another example of paleo-conservatives “saying the quiet part out loud”.
Thump’s Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, served nine terms the House of Representatives, but before that he was a reality TV star, and he is married to FOX mouthpiece Rachel Campos-Duffy.
The couple have nine children. Duffy comes from a family of eleven.
Catholics were doing their own version of “Our tribe must outbreed the other tribes” long before it became a doctrine of White supremacy.
Duffy issued this memo a month ago, and Business Insider reported on it two weeks before NPR did. The broadcaster, however, zeroed in on the “birthrate” issue and got some quotes from a couple of pro-birth right-wing think-tankers.
The DOT order does a number of ugly things, and has gifts for BigFossil Inc. and Wall Street privatizers, as well as MAGA. Duffy’s memo:
- Prohibits the calculation of the “social cost of carbon” in
DOT’s cost-benefit analyses of projects.
- Gives priority to “user-pay models” — which means toll-roads and
“ticketed” transportation like air travel.
- Prohibits recipients of DOT funds from imposing mask or vaccination requirements.
- Requires recipients to “cooperate with federal immigration enforcement efforts” and “other goals and objectives” of the President or the Secretary of Transportation — as a condition of funding.
- Directs DOT administrators to review existing “grant agreements, loan agreements, and contracts” and if necessary to “unilaterally amend the general terms and conditions” to ensure compliance with the new policy directives.
- And it includes the aforementioned preference that shall be given to “communities with “marriage and birth rates higher than the national average” in the issue of grants and contracts.
Duffy’s lawyers stuck in some CYA language… “to the extent practicable, relevant, appropriate, and consistent with law”. DOT grants to states are conditioned by formulas legislated by Congress, so lawsuits should be expected.
I expected Thump’s DOT to ditch electric vehicle infrastructure, public transportation, and bicycle and pedestrian safety. But the MAGA “culture war” elements in Duffy’s order (vaccines, deportation and “White-women-need-to-be-having-more-babies”) elevate it from merely predictable to the realm of “Weird”.
They just can’t keep their racist, xenophobic ideology out of anything. We need to work on ways to tell average voters how and why that is wrong.
