Waste of the Day: Top 10 Amtrak Execs Make $500K+ Each, Despite Record of Losses and Poor Service
The top ten executives at Amtrak each make between $504,000 and $780,000 per year, despite a long record of delayed and disrupted service, enormous federal funding and billions in Covid aid, OpenTheBooks.com auditors found.
Amtrak provided the pay of its top executives totaling $6.3 million, but denied OpenTheBooks.com’s Freedom of Information Act request for the payroll of its 19,000 employees, citing FOIA Exemption 6 , which permits the government to withhold information citing an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.
But our auditors calculated that those employees make an average of $121,000 – a hefty six-figure paycheck.
The national train service received $6.6 billion from the Federal Railroad Administration last year and another $6.8 billion this fiscal year.
Those figures are exclusive of a $1 billion payment from the CARES Act in 2020 (when ridership was down 90%), and another $1.7 billion from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. In just two years, that’s a total of $16 billion of taxpayer funding.
The results? From signal problems in Chicago and nationwide server issues, to wire issues in New Jersey, slowing and stopping trains, and expected service disruptions in the Adirondack line that runs between New York City and Hudson Valley into Montreal, the trains are often delayed. According to The Washington Post, the problems are unlikely to dissipate in the immediate future.
Amtrak’s trains are also taking losses.
The high-speed Acela running from Washington, D.C. to Boston, has long been a revenue driver for Amtrak, making $95 per mile traveled.
Now it loses $2 per mile.
In a June hearing before the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee Chairman Troy Nehls (R-TX) noted that since its 1971 creation, Amtrak has never made a profit.
Despite The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which gave historic funding to railroads, with a large portion of that money going to Amtrak, “Amtrak predicts it will lose roughly $1 billion per year, with those losses largely covered by the taxpayers,” Nehls said.
“In the private sector, accountability would come in the form of an ‘Out of Business’ sign,” OpenTheBooks.com Founder & CEO Adam Andrzejewski said. “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 #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com
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