Since Amtrak’s creation in 1970, the U.S. passenger railroad company has carried millions of passengers each year. In fiscal year 2024, over 32 million people rode Amtrak’s buses and trains, which carry passengers nationwide.
A federally chartered company, Amtrak receives a number of federal subsidies, including direct investments and grants that aid the company’s operations. In 2024, the U.S. government gave $2.4 billion to Amtrak in federal appropriations.
But at a tech conference earlier this month, Trump ally and Department of Governmental Efficiency head Elon Musk called Amtrak “a sad situation,” compared to other country’s train systems. Privatization, he claimed, is the only way to fix the railroad’s issues.
Former presidents, including Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, have similarly called for Amtrak’s privatization, citing concerns over the expense it takes to operate the public entity.
The Biden administration allocated an “enormous amount of money” to improving infrastructure, said Peter Brassard, the chair of the Rhode Island Association of Railroad Passengers. He referenced the 2024 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which made more than $4.2 billion available for transportation initiatives.
But now, no one knows what the Trump administration has in store for the railroad company, Brassard said.
After a number of private railroad companies went bankrupt more than 50 years ago, Congress decided to create a national passenger rail provider that would later become Amtrak.
Today, the Northeast Corridor, which serves the Northeast’s five major metropolitan zones — Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. — is Amtrak’s most heavily trafficked rail line, according to the organization.
Last year, Providence, which sits on the NEC line, was the 14th busiest Amtrak stop in the country, according to Steven Musen, the treasurer of the Rhode Island Association of Railroad Passengers.
More than 800,000 people boarded the Amtrak at Providence’s station last year, he added.
Amtrak ridership has also recovered since the COVID-19 pandemic, now exceeding pre-pandemic numbers, according to Charles St. Martin, chief public affairs officer of the Rhode Island Department of Transportation.
Amtrak often sees a profit in the NEC line due to its high ridership count, Brassard said. In 2024, passengers on the NEC accounted for more than 40% of Amtrak’s total ridership. Outside of the NEC, “most of those trains do not turn any kind of profit,” he said.
While the federal government is Amtrak’s majority owner, Amtrak must still operate as a “for-profit company,” according to its website.
According to St. Martin, RIDOT “is not involved in any discussions around privatization.”
Amtrak creates a profit through ridership and ticket fares, Brassard said. He added that the Northeast is unique in generating a profit compared to the rest of the country because of its high population density and the close proximity of its major metropolitan areas.
If Amtrak becomes privatized and forced to cover all of its costs, “there would be dramatic decreases in service,” said Professor of Economics Matthew Turner MA’92 PhD’95.
Turner explained that if Amtrak was privatized, several routes could be eliminated since the company would not be required to “provide money to losing services.”
While operating Amtrak might make sense in the NEC, the only way Turner believes the country can see if Amtrak is worth the price is “to let (it) run as a private enterprise.”
“Amtrak is bragging about having rail service between places in Alabama in their annual report this year … but there’s kids that go to bed hungry. Is that really what we want to be doing?,” he added.
Amtrak declined to comment, referring The Herald to RIDOT.
Turner noted that while Amtrak faces criticism about the slowness of its trains relative to high-speed rail systems in China, countries like China invest more in their transportation systems because more people rely on it.
But Maddock Thomas ’26, a rail and transportation student researcher, believes that part of the reason the U.S. struggles to provide high speed rail — despite its attempts — is how complicated its railroad system is and Amtrak’s role within it.
“The U.S. is a little bit anomalous in that a lot of our infrastructure is owned by private corporations,” said Thomas, who explained that many other countries have publicly owned rail inrastructure.
Since railroads are “very complicated, capital intensive systems,” publicly owned railroads end up being more efficient for a country, Thomas said. Having a single “operator that can coordinate all the movement allows you to have really highly scheduled operations.”
Amtrak also “doesn’t own its own infrastructure,” only owning a small portion of the railroad tracks it operates, he added.
Private railroad companies “make tens of billions of dollars in profit a year,” but often pay these margins to their shareholders, rather than investing in infrastructure, Thomas explained. While Amtrak gets prioritized access to railroad tracks as a federal entity, the lack of development and funds private rail companies put into their rail system affects Amtrak too.
Amtrak not owning its own infrastructure often causes it to face delays for freight trains and results in the company not receiving the amount of funding that other national rail services do.
But, while Thomas does not think privatization is a solution to Amtrak issues, he does not see it as a real threat.
The idea of privatizing Amtrak “comes around fairly often, but it’s not super politically viable,” Thomas said, noting that the rail system is “something that a lot of Americans, especially in red states, use, because we have fewer alternative options, especially outside of big cities.”
Still, Thomas believes the transportation sector in the country deserves more attention and funding.
“One of the problems this country has is we pass big transportation bills every once in a while, and we don’t really have stable transportation funding other than for the highway system,” Thomas said. “Establishing something like that for rail would enable us to improve our system significantly.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Sanai Rashid lives in Long Island, New York. As an English and Economics concentrator, she is passionate about storytelling and how numbers and data create narratives in ways words alone cannot. When she is not writing, you can find her trying new pizza places in Providence or buying another whale stuffed animal.
