House Republicans voted Wednesday to chop about a fifth of Amtrak’s budget, less than a day after a deadly train crash that Democrats pointed to as a prime example of the dangers of shortchanging the nation’s transportation needs.

They also rebuffed Democrats’ attempts to provide money for an advanced speed-control technology that federal investigators later said would have prevented the crash.


“Based on what we know right now, we feel that had such a system been installed in this section of track, this accident would not have occurred,” National Transportation Safety Board member Robert Sumwalt told reporters Wednesday evening. Sumwalt, who is leading the crash probe, spoke hours after the House Appropriations Committee voted down a Democratic amendment that would have offered $825 million for the technology known as positive train control.

The amendment was part of hours of action on a GOP-backed $55 billion transportation and housing bill that Democrats attacked as an example of badly misplaced priorities. New York Rep. Steve Israel directly tied the crash to Congress’ spending decisions, saying people expect lawmakers to look out for their safety — and “last night, we failed them.”

“It’s not just our trains,” Israel said during a contentious markup Wednesday, which occurred as the wreckage from the seven-fatality derailment in Philadelphia was dominating the news channels. “It is our bridges that are failing. It is our highways that are congested and riddled with potholes. It is our runways, our airports. … We are divesting from America.”

Republicans said the cuts are necessary to stay under the spending caps that President Barack Obama and Congress agreed to four years ago. Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson admonished the Democrats — Israel in particular — for trying to link Tuesday’s crash to the spending debate “when you have no idea, no idea, what caused this accident.”

“Don’t use this tragedy in that way,” Simpson said, wagging his finger in a moment of visible anger. “It was beneath you.”

But the House proposal may face tougher sledding in the Senate, where transportation appropriations Chairwoman Susan Collins (R-Maine) said she hopes to set aside extra money for rail safety in her version of the funding bill. “We have had a lot of derailments,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of accidents. … So there are a lot of reasons for us to take a look at this.”

In the House, the Appropriations Committee voted 30-21 along party lines for a bill that would give Amtrak about $260 million less than its typical $1.4 billion share. The panel defeated Democratic amendments meant to restore or boost the funding.

The NTSB said the train was speeding at 106 mph as it entered a curve where the safe speed would have been 50 mph, just before it derailed — a detail that could indicate that the problem was human error, not a flaw with the rail lines or equipment. But Democrats said the House cuts fit a pattern of Congress failing to keep up with the needs of the nation’s aging transportation networks, which also include crumbling roads and bridges as well as ailing mass transit systems like D.C.’s Metro.

The accident came as Congress remains paralyzed on the wider question of how to pay for the nation’s highways and transit needs over the long term — with a key authorization law scheduled to expire in just 18 days.

Now’s not the time to be cutting rail, Democrats argued. “While we don’t know the cause of this accident, we do know that starving rail of funding will not enable safer train travel,” said top House Appropriations Democrat Nita Lowey of New York.

Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.), whose district includes parts of Philadelphia, noted that the House voted just last month to repeal the estate tax, with no offsets for the $260 billion the Treasury would lose over next 10 years. “I think we should be wiser than that,” he said.

But Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), who chairs the Appropriations panel with transportation oversight, urged caution, saying lawmakers should let the NTSB finish its investigation before deciding how to respond. (Such an investigation could take as long as 18 months.) Still, he said the crash was “sad and scary.”

“From those [NTSB] findings, Congress must look at what it can do to avoid this from ever happening again,” Diaz-Balart said.

Even before Tuesday’s crash, the House’s cuts would have had a hard time getting through the Senate, where Republican lawmakers have been loath to approve budget cuts that could reduce or eliminate Amtrak service in their states. Red states would take the brunt of such cuts, since the Northeast Corridor is Amtrak’s most profitable segment.

Still, the House proposal gave the White House and its supporters a handy weapon against the GOP spending plan.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest bemoaned the House proposal, saying it “certainly is not consistent with the kinds of priorities that the president has advocated.” Obama’s former transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, told reporters that “America is in a crisis when it comes to infrastructure,” even as he urged people to let the NTSB finish its probe of the crash.

Besides cutting Amtrak, the House bill would also slash funding for D.C.’s Metro system, which had a rush-hour meltdown just two days ago because of smoke in the tunnel connecting Washington with Northern Virginia, as well as a smoke-inhalation death in January. The committee agreed to a Republican-backed amendment that would boost Metro’s funding compared with what a subcommittee had approved, but it would still leave the transit system $50 million short of the $150 million it got last year.

In addition to the spending fights, the Senate has yet to follow the House’s lead in renewing the law that authorizes Amtrak, which expired in 2013. (Senators had been set to unveil their Amtrak reauthorization bill on Wednesday but postponed it because of the crash, sources told POLITICO.) And lawmakers from both parties have offered bills to add years to a congressionally imposed Dec. 31 deadline for railroads to install positive train control, which both the railroads and DOT say the industry cannot meet.

It’s unknown if that technology could have prevented Tuesday’s collision. One of the Democratic amendments that failed Tuesday would have provided federal money to pay for installation.

This year has already seen a series of deadly passenger rail accidents, including a rush-hour collision between a commuter train and an SUV that killed six people in Valhalla, New York, a deadly train-truck crash in Oxnard, California, and an Amtrak crash with a tractor-trailer in North Carolina that injured dozens of people. Railroad fatalities have also been on an upswing: Last year’s preliminary total of 813 deaths was 20 percent higher than just three years ago, partly reversing a sharp decline since the early 1990s, according to statistics from the Federal Railroad Administration.

Beyond rail, Congress is just 18 days from the expiration of the law that authorizes federal spending on highways, bridges and mass transit — and the biggest debate in the Capitol is whether to kick the can down the road to either July or December. The latest “report card” from the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the nation a D-plus on the state of its transportation infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the FAA is struggling to implement an advanced, GPS-based air traffic control system that’s supposed to improve safety and reduce congestion, and Vice President Joe Biden has likened the condition of some U.S. airports, like New York’s LaGuardia, to something out of “some Third World country.”

Tuesday’s collision, on an Amtrak route popular with Northeast politicians and business leaders, touched some lawmakers personally. Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) had ridden the same train Tuesday but got off in Wilmington, Del., minutes before it pulled into Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said that for part of Tuesday night he didn’t know the whereabouts of his son, who had been scheduled to ride Amtrak back to New Jersey. He later learned that his son had boarded the next train and was safe.

Menendez said in a floor speech Wednesday that the U.S. needs to “stop relying on patchwork upgrades to old, rusted 19th-century rail lines.”

“We in Congress are … failing to recognize the real world impacts,” he said. “We have a passenger rail bill that expired. We have a Highway Trust Fund on the brink of insolvency with no plans, no plans, to fix it sustainably. We have a crowded and outdated aviation system that we refuse to adequately fund. We have failed to upgrade with presently available technologies that can reduce the number of failures. We have appropriations bills aiming to cut already low funding levels of Amtrak in particular to meet an arbitrary budget cap. I can’t understand it.”

Carper offered similar words Wednesday. “We are not close to where we need to be for our roads, highways, bridges, transit and inter-city passenger rail,” he said in an interview. “We are just fairly miserable at that — and not just the ability to move people where they need to go when they need to go, but also to ensure our safety. We’ve got to do a better job, and last night’s train tragedy is just a grave reminder of that.”

LaHood said lawmakers should pass a multiyear highway authorization before another crisis occurs. “Have people in that building right there, the U.S. Capitol, show a little vision and leadership and pass a transportation bill before another bridge falls down, before a road collapses,” he said.

Kathryn A. Wolfe and Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.