WATCHING WASHINGTON, RAILWAY AGE APRIL 2025 ISSUE: As the dust settles following a tendentious Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) superintendency of Amit Bose, stakeholders await a successor—presumably, White House nominee David Armstrong Fink, a former president of regional Pan Am Railways (now part of CSX), who awaits Senate confirmation.
If the FRA, whose primary mission is rail safety regulation, is not to be the partisan inverse of what it allegedly was under Bose—an employment agency for rail workers at the expense of productivity-enhancing innovative technology—the new Administrator must impartially follow fact-based science and respect benefit-cost analysis. Quite simply, be technology-neutral and follow the rule of law.
As for FRA’s secondary role disbursing congressionally authorized grants for Amtrak, regional and short line railroads and rail safety programs, following the law may prove problematic. The President’s Cabinet members and agency heads so far appear chosen largely for unquestioned loyalty and are expected to exhibit vigor in an all-acceleration-and-no-brakes legally questionable assault on funds Congress authorized.
No matter assurances the nominee may express in Senate confirmation hearings, FRA is an Executive Branch agency answerable to a President pursuing a unitary form of government with seeming unchecked power ceded to an unelected alter-ego—First Pal Elon Musk—DOGEdly overseeing a helter-skelter, chainsaw massacre of federal agencies.
Given that POTUS 47 and his First Pal have suspended federally funded domestic and international humanitarian aid and targeted funding for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—in contravention of congressional directives and due process—it is probable FRA headcount and funding cuts will occur.
Although as of late March the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had not breached FRA’s headquarters, DOGE “whiz kids” (typically in their 20s with masked identities) likely are delaying entry, pending arrival of the new Administrator—who will be expected by the POTUS to extend every hospitality.
At risk is some $41 billion in congressionally authorized program funding—$34 billion of which is earmarked over the next two years for Amtrak. The Supreme Court, with a record of indulging this President, eventually will rule whether the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which prohibits such confiscation, means what it says.
Among FRA programs at risk of impoundment (dollar amounts in parenthesis) are:
- Amtrak grants for its National Network, Northeast Corridor restoration and enhancement, intercity route expansion, development of high-speed corridors and federal-state partnerships ($34 billion).
- Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvement (CRISI) grants for rehabilitating or building rural-area freight rail infrastructure to improve safety, efficiency and reliability ($4 billion).
- Railroad grade crossing elimination ($2.2 billion).
- Grants for railroad safety, research and development ($650 million).
Comes Now, Safety
FRA’s preeminent mission is promoting rail safety through rulemakings, accident investigations, safety culture assessments, audits, standards settings, worker certifications and civil penalty enforcement.
It is alleged that President Biden’s FRA chief Amit Bose, in an effort to increase rail employment, diluted the agency’s safety mission by suppressing the transformative role of technology, whose positive externalities increase productivity and reduce costs—the sine qua non for railroads to meet customer expectations and compete with subsidized barges and trucks. At an event honoring Bose, two sources present say a rail union official called him “the Jesus” of rail labor.
The FRA, under Bose, mandated two-person train crews, absent evidence the second on-board crew member increases train safety; established dispatcher and signal employee certification standards having negative benefit/cost ratios; impeded deployment of advanced train, air brake and track inspection technology; and failed to rule on carrier waiver requests to test new safety technology. Those actions are being challenged in federal courts as “arbitrary and capricious” in violation of federal law.
As for Bose’s two-person crew mandate, union officer dissidents support a carrier-preferred mutually beneficial collective bargaining approach to minimum crew size, citing opportunity to gain for members increased job security, higher wages, more predicable work schedules and greater job satisfaction. Reassigned ground-based conductors would utilize 21st century technology—drones, computers and artificial intelligence—to ensure operational safety, with FRA ensuring compliance.
FRA Veterans’ Advice
If the new Administrator is sufficiently humble to seek advice, available are two highly respected fellow Republican former FRA Administrators—Allan Rutter and Ronald L. Batory. Rutter served as George W. Bush’s Administrator from 2001-2004, and Batory from 2018-2021 during the current President’s first term.
Rutter tells Railway Age that what keeps every administrator up at night is “the black swan theory—a highly improbable event way down the bell curve of likelihood but with significant impacts.” For example, the 2005 Graniteville, S.C., misaligned switch crash resulting in release of chlorine gas killing nine and injuring hundreds; the 2002 Minot, N.Dak., derailment resulting in release of anhydrous ammonia killing one and injuring hundreds; and the February 2023 East Palestine, Ohio, derailment resulting in release of hazardous materials requiring thousands to be evacuated.
A new Administrator, says Rutter, should embrace transparency, recognizing that “security cameras, ubiquitous smart phones and drones” will provide extensive imagery on social media.
What is available to the new Administrator is artificial intelligence (AI) that Rutter only recently has been utilizing in his latest post at Texas A&M University’s Transportation Institute. AI, he says, “should help railroads and railcar owners move beyond defect detection to predictive maintenance [and assist inspectors] in completng reports with speed and accuracy. Its biggest promise could be in finding meaning amidst the flood of data being collected.”
Rutter supports granting project-specific waivers for relief from safety regulations as complementary to FRA research. “If you can find more bad-order cars through enroute technology than in the yard, there would be more work for carmen,” Rutter says, citing an April 2019 Batory-issued waiver allowing BNSF to use wayside detectors for measuring wheel temperatures in determining brake-health effectiveness.
Between then and mid-2024, BNSF eliminated 11,215 inspection hours while providing carmen with 23,144 additional hours of repair work—“in shops rather than in yards in blistering heat and crippling cold,” Rutter says. Bose did not extend or expand the waiver as requested by BNSF.
The late Joseph Boardman, a Republican who also served as FRA Administrator (2005-2008) under Bush 43, told Railway Age in 2017 that an Administrator coming from the private sector needs a deputy “steeped in the ways of Washington’s inscrutable bureaucracy. If you don’t, you will waste too much time getting anything done.” Rutter credits his master’s degree in public administration and state government posts under four Texas governors, including Bush 43, as providing him with “professional bureaucrat training.”
Batory, a career railroader and President of two (Belt Railway of Chicago and Conrail) counsels listening to staff. “Employee opinion and expertise matter; the boss doesn’t always know best.” He also supports performance-based safety standards in place of prescriptive regulations—FRA establishing a desired outcome and carriers innovating to reach the goal. “Technology moves faster than the ink can be applied on regulations,” Batory says.
Rutter cautions the shift to performance standards “is a tough road for regulators [and] certainly a big leap for the rail industry because the consequences of rail incidents are so large.” A successful transition, he says, requires “common understanding” of data and “clearly stated standards to motivate repeatable safe behaviors.”
Into a POTUS 47-created chaotic and politically charged environment will step a new FRA Administrator whose job security depends on approval by a President who reacts menacingly to disagreement. Should much of congressionally authorized Amtrak funding and that for rail safety and rural area rail service be marched up a scaffold by DOGE, it’s going to take—to borrow a hockey term from our once-friends in Canada—an “elbows up” defense to save it.
Frank N. Wilner is author of “Railroads & Economic Regulation (An Insider’s Account)” and “Amtrak: Past, Present, Future,” each available from Simmons-Boardman Books, 800-228-9670.
