Uhhh...and who is going to step in line for Moonshot Bucks in Massholia right now? Baker the transactional austerian who's expended more transportation energy over the last 2 years slipping whoopie-cushions into his state's own intercity transit studies to make them all self-fulfilling no-build prophecies???
I said it in the other thread: this isn't a "Federal Daddy" issue. If the bucks get hustled, they'll be distributed to states that join the Coalition of the Willing. If a bunch of Legislative nihilists (Ohio, looking your direction) want to point the gun straight at their own foot and blow out a part of the map...that's on them. If the zero attention-span shitshow that is the NH House wants to squabble its way out of taking any stance whatsoever...that's on them too. More fun bux for the Virginias of the country who have their act together and are ready to make hay. The PRIAA legislation re-stacked the deck in favor of the states on implementation planning, and that's the structure we're living under until some election far from now masses up Congressional majorities big enough to actually do the committee work amending PRIAA. Fed largesse was always going to contour with who the Coalition of the Willing is. It's not straight-line party line where every GOP nihilist in the Senate reflexively backing the filibuster against it can expect to not have to deal with significant blowback from their own state-level Party, because state legislative stances under the "Home" team parse this way more heterogeneously than McConnell's whip count. There will be Red states willing to play ball locally where their leadership-whipped Congresscritters will not. But it's also absolutely true that the Feds cannot expect to be in the driver's seat at the individual corridor level if individual states don't want to play ball. Flip a coin for best odds on whether NH will play ball, because if there's a squirrel outside the window the People's Legislature is fair game to spazz completely out. And be outright pessimistic about Ohio not knowing what's good for itself.
What's very clear is this impending legislation was the driving force behind the unprecedented rebuke Baker just got from his entire Congressional delegation over the T service cuts. And the fact that the delegation's most fiscally conservative and Baker-friendliest member (Lynch) was the one annointed mouthpiece for them all to lob the not-so-veiled threats of retaliation at him if he didn't walk back the cuts to meet the spirit of the fed funding relief. It's mortal sin to the 11 of them if we get lapped by some willing-er Coalition of the Willing state on the Build Back pork awards because Baker refuses to govern in good faith. He just got a very loud shot across the bow to start behaving more like a team player or else.
State's NSRL portfolio is too big an incoherent mess right now to be fair-game for Build Back bux, anyway. That's quite clearly going to be the stuff of follow-on funding pulses like the Progressive wing of the House is calling for now rather than a sales pitch they could feasibly load up for this year and a one-and-done bill. They have too many more years of hard work to put into the Service Development side of the NSRL plan (if we even had an Admin willing to go to that effort) before there's a blueprint in-hand that's ready for national lobbying. Even at somewhat urgent pacing no one expects that effort to be doable at any less than 1 decade's time given how unfleshed some very major aspects of NSRL still are, and for jury still being out on whether they'll commit to priming the NSRL pump with no-excuses full Rail Vision enacting of Regional Rail. Build Back, on the other hand, would be a perfectly good opportunity to re-launch East-West Rail as "NNEIRI Redux" and try to clean up the utter incoherence of it by making the last two studies' conclusions agree with each other instead of dividing-and-conquering through willful direct contradiction. That kind of refactoring is the stuff that can be done quickly enough for this bill if internal forces were so willing. And you could say Baker just got read the riot act to prepare to Go Big for exactly such a pivot.
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