Mr. Shelby’s job was about “trying to make sure we got our fair share,” said Sandy Stimpson, the mayor of Mobile, where an estimated one in five people live in poverty.
Mr. Shelby has funded roads and bridges and hospitals and public libraries and drinking water systems; university research on topics as diverse as the occurrence of disease in local foods such as catfish and oranges, to improved coastal flood and hurricane monitoring systems, to the combustion behavior of liquid oxygen.
For some of his biggest priorities – such as the Redstone Arsenal, the military installation near Huntsville that houses the military’s missile programs, the FBI and the Marshall Space Flight Center – Mr. they bill after bill over the course of decades.
“I thought the best thing I could do with federal money was not pave someone’s driveway,” Mr. Shelby said. What he was trying to do instead was “build institutions and then infrastructure that would create a more competitive environment in the long run.”
At Redstone Arsenal, he successfully lobbied the Air Force to build the new U.S. Space Command headquarters, and pushed the FBI to expand its footprint there, an investment now exceeding $2.48 billion. amount, of which a large part with ear tags. And he sent billions of dollars to support research and expand jobs at NASA’s civilian rocket and spacecraft propulsion research center there.
Sometimes his plea came in the form of a few paragraphs. In 2011, as lawmakers scrambled to pass a short-term spending bill to ensure the government wouldn’t shut down, Mr. Shelby in language that prevented NASA from scrapping an attempt to deploy rockets with “heavy-lift” capabilities. that would have cut hundreds of jobs at Redstone Arsenal.
Mr. Shelby has also taken a particular interest, partly for personal reasons, in the universities of Alabama, which have been among the greatest beneficiaries of his generosity. In 1987, during Mr. Shelby’s first year in the Senate, his wife, the first woman to be tenured as a professor at Georgetown University’s business school, suffered kidney failure from lupus. The family turned to the medical staff at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.