A funding freeze implemented by the Trump administration is putting our national transportation future at risk — and exposing larger structural vulnerabilities in how America funds sustainable mobility that badly need to be addressed, a report from the nation's top government watchdog suggests.
The Government Accountability Office found that as of April 2025, the U.S. Department of Transportation had yet to sign formal agreements for a stunning 41 percent of the funding promised to communities under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which provides the baseline federal funding for America's entire surface transportation network. That's a dangerously slow pace for a bill signed by President Biden in 2021.
Worse, of the funding that has been officially "obligated" to grantees under those federal agreements, only 52 percent — or $135 billion — has gone out the door, leaving hundreds of billions in grant funding in limbo with just 13 months left before the infrastructure act expires.
So much cash is hanging in the balance partly because the Trump administration's ongoing crackdown on what it calls "DEI, woke gender ideology, and the Green New Deal," which has required agencies across the federal government to scour approved grant applications for language that's taboo to the MAGA movement, setting off a flurry of lawsuits from communities who said those reviews were illegal.
And some of the discretionary grant programs that transportation reform advocates care about most have been hit particularly hard.
A recent analysis from Transportation for America found that even as the Trump administration bragged about cutting red tape to "Get America Building again," the current federal DOT is 66 percent slower than the Biden administration at obligating funds for all safety, multimodal, walking, and biking-related competitive grants. Some particularly important programs, like the Reconnecting Communities pilot to mend neighborhoods torn apart by highways, have had none of their grant agreements finalized under the current administration.
As the GAO report makes all too clear, though, communities had a hard time promptly accessing their infrastructure act dollars even before Trump unleashed chaos in Washington. And if Congress wants to build a better transportation bill next time around, they may need to radically rethink the way they do business.
How federal grants are supposed to work
To understand how the rollout of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act turned into so much a mess, it's important to understand what it actually means when a community "wins" a federal transportation award. And it gets a little complicated, so put on a helmet.
When U.S. DOT puts out a press release that says it's funding a transportation project in a given community, what it's actually announcing is the start of a lengthy and fraught bureaucratic process that often won't culminate in real cash until years later.
As a first step — and, spoiler alert, step one takes a while — communities have to work closely with DOT to sign a comprehensive "grant agreement," where they hammer out a mess of details like how much every aspect of a project will cost and how long each phase of it will take, as well as undergoing comprehensive reviews to confirm that their projects comply with federal, state, and local laws, like notoriously difficult Build America, Buy America requirements and the National Environmental Policy Act.
Getting to a grant agreement can be even trickier if the project was awarded its money under a competitive or "discretionary" grant program with a lot of extra strings attached, rather than a "formula" program that more or less guarantees states cash for certain broad categories of projects.
To make matters even slower, the Biden-era infrastructure act created a ton of new discretionary grant programs — it has about 45 in all, compared to the previous bill's 13 — each with its own unique and complicated eligibility and policy requirements. And on top of that, the law made a lot of those grants available to whole new categories of grantees like community groups, who needed more hand-holding from the feds as they went through the process to make sure they got the technicalities right.
That onslaught of new applications, experts say, significantly hampered DOT's ability to get grant agreements signed quickly — and that was before the Trump administration added yet another layer of review to the whole process when it went on a witch hunt for "woke" buzzwords, and started cutting the staff needed to do them to the bone.
Put it all together, and the GAO found that under the infrastructure act, even clearing just this first hurdle often took so long that communities had to watch helplessly as the value of their awards got whittled away by inflation — something like 60 percent of discretionary grantees ranked as significantly challenging to actually getting their projects done.
Once that agreement is signed, though, communities still don't get their money "up front or in a lump sum," as the GAO explains; their grant is merely considered "obligated," which means that "an agreement is signed, which serves as a promise of future reimbursement."
In plain terms, that means that once a community has a signed award letter in hand, all that really means is that they can start spending their own money on their project, and theoretically rest safe in the knowledge that the federal government is legally required to pay them back — and if the feds don't pay them back, they can sue. Which a lot of them currently are.
But if DOT can successfully slow-walk a grant agreement process for long enough — which, again, many advocates believe the Trump administration is doing with several programs now — it can give Congress enough time to legally rescind "unobligated" grants that the White House just doesn't like, without DOT technically running afoul of federal laws that bar it from not spending money that Congress told it to spend.
Put another way: under the best of circumstances, a progressive DOT takes years to get a lot of discretionary grants out the door. And under the worst of circumstances, a regressive one can weaponize the slowness of that process while they work with Congress to get good programs killed.
How to fix this — and do it better next time
To its credit, the U.S. DOT has taken some steps to address the messy rollout of the infrastructure bill. Under Biden, the agency established new technical assistance and funding to help grantees clear all the hurdles between them and their finished transportation projects, as well as instructing applicants to include an inflation factor in total project cost estimates to buffer against their awards losing value during bureaucratic delays.
Still, both the GAO and experts say that today's DOT could be doing more to get money out the door — and to make sure the next transportation bill is less vulnerable to this kind of chaos.
In a recent post, Transportation for America's Corrigan Salerno stressed the importance of "modernizing environmental review" so good projects don't get snarled in paperwork for years, while maintaining guardrails on the kind of harmful highway efforts that America simply can't afford.
"Projects with well-defined positive environmental outcomes — like removing a highway and replacing it with green space or people-centered streets — should be able to advance on a consistent and swift basis through environmental review processes with maximum federal support," Salerno wrote. "On the flip side, projects that just guarantee more pollution and more congestion, like highway expansions, should be made to fully mitigate their well-documented impacts and receive lower proportions of federal support."
To accomplish that feat, Salerno says that the federal government needs to go back to basics and "reform the system itself, the measures and evaluative tools we choose to evaluate the success of potential projects and select them," rather than simply band-aiding on more discretionary grant programs focused on safety, sustainable and equity, in a futile attempt to staunch the bleeding from the massive wounds gouged by America's core highway programs.
That means removing outdated measures like "level of service" for drivers from the rubrics to select and design federally funded transportation projects, and adding multimodal access to jobs and essential services as key performance measures that can help good projects get more money. It also means ditching outdated traffic and demand models that overestimate future driving and pivoting to ones that evaluate the environmental, quality of life, and safety impact of projects — before we dump more taxpayer money into, say, expanding highways that harm communities in ways that current models don't capture.
If Congress can do the hard work of baking those values into their core transportation programs, America might avoid getting into the kind of mess that the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is in now — and really "get America building again."
