$50B Government Boondoggle

Extracted Attributes

• Amount

  $50 billion

• Nature of Critique

  Systemic waste, fraud, and abuse

• Source of Critique

  All-In podcast

• Contrasting Solution

  Starlink (private sector)

• Targeted Spending Areas

  Rural Broadband, EV Charging Infrastructure

• Accused Parties (for retaliation)

  Biden Administration, FCC

Timeline

• The All-In podcast episode titled 'Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala' was released, where the hosts delivered a scathing critique of $50 billion in government spending on rural broadband and EV charging infrastructure. (Source: reddit.com/r/TheAllinPodcasts)

  2024-06-21

Interstate 40 in Tennessee

Interstate 40 (I-40) is part of the Interstate Highway System that runs 2,556.61 miles (4,114.46 km) from Barstow, California, to Wilmington, North Carolina. The highway crosses the state of Tennessee from west to east, from the Mississippi River at the Arkansas state line to the Blue Ridge Mountains at the North Carolina state line. At 455.28 miles (732.70 km), the Tennessee segment of I-40 is the longest of the eight states through which it passes and the state's longest Interstate Highway. I-40 passes through Tennessee's three largest cities—Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville—and serves the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most-visited national park in the United States. It crosses all of Tennessee's physiographic regions and Grand Divisions—the Mississippi embayment and Gulf Coastal Plain in West Tennessee, the Highland Rim and Nashville Basin in Middle Tennessee, and the Cumberland Plateau, Cumberland Mountains, Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians, and Blue Ridge Mountains in East Tennessee. Landscapes on the route vary from flat, level plains and swamplands in the west to irregular rolling hills, cavernous limestone bluffs, and deep river gorges in the central part of the state, to plateau tablelands, broad river valleys, narrow mountain passes, and mountain peaks in the east. The Interstate parallels the older U.S. Route 70 (US 70) corridor for its entire length in the state. It has interchanges and concurrencies with four other mainline Interstate Highways, and has five auxiliary routes: I-140, I-240, I-440, I-640, and I-840. I-40 in Tennessee was mostly complete by the late 1960s, having been constructed in segments. The stretch between Memphis and Nashville, completed in 1966, was the state's first major Interstate segment to be finished. The last planned section was completed in 1975, and much of the route has been widened and reconstructed since then. The I-40 corridor between Memphis and Nashville is known as Music Highway because it passes through a region which was instrumental in the development of American popular music. In Memphis, the highway is also nationally significant due to a 1971 U.S. Supreme Court case which established the modern process of judicial review of infrastructure projects. Community opposition to the highway's proposed routing through Overton Park led to a nearly-25-year activist campaign which culminated in the case. This resulted in the state abandoning the highway's original alignment and relocating it onto what was originally a section of I-240.

Web Search Results

• Taxpayers lose and unions win in Obama's $50B ...

  # Taxpayers lose and unions win in Obama's $50B boondoggle President Obama calls his latest attempt to revive the economy a “Plan to Renew and Expand America’s Roads, Railways and Runways.” I’m calling it “The Mother of all Big Dig Boondoggles.” Like the infamous “Big Dig” highway spending project in Boston, this latest White House infrastructure spending binge guarantees only two results: Taxpayers lose; unions win. [...] So, the president says he wants to “put people back to work” through a new “upfront investment” in surface transportation, airports and the air-traffic control system paid for by repealing tax incentives for the oil and gas industries — followed by massive, unpaid-for expenditures on pie-in-the-sky high-speed rail, “environmental sustainability” and “livability,” whatever that means. [...] The blunt instrument used to give unions a leg up is the “project labor agreement (PLA),” which in theory sets reasonable pre-work terms and conditions — but in practice, requires contractors to hand over exclusive bargaining control; to pay inflated, above-market wages and benefits; and to fork over dues money and pension funding to corrupt, cash-starved labor organizations.

• Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt ...

  Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala : r/TheAllinPodcasts.

• s $50B Boondoggle: Classic Waste, or Part of a Political…

  One is typical government waste, fraud and abuse. They've allocated 42 billion for rural Internet, haven't hooked anyone up. And we could spend

• Frustrations over NITAAC's $50B CIO-SP4 GWAC boiling over

  massive governmentwide vehicle, you can’t pull punches or have any surprises. NITAAC could have avoided some of these surprises like with the inconsistencies in the RFP.” [...] At the heart of the matter for most of the protestors is the SBA Mentor-Protégé program and the change NITAAC made that said if the mentor was a large business, the small business protégé couldn’t use more than one example of past performance from the relationship. PSC’s Kostro said this would mean companies would have to get 39 new pieces of information from their government client approved in a matter of weeks before the proposal deadline. [...] All of the confusion and consternation over the solicitation for the CIO-SP4 IT services governmentwide acquisition contract finally has boiled over. Five companies filed pre-award protests with the Government Accountability Office after the National Institutes of Health Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC) failed to clarify several questions about its request for proposals.

• S.766 - Billion Dollar Boondoggle Act of 2025 119th ...

  Billion Dollar Boondoggle Act of 2025​​ This bill requires the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to collect information from federal agencies and report to