A Government Accountability Office (GAO) examination has raised serious concerns about the process by which Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao determined project grant recipients, finding that it did not treat all applicants with “the assurance of fairness.”
One of the beneficiaries of that process was Boone County, Kentucky — a jurisdiction represented by Chao’s husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Politico reported on Tuesday that a $67.4 million grant application for Boone was “initially flagged by professional staff as incomplete.” After the Department of Transportation gave Boone and a minority of the other incomplete applicants a second chance to fix their submission, Chao selected it as among the 26 grant winners from an initial pool of 258 applicants. Continue reading