DALLAS — The Transportation Department still does not properly account for how it awards federal Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery grants five years after the program began, the General Accountability Office
GAO said there is poor documentation of how some of the projects that receive TIGER discretionary grants actually assist the program's stated long-term goal of advancing projects of regional or national significance.
"As a result, Department of Transportation lacks a framework to assess the performance of the overall TIGER program in achieving its long-term outcomes, and Congress lacks information on whether the amounts invested in the program have had their intended impact on the nation's transportation infrastructure," GAO said.
The new report is a follow-up to a GAO report in May 2014 that found the department could not document its rationale in 2013 for giving funding priority to 43 projects with low technical evaluations rather than 22 projects with higher ratings in the competitive grant program.
Many projects received TIGER grants in 2013 despite being submitted past the stated deadline, GAO said, and several projects with low ratings had their scores revised upward.
"Absence of documentation of such decisions can give rise to challenges to the integrity of the evaluation process and the rationale for the decisions made," the congressional watchdog agency said in May.
The selection procedure has been revised by program administrators since then, GAO said, but the rules are still not clear enough.
"For example, the revised guidelines do not specify who may request the advancement of a lower-rated project and at what point in the process those decisions can occur," GAO said.
TIGER grants have provided almost $4.1 billion to 342 projects since the program was established as part of the 2009 stimulus package. The total includes $600 million for 72 projects in the sixth round of awards announced earlier this month.
GAO said it would study the 2014 TIGER project selection process to see how well the revised guidelines address the earlier recommendations.
Sen. David Vitter, R-La., the ranking Republican member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee whose April 2013 letter to GAO prompted the TIGER probe, said the criteria for deciding which projects get grants have more to do with politics than transportation.
"The application and project selection process have been major concerns because they lack any merit-based structure and transparency, making the program more about meeting the Obama administration's political needs versus our infrastructures needs," he said.
The GAO report shows that the TIGER program continues to operate without proper administration or transparency despite the May recommendations, said Vitter. "Since it started the TIGER grant program has been plagued by a lack of transparency in the decision-making process and mishandling of the management of the program," Vitter said.
Program administrators have done a good job in ensuring that TIGER grants are equally distributed across the country and that rural projects get their fair share, GAO said.
Overall numbers indicate TIGER administrators have successfully used the discretionary grants to leverage other funds, but results from individual projects are less clear, GAO said.
TIGER grants accounted for 30% of total funding of 20 highway and transit projects analyzed by GAO, with 34% coming from local sources, 11% from states, 23% from other federal programs, and 3% from bond proceeds and private investments.
