“Todd probably smoothed the way, I mean, you know, used his influence,” Mattingly said in a Politico interview. “Everybody says that projects stand on their own merit, right? So if I’ve got 10 projects, and they’re all equal, where do you go to break the tie? Well, let’s put it this way: I only have her ear an hour when I go to visit her once a year,” he added of Chao and Inman, a longtime Bluegrass State operative who had worked as McConnell’s advance man. “With a local guy, he has her ear 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You tell me.”

At a news conference celebrating the grant, Owensboro Mayor Tom Watson told reporters the town was “thankful that we had such good associations built with Sen. McConnell and the U.S. Department of Transportation because without them it wouldn’t have happened.” Mattingly added, “We’re just really grateful and thankful to Sen. McConnell and Secretary Chao and our own Todd Inman.”

Boone County, another McConnell stronghold, also benefited from the direct line to Chao, via Inman. Inman reportedly communicated with the senator’s office concerning multiple requests from county executives to meet with the secretary, who sat down with Boone County Judge/Executive Gary Moore in December 2017, and whose request for a $67 million discretionary grant to upgrade roads in Boone County, was approved in June 2018.

Unsurprisingly, not everyone is thrilled by the special privileges that McConnell has enjoyed by virtue of his marriage. “Where a Cabinet secretary is doing things that are going to help her husband get reelected, that starts to rise to the level of feeling more like corruption to the average American…. I do think there are people who will see that as sort of ‘swamp behavior,’” John Hudak, a Brookings Institution scholar, told Politico. “There’s a standard for government employees; they’re expected to be impartial,” said Virginia Canter, a former White House associate counsel under Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and current ethics counsel for the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “When you have a spouse who’s the head of an agency and the other spouse is a leading member of Congress—and their office is referring matters to the department, and they’re flagging things from donors, from people with particular political affiliations, who are quote-unquote ‘friends’—it raises the question of whether the office, instead of being used purely for official purposes, is being used for political purposes. The fact that they’re both in these very important positions gives them the opportunity to be watching out for each other’s political and professional interests.”