After months of frozen funds and chaotic attempts to claw back federal dollars, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has finally released funding for a handful of projects — but the ones he's excluded, and the agency's larger disarray, could significantly hold back America's transportation progress, advocates say.
The Trump administration announced last week that it would "get America building again" by advancing 180 of roughly 3,200 infrastructure projects that former Secretary Pete Buttigieg approved during his term, but did not complete, before the Biden administration was voted out of office.
In normal times, the journey between a grant announcement and a grant "obligation" is mostly a bureaucratic technicality the public doesn't need to worry about, since states are rarely denied their promised awards. During the new Trump era, though, Secretary Duffy has repeatedly turned a spotlight on the finer points of the grant execution process.
In recent testimony to the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, for example, he pointed out that the Biden administration had approved about nine times more transportation projects between his election loss and Inauguration Day than Trump did before finally ceding office to Biden following the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Experts say that difference was largely due to the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law during Biden's term — a massive bill which multiplied the amount of discretionary funding the DOT Secretary had to dole out by several orders of magnitude, and which also funded an unusually high number of of complex, long-term efforts like highway teardowns and new transit lines which require multiple years to achieve that final rubber stamp. Duffy, though, essentially accused his predecessor of both failing to do his job and doing his job too overzealously by micromanaging grantees with onerous environmental and equity requirements that slowed projects down.
"The last administration liked to grab the headlines, but didn’t want to do the hard work of building," he wrote in a release. "They also tied road construction up with red tape and leftist social requirements – adding millions in costs and months of delay – all while our outdated infrastructure sat in disrepair. This administration has a different vision: drain the swamp and make government work for the American people.”
Some advocates, though, questioned whether the Trump administration's efforts would speed up project delivery — especially in light of anticipated mass layoffs at U.S. DOT that they say will almost certainly slow down every step of the grant-making process.
And considering the specific projects the agency didn't advance last week — a pool which represents roughly 90 percent of the Biden-era backlog — some feared that some of America's most urgently needed initiatives might never get their money at all.
"There's absolutely no denying that this administration's actions have created chaos and delays in all of these infrastructure programs, which is having pretty devastating impacts in states across the country," said Stevie Pasamonte, senior organizer at the National Campaign for Transit Justice. "They're saying that they're addressing this funding backlog, but that's just not true. The reality is that they're just creating further delays, sowing further confusion, and continuing to delay projects."
Who got money — and who's waiting?
Some of the most-troubling delays fell on the Reconnecting Communities Program to rebuild neighborhoods torn apart by past transportation investments; none of the approved grants advanced last week. The Safe Streets and Roads for All Program also got short shrift, receiving $14.6 million across just six grants, or just 0.45 percent of the total funding released — despite the fact that the program funds infrastructure investments to decrease a national roadway death toll that topped 39,000 last year.
Grants for airport terminal improvements, by contrast, received 8.66 percent of the funding, and a major bridge repair program got 44 percent.
"That's not to say that [airport terminal and bridge repair] aren't necessary and good," added Pasamonte. "But to just focus on those, and not focus on the way people travel every single day is really concerning. ... It's not in any way ideological to say that people should not be killed every day just traveling back and forth to work, to school, to the grocery store, to wherever they're trying to go. I think if we don't find ways to continue those programs, we need to [raise the alarm]."
Contrary to President Trump's rhetoric about ending the "electric vehicle mandate," zero- and low-emissions busses received a windfall from DOT, raking in $493 million, or about 15 percent of the total funding. Grants for other types of transit infrastructure, though, scored far less, with the New Carrollton multimodal station in Maryland and a transit facility for the Bois Fort Band of Chippewa in Minnesota scoring two of just four grants under the BUILD program, usually a significant funder of intracity transit initiatives. (The other two projects went to railroad crossing safety in Florida and port improvements in Miami.)
That conspicuous absence will have damning impacts on communities across America who are already struggling without access to mass modes — and not just in big, blue urban centers.
"Across the country, we're seeing people in small urban and rural areas having difficulty getting where they need to go, and relying on smaller transit systems that have very few resources and are trying to stretch the ones that they have," said Pasamonte. "We're not just talking about cutting programs in big cities, or sanctuary cities, or areas that they deem to be less deserving for whatever ideological reasons; it affects everybody, and they're just not going to be able to to target [these cuts] in the way that they want to."
'Hope is a discipline'
Interestingly, Secretary Duffy didn't even appear to try to target his grant-advancing decisions to cities with high marriage and birth rates, as he promised to do in the early days of his term. He also did not deny funding to communities that have publicly refused to cooperate with the Trump administration's immigration orders, as he warned states he would in late April. Several projects could even conceivably be argued to have a positive impact on equity, diversity, and inclusion, even if they also carry other benefits to communities, as experts say most "DEI"-based transportation efforts do.
Those moves may have less to do with the department backing down on its threats against what it considers "woke" priorities than simply not having the capacity to follow through on them — with the possible exception of New York State, which Duffy said he would defund due to its congestion pricing program in New York City; it was one of only seven states to get blanked.
"There's a reason that we're not seeing them follow through on that — and that's because it's really hard to do," added Pasamonte. "To be able to follow through on that type of rhetoric at that scale in a even in a good, well-functioning environment is hugely difficult; to do so when you're ... cutting all of this staff and capacity? I don't even see how it would be possible."
Rather than cross their fingers that a capricious and unpredictable agency will simply neglect to cancel their grant, though, Pasamonte urges advocates to be proactive and call on their representatives to demand federal transportation funds that still hang in the balance. And most important, they say we need to smash the narrative that money for non-drivers is just another bit of muck to be drained from the woke "swamp," rather than an essential, life-saving, and basic foundation of good government.
"Hope is a discipline," they add, quoting the activist Mariame Kaba. "If we act like things are hopeless, then they will be. I know that there's so much going on; there are so many things that we're already calling into our members of Congress to talk about, and transit may not seem like a huge priority now, given how many other things are thrown into the same chaos. ... But I think it is part of this larger stripping away of our public goods and services, and just our [ability to] care for one another."
U.S. DOT did not respond to a request for comment.
