Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told concerned-but-credulous Democratic members of Congress earlier this month that his painstaking project-by-project review of Biden-era federal grants isn't delaying or canceling anything — yet thousands of such grants remain in limbo as the secretary cuts staff and cracks down on DEI and environmental rules.
Testifying on President Trump's budget before the House Appropriations Committee on May 14 and Senate Appropriations Committee on May 15, Duffy repeatedly denied any downstream impacts of his efforts to retroactively apply Trump's executive orders targeting "woke" transportation priorities to grants approved during the Biden administration, which experts and some lawmakers argue is an unprecedented and dubiously legal procedure.
Duffy, though, downplayed that review as a run-of-the-mill effort to work through an administrative backlog created by his predecessor, Pete Buttigieg, who Duffy claimed left office with an estimated 3,200 awards without completed grant agreements. Duffy, to date, has cleared about 15 percent of that pile.
"I haven't frozen anything," Duffy said after a grilling from Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.). "If you have a grant agreement, that money is flowing — that has not been stopped."
Duffy went on to insist that U.S. DOT under his leadership has merely "asked to repurpose some of the requirements inside of those grant agreements" in order to save money — since, in the Trump administration's view, climate and social justice benchmarks add unnecessary additional costs to projects.
"The money is going on those projects, they haven't been they haven't been stopped. They haven't been frozen," Duffy told senators. "If we can build quicker and we can build with smarter requirements, I think that we have more money than to build more of your projects, which — everyone wants more projects."
But some lawmakers worried that those delays could have the opposite of the effect Duffy claimed, deferring project benefits and increasing project costs, particularly as mounting inflation erodes each grant's purchasing power. Any corresponding financial burden, meanwhile, will fall entirely on state and local governments.
"I'm worried that the department has buried itself in red tape by re-reviewing 3,200 competitive grants that have been previously awarded, eligible and met all other criteria," Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), the committee's top ranking Democrats, said at the start of the hearing. "There's no doubt that the months long effort to re-review grants is slowing down transportation projects in every single state."
Sen. Coons, meanwhile, noted that most of the projects under review were funded under the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law — and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle want to see them completed.
"There was a bipartisan effort at infrastructure investment under the last administration, and that produced a lot of new programs, more than 40 new programs, more than $300 billion in funding," Coons told Duffy. "To me, the grants that are being reviewed — that were appropriated and authorized by Congress — ought to be moving more quickly than they are, and I hope you will speed up that process going forward."
'How many departures can you handle?'
Some lawmakers, meanwhile, questioned whether Duffy could speed up the process while simultaneously cutting DOT staff.
At the House Appropriations Committee hearing, Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) questioned Duffy's plan to offset 25 percent cuts to agencies like the FHWA and NHTSA with AI tools.
"I think a lot of us up here would agree that the federal bureaucracy has become bloated, but I think we need to be a little bit more precise in downsizing a department with the mission is critical as DOT's," he said. "How many departures can you handle without eroding the ability to carry out a safe and effective mission?".
Duffy replied, "We can do more with less," then insisted he could simply re-hire any of the laid-off employees as needed.
But some advocates say Duffy's rhetorical insistence that his reviews are about cost-savings or cutting red tape defy the reality on the ground.
Duffy’s comments "reveal [his] priorities," said Corrigan Salerno of the D.C.-based advocacy group Transportation for America, who argues that the step of "obligating" funds to legislatively-funded projects is usually a simple formality, rather than an opportunity for federal agencies to inject a last-minute review. It's similarly unheard of for an administration to retroactively apply its agenda to processes set in motion under a previous ideological regime.
"Rather than working and communicating with grantees to advance each project, it seems the administration is more concerned with screening for undesirable language to comply with the administration’s own form of political correctness," he told Streetsblog. "Congress, project stakeholders, and most importantly, communities on the ground are concerned about delays for awarded projects with unsigned agreements — the very projects this administration is subjecting to new layers of politicized review and 'approval.'"
Sowing confusion
At the hearings, at least one official expressed concern that Duffy may actually cancel projects he deems too "woke," rather than simply delaying them into obsolesce.
Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) reminded Duffy of the historic harms caused by the construction of highways in the twentieth century, while defending federally-funded projects that explicitly aim to redress that harm.
"We've had some rules and regulations about how to build highways, where to build highways, where to put those bridges, and we have done some things to stop that injustice — that's not wasteful spending," Clyburn said, referring to the Reconnecting Communities program, none of whose grants have been obligated since Duffy took office. "These are social injustices that I think we as a government [have] got a responsibility to make sure that does not happen going forward."
Duffy repeatedly promised reps like Clyburn that he would allow grantees to "repurpose" their applications around new grant requirements to reflect Trump rather than Biden priorities — but recent history shows that he's already broken that promise.
Earlier this month, DOT even went so far as to kill $54 million worth of what he called "woke university grants" under the congressionally-created University Transportation Center program without notice, despite grantees' pleas that their work addressed a range of bipartisan priorities.
The Trump administration's efforts to halt infrastructure projects funded by Congress under President Biden veered even closer to what the New York Times called a "constitutional showdown" last week after the Government Accountability Office determined that Duffy's move to terminate the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program is illegal.
And downstream from all these decisions, chaos reigns.
"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," Stevie Pasamonte, senior organizer at the National Campaign for Transit Justice, told Streetsblog earlier this month.
"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."
With reporting from Kea Wilson. USDOT did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
