Ted Cruz pumps up Keystone job numbers
“I will say it was disconcerting to see yesterday, the first day of the Biden administration, straight out of the gate, President Biden announced that he was canceling the Keystone pipeline. … That is a project that right now, today, has 1,200 good-paying union jobs. And in 2021, the Keystone pipeline was scheduled to have more than 11,000 jobs, including 8,000 union jobs, for contracts worth $1.6 billion.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), at a hearing on Pete Buttigieg’s nomination to be transportation secretary, Jan. 21, 2021
The Fact Checker has a long history of looking into puffed-up job estimates for the Keystone XL pipeline, an international energy project that stalled through the administrations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump and now appears frozen.
On his first day in office, President Biden revoked a key federal permit Trump had issued. At Buttigieg’s confirmation hearing the next day, Cruz said that “in 2021, the Keystone pipeline was scheduled to have more than 11,000 jobs.”
Our first fact check of Keystone job numbers appeared almost a decade ago, in 2011, and we have published many more in recent years. So regular readers may recall that, barring 50 or so permanent positions, these 11,000 estimated positions are for temporary construction work.
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The Pinocchio Test
Cruz cited a real estimate of approximately 11,000 jobs, but he left out that they were all temporary. In the same report, the State Department said the Keystone XL pipeline, if built, would require only 35 to 50 permanent positions.
The missing context is key here, obscuring half the story. Cruz earns Two Pinocchios.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/26/ted-cruz-pumps-up-keystone-job-numbers/
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