Last week’s Amtrak crash in South Carolina shouldn’t have happened. Same with the one in Virginia the week before, and the derailment that happened last December in Washington state. If the politicians and advisors who designed the system had succeeded, no passenger rail train would have crashed in decades. That’s because Amtrak wouldn’t exist.

Amtrak was designed to fail quietly. Richard Nixon and his advisors had such little faith in American passenger rail that one of their biggest concerns was just making sure they didn’t catch the blame when it choo-choo-ed into the sunset. Amtrak is obviously still around. In fact it’s more popular than ever, and paid about 94 percent of its own operating costs in 2016. But Amtrak's origin story could be why a certain sort of politician views Amtrak as a giant leech on the public: President Trump’s latest budget proposal halves the federal government’s Amtrak commitment.

Indeed, from its inception, Amtrak was not guaranteed any long term funding. Unlike the highway system—which is also heavily subsidized—it had to proactively approach Congress to clear its debts. To understand how this funky setup happened, we need to take a trip back to 1970.

By then, almost every American passenger rail line (by law and charter, freight rail companies had to run passenger service) had been in the red for decades. Cheap air travel and the Interstate Highway System had siphoned off much of their ridership. Many railroads were veering toward bankruptcy. This put Congress and President Nixon in a tricky position. On one hand, most economic experts predicted that passenger rail travel wasn’t long for this world. On the other, if they did nothing, the public would likely blame them for allowing a Beloved American Institution to fail.

Congress came to the rescue with the Rail Passenger Service Act, signed into law by Nixon in 1970. It let railroad companies sell their intercity passenger lines to the government. The consolidated national railway (briefly known as Railpax before someone thought up Amtrak) was a brand new thing. Amtrak would be federally subsidized. However, the law provided no long term funding. “In the 1970s, there really wasn’t a clear financial sense of what the life of Amtrak would be,” says Joseph Kane, an associate fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies transportation. As reported in Governing magazine in 1996, most in Congress believed Amtrak would click its final clack within a few years. (Those founding documents also denied Amtrak right of way, which meant, until just a few years ago, passenger rail had to pull aside whenever freight needed the tracks.)

If Congress provided the nails, Nixon built the coffin. His design approach to Amtrak was mercenary. Nixon had his ombudsman rate the different national route proposals on how likely they were to fail. Then the ombudsman ranked how likely it would be for Nixon to catch the blame for each failure scenario. Nixon didn’t seem to have any personal qualms against passenger rail (at least, Amtrak wasn’t on the enemies list), he just didn’t see it going anywhere. He apparently wanted to expedite Amtrak’s demise so it wouldn’t be a long term burden on taxpayers.

Amtrak survived, though, through a mix of savvy administration and public popularity. But, the congressional shortchanging and Nixonian sabotage left scars. “Amtrak has historically jumped from one funding request to another, with very little sense of where its financial future was coming from,” says Kane. Throughout the Reagan ‘80s, and well into the ‘90s, politicians have harped on Amtrak’s supposedly outsize expense, relative to its ridership. It was only in 2015, when President Obama signed the FAST Act giving Amtrak funding for five years, that the organization finally had a guaranteed source of cash.