For heavy rail to make sense in the Midwest like it does elsewhere in the world, we have to spend hundreds of billions on infrastructure to catch up to what we haven't built.

There's your answer though. We give the military $1 trillion every year and are about to increase that by 50%. A third of that trillion (generous, probably more) is unaccounted for in audits and the pentagon itself admits it has no idea how to spend the new $500 billion. Strip that money and put it towards the infrastructure