Political Quotes

“This amendment strikes $150 million in grants from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, known as WMATA. This area that we are operating in, that we are speaking about, is full of highly educated professionals, many of whom work for the government or government contractors and associated jobs. Some of the surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia have some of the highest median incomes per county in the country. It is pretty affluent around here. Like many transit agencies, even before the pandemic, WMATA had an unsustainable budget outlook and operation, getting 53 percent of its budget through State and local subsidies--not through fares of all the well-to-do folks around the area riding, but through subsidies. If you were to run a business where you only made 47 percent of your budget in revenues, you would be out of business pretty darn quick. During the pandemic, most Federal agencies sent their workers home. Even so, WMATA received over $2 billion from pandemic-era legislation to keep it afloat. Nobody was riding because everybody was sent home, but this place sent them $2 billion to keep paying the bills when nobody was riding--only in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, only in America. We are now post-shutdown, and Federal workers are still not going to the office.…”