Let's Cut Some Spending: Billions to Amtrak while it hides employees' big salaries

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Remember the absolutely critical Omnibus spending bill Congress muscled through at the end of last year? It was 4,000 pages that no one read and cost taxpayers $1.7 trillion.

In our Let's Cut Some Spending series, ForAmerica will chronicle parts of the 2021 and 2022 spending bills from a variety of sources that you probably don't know about - programs, grants and spending of all kinds that should have never happened in the first place and many that are still happening.

Today’s offering: Billions spent on Amtrak while it hides employees’ big salaries!

The Daily Caller reports:

The rail company paid its 19,000 employees an average salary of $121,000 for fiscal year 2022, with the exact numbers being hidden by Amtrak through its use of an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The exemption permits the government to withhold information on personal privacy grounds, while top executives whose salaries were reported made between $504,000 and $780,000, according to Open The Books, citing payroll data acquired through FOIA requests.

“In the private sector, accountability would come in the form of an ‘Out of Business’ sign,” Adam Andrzejewski, founder and CEO of Open The Books, said in a statement to the DCNF. “In the pseudo governmental realm, taxpayers should at minimum be allowed to scrutinize the pay and performance of the 19,000 employees that keep Amtrak barely chugging along. Instead, the feds choose to use a technicality in the law to shield Amtrak from proper accountability, a practice that’s all too common in the Beltway…”

The government has injected billions through grants into Amtrak, such as $1.69 billion made available by the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Federal Railroad Administration following financial trouble from the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the DOT. In 2020, that same agency gave Amtrak $1 billion to respond to the spread of COVID-19.

The Biden administration designated $66 billion for Amtrak in 2021 as part of the Infrastructure and Jobs Act…

Billions of our tax dollars continue to go to a railway company that can't manage to turn a profit...

...while hiding that their top executives are making half a million a year or more.

Another example of why most Washington politicians deserve to be run out of town.

On a rail.