The Trump administration may be deliberately running out the clock on millions of dollars for transit projects across America, a top advocacy group warns – and the money could vanish at the end of the month.
According to a recent analysis by Transportation for America, funding for at least 13 competitive federal transportation programs under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is set to expire Sept. 30 — which means that communities that completed arduous applications and won hard-earned grants as many as three years ago might not actually get their money, now, unless the federal Department of Transportation has signed a legal contract obligating the federal government to actually release their awarded funds.
Worse, Washington insiders say that the Trump administration is deliberately delaying executing those grant obligation agreements as "part of a broader strategy to allow unobligated discretionary grant awards to expire,” according to T4A.
The advocacy group is still analyzing which projects are at risk, but says it will almost certainly include multiple grants doled out under the popular "Reconnecting Communities" Program, which helps remove and remediate the harmful impacts of highways and other transportation projects in neighborhoods; the All Stations Accessibility Program, which makes transit stations accessible to people with mobility challenges; and the University Transportation Centers Program, which provides critical road safety research.
To be fair, some experts argue that the IIJA was bound to leave important projects in limbo if the White House changed hands, because it relied too heavily on labor-intensive "discretionary" grants that have to be painstakingly approved and reviewed by DOT one at a time — a fatal flaw that some advocates hope to correct in the next surface transportation bill by guaranteeing local communities more money for sustainable and equitable projects.
In multiple hearings before Congress, though, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed his predecessor Pete Buttigieg for exacerbating the inherent inefficiencies of the IIJA, alleging that Buttigieg neglected his responsibilities and left the current DOT with an insurmountable backlog of paperwork to churn through.
A July analysis from Transportation for America, though, found that Duffy's DOT was implementing funds for safety projects at just 10 percent of the speed of his predecessor — in part because the Trump Administration added new layers of review to existing grants to ensure that they aligned with the new administration's priorities, and don't contain elements it deems too "green" or "woke."
"The [Trump] administration has been holding grantees to standards of evaluation that are completely different and unrelated to what they initially applied for," Corrigan Salerno wrote in the T4A report. "And [it's] directly targeting projects that contain elements to address equity, climate, and even basic mobility improvements, such as bike lanes and sidewalks."
In addition to those arbitrary ideological reviews, some experts suspect the current administration is now weaponizing the structural failures of the IIJA by slow-walking the process of finalizing grant agreements that the president doesn't like, despite court orders to unfreeze illegally impounded funds. And even when the funds are technically flowing, DOT has now slashed so many staff that some argue they've essentially kneecapped their own ability to execute the grant agreements they claim Buttigieg left in their lap.
Meanwhile, Salerno explains that while it's technically illegal for US DOT to refuse to spend money that Congress ordered it to spend under the bill, the agency can test the limits of the law by waiting to "send a notice to awardees with expiring funds on the eve of Sept. 30 (the end of the fiscal year), letting them know that they are not moving forward with grant agreements — intentionally leaving this notice to the last minute to run out of the clock so that grantees will not have time to file lawsuits before Oct. 1," he wrote.
Now, Salerno says communities' best line of defense is to lawyer up, so they'll be prepared to launch an eleventh-hour lawsuit if those eleventh-hour notices come through. And then advocates should rise up to tell Congress that they won't stand for this funding to be rescinded down the line, either.
