A series of recent cuts to federal research centers is casting a spotlight on a critical but little-known corner of the transportation world — and raising disturbing new questions about why the Trump administration is scrapping basic programs that could make roads safer, more accessible, and less polluted, while telling the public they're curbing "woke" waste.
Earlier this month, U.S. DOT issued a scathing memo announcing the repeal of $54 million in "woke university grants," which the agency said had been "used to advance a radical DEI and green agenda that were both wasteful and ran counter to the transportation priorities of the American people."
The administration reduced these research projects to MAGA boogeymen, including a swarm of buzzwords that prompted the rescission of dozens of other research grants early in Trump's term, like "decarbonization," "equitable transportation," "low-income travelers," and "gender non-conforming" public transit users.
For those familiar with the specific grantees losing their funding, though, these rollbacks represent a stunning and unprecedented assault on what is normally a sacrosanct corner of the transportation world: the university transportation center.
What is a UTC?
Established by Congress in 1987, the University Transportation Center program was founded as a way for the federal government to invest directly in research and workforce development to make the nation's transportation system better — and critically, for academics and federal policymakers to co-create what that "better" future might look like.
Created under the Surface Transportation and Uniform Relocation Assistance Act and renewed in every major federal transportation bill since, the program today is made up of 35 "centers" — each of which is actually a cluster of three to 10 trusted colleges and universities, which team up to share resources and work together on a set thematic area approved by DOT.
Those centers, in turn, have the exclusive opportunity to apply for a pool of special grants available only to UTCs, and each grant they get powers a full slate of research projects and workforce development activities, educational programs, and outreach to students as young as kindergarteners for an entire year. Many of America's top transportation officials are the products of the universities involved in those consortia, and many of the research projects they power go on to have a deep influence on policymaking.
In exchange for that special status, though, the centers have to focus on specific, federally identified priorities, and they have to go through a rigorous application process demonstrating that they'll use taxpayer money in accordance with the DOT's strategic plan, as well as in line with a handful of "priority areas" that the agency identifies each year. Those priority areas might shift along with the political winds in Washington, but it's rare for a UTC's grant to be suddenly pulled when a new party takes the helm at the White House.
Because of that trusting relationship, UTCs don't have to detail every aspect of every single research project or program they might take on, but they do have to give the federal government a general overview of a few specific studies they'll pursue. Those overviews are then scoured by leading subject matter experts — and eventually, the office of the Secretary itself.
"You don't necessarily just get to do whatever you want to do," explained Dr. Hilary Nixon, deputy executive director of the Mineta Consortium for Emerging Efficient, and Safe Transportation, a UTC lead by San Jose State University. "You do work within your thematic focus area — [whether that's] safety, congestion, infrastructure, mobility — and then also in alignment with federal priorities."
The E-word
Nixon and her colleagues navigated DOT's application process without incident for the first two years of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, winning the maximum $2 million for which Tier-1 UTCs are eligible in each annual application cycle.
Their slate of proposed research was more than a dozen projects long, and all were strong. According to the Center's 2022 application, which was obtained by Streetsblog, one study proposed to assess the "feasibility, cost, and benefits" of several techniques to measure mobility and access for people outside cars, potentially making it easier for federal grant recipients to consistently adhere to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and avoid costly challenges that delay projects. Another would have developed a mobile phone app that cis women and trans people could use to log moments they felt unsafe on public transportation right after they happened, so researchers can collect better data on why they happen, and transportation professionals can craft better interventions to stop them.
And their entire proposal adhered closely to their selected DOT goal: equity.
President Trump has made "e-word" anathema in Washington, even as grantees scrambled for clarity on what that term actually meant to the new administration. And as they geared up to apply for their third year of funding, the Mineta team got the devastating news that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was rescinding not just the $4 million the center had won from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law so far, but "about $6 million" total — a possible indication, they feared, that the agency may have already decided to withhold their third year of funding before they even applied. (U.S. DOT did not respond to a request for clarification.)
