Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa sent Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy a letter Tuesday, asking him to cancel federal funding for seven projects identified in a report released July 30.
Ernst released the report after Duffy sent Vice President J.D. Vance a letter detailing projects facing cost overruns of at least $1 billion or which have been behind schedule for five or more years. Ernst praised Duffy as a “tremendous partner” in identifying the wasteful spending.
“My Off the Rails report exposes how crazy trains and bridges to nowhere are taking taxpayers for quite the ride,” Ernst told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The American people should not be forced to continue funding boondoggles that are years behind schedule and billions over budget. Luckily, I have identified $14 billion that has yet to be spent. Secretary Duffy has been a tremendous partner in combatting wasteful spending, and I will continue to work with him to claw back the unspent funds and return them to taxpayers.”
One program Ernst singled out in the letter, the Honolulu Rail Transit Project, not only saw a cost overrun of $4.8 billion since it started in 2012, but its projected completion slipped from 2020 to 2031 in the process. Another program Ernst listed, the Purple Line for the Washington Metro, is $3.1 billion over budget and delayed by more than five years, and is expected to not be finished before February 2028.
For too long, Washington has treated taxpayer-funded projects running more than a billion dollars over budget as a rounding error.
That ends now.
I am exposing, scrutinizing, and defunding government boondoggles.https://t.co/f2lO6538V0
— Joni Ernst (@SenJoniErnst) August 4, 2025
Two other projects on Ernst’s list are from California, which had $4 billion in funding for a high-speed rail project yanked by the Trump administration due to cost overruns and falling behind schedule. One was a subway extension to Silicon Valley slated to receive over $5 billion in federal funds, the other was a transit center in San Francisco due to receive $3.3 billion in federal funds.
Ernst requested Duffy list any projects that fit criteria in Section 11319 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which then-President Joe Biden signed into law in November 2021 in a letter sent April 1.
“I would encourage a similar level of inquiry be brought to the other overdue and overbudget projects on the list required by my boondoggle law. Four of these collectively are receiving $4.5 billion from DOT and taxpayers,” Ernst wrote in the letter. “Additionally, the boondoggle report omitted three other projects that are overbudget and behind schedule to which DOT has committed $9.4 billion of taxpayer money.”
“If these can’t be salvaged with better management, they too should be canceled. The $14 billion saved could be redirected towards higher priority transportation needs or rescinded to help pay down our $37 trillion national debt,” Ernst continued.
Ernst also had a request for future reports sent to Congress about “boondoggle” projects that are over budget or behind schedule.
“Since my law requires an annual boondoggle report, taxpayers and lawmakers would greatly benefit if a higher level of detail was included in future installments,” Ernst wrote. “While DOT’s overview of the California’s High Speed Rail was over 300-pages long, the list of 14 projects prepared to comply with my law is compressed into a simple, one-page chart. The information provided glosses over significant contributing factors to the cost increases and schedule delays.”
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