Elaine Chao's Transportation Dept. designated a special liaison to help with grant applications and other priorities from her husband Mitch McConnell’s state of Kentucky, paving the way for grants totaling at least $78 million for favored projects
The Transportation Department under Secretary Elaine Chao designated a special liaison to help with grant applications and other priorities from her husband Mitch McConnell’s state of Kentucky, paving the way for grants totaling at least $78 million for favored projects as McConnell prepared to campaign for reelection.
“Todd probably smoothed the way, I mean, you know, used his influence,” Mattingly said in a POLITICO interview. “Everybody says that projects stand on their own merit, right? So if I’ve got 10 projects, and they’re all equal, where do you go to break the tie?” “Where a Cabinet secretary is doing things that are going to help her husband get reelected, that starts to rise to the level of feeling more like corruption to the average American. … I do think there are people who will see that as sort of ‘swamp behavior,’” said John Hudak, a Brookings Institution scholar who has studied political influence in federal grant-making.
“Firstly, we are thankful that we had such good associations built with Sen. McConnell and the U.S. Department of Transportation because without them it wouldn’t have happened,” declared Owensboro Mayor Tom Watson, standing alongside three other local officials at a news conference celebrating the grant award.
Chao declined to comment for this story, and neither she nor Inman addressed questions about his role as intermediary between the department and Kentucky. Nonetheless, one former career official who was involved in the grant review process under multiple administrations, said that once the findings of the professional staff are presented to the secretary’s office, politics often plays a role in who gets the money.
“There’s a standard for government employees; they’re expected to be impartial,” said Canter.
McConnell has long had a special relationship with Owensboro, whose location on a bend of the Ohio River had once made it an ideal hub for manufacturing and agriculture. At the beginning of McConnell’s Senate career in the late 1980s, the decline of the tobacco industry and the rise of shopping malls far from the city center left Owensboro’s downtown dotted with boarded-up storefronts and empty streets that had once bustled decades earlier.
The city’s courting paid off in July 2005, when McConnell phoned new mayor, Tom Watson, and explained that he had secured $40 million in federal funds to overhaul the riverbank. At the other end, a sparkling 184,000-square-foot convention center was erected at a cost of more than $50 million dollars — roughly twice the town’s initial budget for the project — in a bid to bring large conventions and other business to the downtown area. In stark contrast, a rusting one-story auto repair shop sits across the street, a reminder of the earlier decay.
The city was still eyeing more projects to build on the earlier investments, but Owensboro’s remaining debt and scarce state resources limited the available funding options. Once again, the town turned to the federal government for support.In particular, the city wanted to widen and improve a section of Kentucky Highway 331 that connected the port’s river and rail shipping facilities to the federal highway system.
Back in Washington, Inman encouraged that perception. In a February 2017 email to McConnell’s chief of staff, he wrote, “The Secretary has indicated if you have a Ky-specific issue that we should flag for her attention to please continue to go through your normal channels but feel free to contact me directly as well so we can monitor or follow up as necessary.”
“I can’t tell you how exciting it is for me to see what the riverfront has spawned,” McConnell told the assembled crowd. “Not only the project itself, but all around it.”Inman, who is 48, grew up in Marshall County, Ky., about a two-hour drive from Owensboro. Soon after graduating from the University of Mississippi in 1993, he moved to Owensboro, where he ran a small insurance business from 1994 to 2017, according to his LinkedIn page.
His first posting was as director of operations, from which he helped steer requests for grant assistance from McConnell’s office — at Chao’s direction, according to the emails.
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