WASHINGTON — The question on congressional culpability for the deadly train derailment in Philadelphia was not even finished when House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio gruffly declared it “stupid.”

“It’s all about funding. It’s all about funding,” he said, as he turned from the podium Thursday to abruptly close his weekly news conference. “Well, obviously, it’s not about funding. The train was going twice the speed limit. Adequate funds were there, no money’s been cut from rail safety. And it’s hard for me to imagine that people take the bait on some of the nonsense that gets spewed around here.”

But the debate over Amtrak funding after the derailment of Northeast Regional Train No. 188 will not be so easily dismissed. House Republicans cut more than $1 billion from President Obama’s $2.45 billion Amtrak funding request the day after the derailment, and Democrats may be asked to explain why hundreds of millions of dollars from the 2009 stimulus law was earmarked for Amtrak’s Northeast corridor to little obvious effect.

“Speaker Boehner speaks with massive ignorance,” Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said Friday outside Pennsylvania Station in New York, lamenting the nonfunctioning positive train control safety system aboard the derailed train.