Making Trains in the Sausage Factory

The Center for Public Integrity has an interesting new project they’ve just published on the web detailing all the area of lobbying angling to get a piece of the fairly substantial money Congress has appropriated for investment in high speed inter-city rail projects. The danger, as they see it, is that lobbying cash and congressional barons will ensure that the money is divvied out into so many different places and on to so many different projects that nothing of any real consequence — in terms of technology or transformative infrastructure will end up getting done at all.