Moreover, the language that the agency used to describe the roughly 30 studies the Mineta Consortium already had underway had collapsed their work down to a single, confounding run-on sentence, made up of phrases pulled from throughout a complex 38-page application.
"About $6M for research on “intermodal inequities, particularly how improvements to auto travel can benefit higher income, often white drivers, while depressing transit ridership potential and depriving it of revenues necessary to provide comprehensive services to lower income, often BIPOC people and research into using crowdsourcing and collaborative planning to address safety concerns of women and gender non-conforming people using public transportation.”
That summary was confounding to the consortium members, especially since one of the two grants to which the agency seemingly alluded — to develop a "crowdsourcing" app for non-male public transit users — had actually been cancelled since their initial proposal, since the faculty member leading it had left the university.
Even more confounding was the termination letter which the Mineta team received — also obtained by Streetsblog — which cited none of the specific projects that the agency had publicly decried as the kind of "woke" transportation research in which "the American people have zero interest."
Instead, the agency lead by Secretary Duffy — who memorably questioned whether the sun rather than emissions from human sources might be causing climate change shortly before joining Trump's cabinet — called out just three grants, entitled "Vehicle Miles Traveled Mitigation Strategies: Implications for Equity and Sustainability Across the Urban-rural Continuum," "Path to Economy-Wide Net Zero Emissions by 2020," and "Climate Justice & Environmental Justice."
Along with eliminating those climate and DEI-focused initiatives, though, the Trump administration also cut off funding for a constellation of projects that arguably don't focus on either — because the termination letter essentially took a cudgel to the center's entire operations, rather than applying a scalpel to a few objectionable programs, or asking the team to rescope their work in new terms.
That meant a study on "improved safety for pedestrians in crosswalks at signalized intersections," for instance, was out; so was another one meant to identify best practices to mitigate assaults and understand mental health concerns on public transit also lost funding, which Duffy himself has claimed is a major problem.
And the vast range of workforce development, educational programs, and other activities for which UTCs are responsible were defunded, too — even if none of them merited so much as a mention in U.S. DOT's fiery release.
Because their grant was terminated effective immediately — itself a rarity in federal circles — the consortium had few options to fill a sudden hole that represented more than 40 percent of their budget. That meant even projects that were close to the finish line were brought to a halt, and people were immediately put out of work.
"We had 30 projects underway, and [I had to send termination notices to] researchers and students [on all of them]," said Nixon. "And that was just at my own center; we're a consortium, so we have partners at three other universities, and all of their work had to stop too."
'This is where innovation happens'
It's not clear why, exactly, U.S. DOT would kill funding for so many of America's university transportation centers, or if they intended to misrepresent the scope and importance of those centers' work to the American public. The agency did not respond to Streetsblog's request for comment, and some experts we spoke to for this story pointed out that the administration has reversed course in the past, especially when it became clear that it didn't truly understand the impact of a given decision.
And for their part, the centers that suffered those cuts are hoping that Secretary Duffy's tough talk won't necessarily be the end of the story.
In a May 15 hearing before the Senate Appropriations committee, Duffy even suggested he might give grantees like UTCs the opportunity to amend their language to reflect the administration's new priorities, claiming that "we're just trying to pull out that [DEI] language, unless it could not be re-scoped or pulled out."
What it actually means to "pull out DEI language," of course, is troublingly vague — and many advocates will argue that those basic concepts absolutely deserve a central place in the transportation conversation. At the very least, though, Nixon hopes her center will have the opportunity to reframe its work around the many benefits it carries for communities — including conservative priorities — If only to honor the will of the American people who called on them to do it in the first place.
"Congress authorized this program, and I hope it's something that our congressional representatives still care about across both sides of the aisle," she added. "Transportation touches everyone's lives. ... The need for the research, the education, the workforce development that we do out of the UTC program has really never been greater. This is where innovation happens in our country, and if we want a great transportation system, working with the UTC program is one of the best ways to get there."
