California’s ambitious high speed rail program hit a snag yesterday when a peer review group recommended a halt to continued bond funding of the project until a long-term funding source can be secured.

During a recession, demand for public transit goes up. People cannot afford cars and still need to find their away around their local communities. Smart public policy would have added funding for public transit, for a variety of reasons. First of all, it would support public transit jobs. Second, it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Third, making it cheaper for folks to get around both increases productivity and makes it easier for someone to take a job outside their immediate area. So there are a lot of wins here.

A good deal of money earmarked for high speed rail was sacrificed in the 2011 appropriations deal. Billions of federal dollars will not go toward constructing a networked of high speed rail lines across the country.

However, the Transportation Department has been able to award willing states with grants, mainly because of money turned down from the initial stimulus package by states with Tea Party governors like Florida and Wisconsin. Today, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood took Florida’s $2 billion and gave it to 15 states and Amtrak.

Food safety is cut 1% below the previous year’s level. The Labor Department program for green jobs has been cut. The Justice Department’s asset forfeiture fund, which helps fund its criminal investigations, got a $500 million hit. The Special Supplemental Feeding Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) has been cut $500 million from 2010 levels. The total reduction in the Financial Services area, barely a year out from passing Dodd-Frank, approaches 10%. There’s a $942 million cut to the Community Development Fund program, which is nearly 1/4 of the total. And two programs in the health care law, Kent Conrad’s co-ops and Ron Wyden’s Free Choice voucher, have been eliminated.

In the end, the deal to a avert a government shutdown and keep funding going for the rest of the fiscal year amounted to a $38.5 billion cut in appropriations from the 2010 baseline. There was a time last December, with the McCaskill-Sessions compromise, promoted by the very conservative Republican ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, when Republicans agreed to a 2011 budget appropriation $20 billion ABOVE the 2010 baseline. If mixed in with the tax cut deal, that level could have been put in place. Therefore, this deal inked late last night cut $58.5 billion from the level of McCaskill-Sessions. This equals all of the tax advantages that didn’t extend current law, outside of the business expensing provisions, in the December 2010 tax cut deal. The entire stimulus is gone.

Scott Walker did not run primarily on a platform of killing public employee unions and becoming a conservative darling. His slogan during the Wisconsin gubernatorial campaign was “Wisconsin is open for business.” He put a premium on attracting new businesses to the state.

Now, his policies have sent other businesses throughout the state scurrying.

On the heels of massive public demonstrations in Wisconsin and Ohio after Republican governors over-played their hands in seeking to destroy collective bargaining for public employees and make punitive cuts to education, Florida may be next in line. Tuesday, March 8 has been designated the day to “Awake The State“, with over thirty demonstrations planned across the state, spanning from Key West to Pensacola. There will even be multiple demonstrations in Tallahassee and Miami.

I noted yesterday that Rick Scott returned $2.4 billion in high speed rail money to the federal government, which would halt a planned project for an intercity link between Tampa and Orlando. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has dealt with this before with respect to Ohio and Wisconsin (there are those two states again), and he simply redistributed the money to states who wanted it. However, in this case, Florida Congressional leaders, Democrats and Republicans, are scheming to get the deal done anyway.

Let’s recap what turned out to be a busy Wednesday in Congress, particularly in the House.

You undoubtedly heard about Russ Feingold being evicted from his U.S. Senate seat by Wisconsin voters last week. What you may not know is that Wisconsin elected a Republican governor as well, and he’s accepted his victory with all the grace divisive partisan bluster we’ve learned to expect from the GOP.