President Obama's high-speed rail initiative has gone off the tracks as part of the budget deal struck with Republicans.

Details of the agreement released Tuesday showed that high-speed rail financing for this year had been eliminated, and some question remained about financial commitments made earlier.

Obama had sought to spend more than $50 billion to make rail access available to most Americans over the next quarter century. New Republican governors and Republicans in Congress called it a boondoggle.

IWatch News wrote earlier about Washington's Newest Gravy Train: High-Speed Rail

Bob Schafer just laid off another worker.

Schafer is a manager at Ranger Construction, a Florida-based company that builds roads in a state famously fueled by its own growth. For more than three decades, Ranger Construction helped connect all that development, but the economic recession has forced the company to cut more than one-third of its staff, which has dwindled to under a thousand.

Looking ahead, Schafer worries whether state funding cuts might eventually mean laying off even more workers. “It could shut the lights out,” Schafer says. At more than six feet tall, Schafer makes an imposing figure at construction sites. He appears as focused as he is bald — which is to say completely.

Schafer just came from checking his team’s progress with a four-mile highway widening project on Interstate 95 in Brevard County, a job that will keep about 30 of his employees on the payroll for the foreseeable future. Ranger Construction won the project, which is funded by the economic stimulus law, amid some tough bidding.

“A lot of these guys,” Schafer says, speaking of struggling home and commercial builders, “now they think they’re all road builders. So we went from projects with four or five bidders to maybe 15 or 20.”

The 2009 stimulus law helped Ranger Construction. But at the same time, Florida’s cash-strapped legislature is raiding state transportation funds to help pay for programs like education and health care. If you compare what Florida received under the stimulus law and what legislators in Tallahassee propose to take away again on top of last year, it’s nearly a wash, Schafer says.

Nearly five years ago, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer of New York landed a million-dollar highway earmark in a transportation bill chock full of more than 6,300 such projects. As earmarks go, it failed to gain much attention. This same bill, after all, directed billions elsewhere for projects far more visible than a rural highway leading to a Catskills Mountain resort planned by a prominent real estate developer.

The relatively small earmark came after the developer, Concord Associates’ Louis Cappelli, and his team opened their wallets and donated a combined $100,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, then headed by Schumer. None had ever contributed to that political action committee (PAC) before. Some of the same executives gave an additional $64,000 to the committee over the next few years, after the bill with the earmark was signed into law.

But the New York Department of Transportation did not claim this specific million-dollar earmark. Its intended purpose — to study widening Route 17 from two to three lanes in each direction over a 43 mile stretch — did not appear to be a priority for the state. The stretch of road in question starts near the village of Harriman and extends northwest to Sullivan County, where Cappelli envisions a huge “Entertainment City” to restore the Catskills to its former fame as a vacation destination and generator of much-needed local jobs. A wider road might cut travel time from New York City, some 100 miles away from the resort and its planned time-shares, dinner theater, riding stable, winery, artists colony, and spa. Empire Resorts Inc., of which Cappelli is also a director and major shareholder, would oversee horse racing and video gaming operations at the site. Empire also hopes to develop a full casino on 29 acres situated just across the highway. The potential is massive; but the planning is still largely unclear.