A DOT spokesman said the change was necessary to allow for a more detailed consideration of the grant proposals.

“We are using more information, better information and all the information available rather than eliding some of it in a catch-all” rating that technical staff would give, said the spokesman.

The year Boone County received its grant, the secretary received a 25-page spreadsheet with 14 different lists assessing the merits of 118 small projects and 47 large ones, without a short list of recommended projects.

“In this case, unfortunately, the full list of statutorily eligible projects was sent to the secretary, regardless of merit scores,” Fleming said. “This method of presenting information on projects (and the volume of information presented) would make it challenging for any decision-maker to compare projects and readily see how 165 projects scored across all criteria.”

Under this process, the secretary herself consults in a limited way with a very small group of close advisers rather than relying on the judgment of professionals from the technical staff and the modal administrations. It also gives DOT a means to avoid charges of not following its own data-based procedures in favor of politically motivated grant decisions, as has been the case in the past when GAO found that the Obama administration was deviating from DOT’s “established procedures and recognized internal control practices.”

A DOT spokesman insisted that “GAO never said the secretary goes off and winnows down the list on her own or substitutes her preferred projects or processes, and the secretary does not,” and noted that “the grant-making process is driven by dedicated career staff and technical experts who spend thousands of hours analyzing project applications.”

Still, GAO did find that the process concentrated power in Chao’s hands and eliminated the ability of those technical experts to express their own judgments by giving high, medium or low overall ratings to the projects.

In the end, the GAO reported, more than half of the projects that Chao chose had been scored by professional staff as having a “high uncertainty” rating related to their cost-effectiveness — a technical deficiency that Fleming said “raises a red flag.” Only 38 percent of all submitted proposals were given this problematic rating.

A DOT spokesperson said the Boone County project was “a high-performing application that met and exceeded both the merit and statutory criteria.” But despite multiple requests, the department declined to say whether the Boone County application was among those rated as highly uncertain by the technical evaluation team, and the spokesperson downplayed the uncertainty rating as “only a small piece of the criteria.”



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It was under this new process that Kentucky was awarded its largest grant yet under the Trump administration.

Boone County, Kentucky’s fourth-largest by population, is a fast-growing suburb across the Ohio border from Cincinnati, home to an estimated 131,000 residents. Once a reliable Republican stronghold, the county has recently become more of a battleground in statewide races — shifting 11 points toward the Democrat in the most recent governor’s race. The Republican still won the county by 14 points, but that represented a huge drop-off in a place that had delivered a 39-point margin for McConnell in 2014.

Preventing a similar suburban revolt will be a key task for McConnell’s campaign next November.

Much of the county’s growth has been driven by the nearby Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport’s rapid expansion as a shipping hub for companies including Amazon, FedEx and DHL. As that business grew, increasing congestion by delivery trucks spurred an effort by state and local officials to overhaul the county’s highway interchanges. But the Boone County project, which was submitted to DOT by the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, was rejected by the Obama administration.

Almost immediately after the new president, Donald Trump, chose Chao as DOT secretary in 2017, Boone County’s top executive, Gary Moore, was in contact with DOT’s Todd Inman, according to emails obtained by POLITICO. Inman had no official role in the grant-review process, but frequently served as a semiofficial liaison for Kentucky interests that crossed the secretary’s desk, emails show.

Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao chats with Boone County Judge Executive Gary Moore. | Cheri Lawson/WEKU

In February 2017, during a visit to Washington, Moore asked Inman for a “personal meeting.” The following week, McConnell’s office emailed Inman requesting that Chao meet with Moore and other Kentucky officials. After the previously rejected application for $67.4 million was refiled under the DOT program known as INFRA — which covers freight improvements — Moore met with Chao in December 2017, according to calendar records.

Then, in May 2018, Moore emailed Inman asking whether he anticipated any “announcements in the near future.” Inman replied asking if they could talk on the phone instead.

Approximately one hour later, Kentucky officials received an email from DOT staff alerting them that the Boone County application was missing required information that they needed to send to DOT promptly.

The DOT spokesperson said Moore was “one of hundreds of local officials who contacted the department to ask for updates on their project” and that Inman simply told Moore that the evaluation process was ongoing. Moore told POLITICO that Inman did not offer him any particular advice — but when asked about Moore’s subsequent email thanking Inman for “the valuable advise [sic] along the way,” Moore declined to comment further.

According to the department, the message about the Boone County grant was one of 26 such emails sent out that day at the direction of the senior review team, a collection of high-level Chao staffers and senior DOT administrators, which met the previous day.

The problem facing the application was its private funding sources. By law, large multimillion dollar DOT grant requests are required to carefully document that all nonfederal sources of project funding are “stable, reliable, and available.” But the Boone County project’s application included a vague $500,000 private funding commitment secured through a “verbal agreement” with an unnamed “local developer.” That omission would have made the application as originally submitted ineligible per the grant program’s terms.

Moreover, according to Moore, the addition of these funds was key to the application’s resubmission — after failing in a previous grant round under the Obama administration, DOT career staff had advised Boone County to include matching local and private funds in the next application.

With little time remaining before the INFRA grant awards were decided, the department gave Boone County the opportunity to revise the application and provide a letter explaining that the county could rely on contributions from several companies with ties to the nearby airport shipping hub, such as FedEx and Kroger.

Once the grant award for the Boone County project was announced in June 2018, Moore reached back out to Inman to express his gratitude.

“Todd, the press roll out here in Kentucky has been outstanding,” Moore wrote to Inman on June 18. “Thank you again for everything. I am willing any time the secretary may be passing through our area to host her in anyway beneficial.”



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Now, as construction crews continue work on overhauling the interchanges on Kentucky’s I-71-/I-75, a major freight corridor serving a brand-new Amazon shipping hub, the process by which the grant was made is under increasing scrutiny. Without intervention from DOT — the kind that 42 projects, including Boone County, received but that 55 others didn’t get — the project almost certainly would have been rejected yet again.

DOT’s inability to explain why some projects got selected for follow-up to fix mistakes or inadequacies in their applications while others didn’t is of particular concern to the GAO officials who performed the investigation into the program. They repeatedly asked DOT officials for any documentation or explanation of their methods and DOT was unable to provide any, according to GAO’s report.

DOT officials told POLITICO that they followed up with those grant applicants who “were best aligned with the required criteria.” But GAO officials said they were unable to unearth any objective criteria for follow-up, making the INFRA grants program “vulnerable to criticism [about] the integrity of the process and ultimately the decisions that are made,” according to Fleming.