Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told senators he hasn't frozen any funding for "woke" transportation projects since taking office two months ago — but says he is following the "will of the Congress" in rooting out the sustainability and equity aspects of thousands of previously approved projects.
Wednesday's hearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee was supposed to be about the next transportation funding bill to replace the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — but it mostly focused on the Trump administration's chaotic implementation of the current bill instead. Nonetheless, Duffy repeatedly told lawmakers that "we did not freeze any" previously obligated funding, despite multiple reports of transportation projects being delayed across the country.
"It's easy to blow the kazoo and send up the balloons when you announce a project," Duffy added. "The hard work is actually doing the grant agreement."
Duffy laid much of the blame for that delay at the feet of former Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who he says left U.S. DOT with a backlog of roughly 3,200 approved projects without signed grant agreements, which he said the new administration could not be reasonably expected to process in just two months on the job.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law did significantly expand the scale of discretionary grants doled out by the Secretary's office directly, and the Biden administration did push out more than 500 grant decisions in its final days in office – though the current Secretary claims the logjam went back far earlier.
"If you're annoyed or concerned, I think the focus shouldn't be on me," he later added. "It should be elsewhere, because we have been there two months. Someone else was there four years."
Duffy acknowledged, though, that his staff is conducting painstaking, line-by-line reviews of those same grants in search of any mention of "environmental justice activities, gender-specific activities, when the primary purpose is bicycle infrastructure," and other trigger-terms — and to flag projects that included those terms for potential removal.
The memos that initiated those reviews directly cited Trump's executive orders against DEIA and "Green New Deal." But Duffy told the senators that he was actually doing their bidding by conducting that probe — because in his view, the Biden administration had imposed sustainability and diversity requirements on grant-seekers that Congress never intended.
"If you're putting in on additional requirements with regard to 'green' or 'social justice,' well, that drives up the cost of a project; that takes the project a longer time frame in which to complete," Duffy argued, without acknowledging the many public savings associated with clean, equitable transportation investments. "And I would just note that all of you on this committee and in this body — you considered, 'Should we include green, should we include social justice requirements in the [Bipartisan Infrastructure Law]?' You debated it, and you didn't put it in there. ... So I'm actually complying with the will of the Congress by pulling it out."
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D - R.I.) rejected the contention that Duffy was doing Congress' bidding by choking off projects for which their communities had sought funding, arguing that the delay had more to do with "rattled and shrunken agencies" struggling to conduct vague, politically motivated audits as the Department of Government Efficiency axes their staff.
"It strikes me that one of the reasons for the 3,200-case backlog that you've got is that you're trying to plow through these executive orders — many of which I believe are both illegal and nonsense — to examine each one of them, to see if they are any MAGA hobgoblins and heresies in them," Whitehouse said.
Beyond lengthy debates about the current infrastructure law, the hearing offered some clues as to how U.S. DOT will advise the next Congress to shape the next one.
Along with his Republican colleagues, Duffy repeatedly referred to President Trump's desire to build "big, beautiful roads and bridges" and the department's desire to slash regulatory and permitting processes so states could "spend more time turning dirt [and] less time doing paperwork."
That deference to the will of the states — regardless of the impacts on people and the environment that good regulation might mitigate — was a common theme among Duffy's responses, which emphasized the importance of supplying direct "formula" funding to DOTs, just weeks after he walked back a controversial policy that would have subjected those funds to more federal scrutiny.
When it came to shared transportation, though, Duffy appeared to be more hesitant to hand states largely unrestricted money, dodging a direct question about whether he would provide predictable, long-term transit funding with the statement that "we should expect that if we want people to ride our trains, our trains should be safe" — a seeming reference to his recent threats to withhold federal funding to New York City if officials didn't reduce crime rates that are already declining. (In a previous interview, he referred to the city's subway system, which carries four million people a day, as a "shithole.")
When it came to building more subways, he joked that "We don't have a money-printing machine," but the former Fox News star did not similarly propose restricting highway building until costs come down, even though road construction costs more than three times as much in the U.S. as it does in other high income countries, often to dubious public benefit.
Duffy was also noncommittal on the topic of active transportation, responding to a question about whether he would hold up Safe Streets and Roads for All grants with the vague response, "Bikes are healthy; bikes, oftentimes, in many places, move people faster."
How those answers might translate into actual policy recommendations for the next reauthorization, of course, remains to be seen — and how Congress will be influenced by those recommendations does, too. If the Trump administration keeps breaking their trust, though, some senators implied that collaborative process won't be easy.
"I'm eager to do a robust bipartisan highway reauthorization," said Sen. Whitehouse. "But I can't do that while the Trump administration blockades authorized and appropriated funds for approved projects, particularly if it blockades selectively. And I can't do that if the Trump administration violates its duty to see that bipartisan laws we pass are executed faithfully, not in favoritism.
"So, Mr. Secretary, the door is open in this committee," Whitehouse continued. "[We can do] big bipartisan things for our infrastructure. And I encourage you to walk through that open door."
