The White House wants Congress to eliminate billions in federal transit money that serves as the backbone of transportation systems across America — and it will hit red states the hardest without even accomplishing the administration's stated goal of stabilizing highway funding and give drivers' their "fair share," experts warn.
Politico's Chris Marquette reported late last week that the Trump administration had advanced a pair of problematic proposals that together would gouge a $30-plus-billion hole into the budgets of transit agencies across America and upend decades of transportation funding precedent.
Under the first proposal, policymakers in Congress would write the next major federal transportation bill — which they are racing to pass when the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act expires in September of 2026 — to exclude the so-called "mass transit account" of the Highway Trust Fund, which has historically reserved about 20 percent of gas tax dollars for transit agencies. That account exists, in part, out of a recognition that funding transit also helps drivers by shifting motorists out of traffic jams and on to trains and buses, as well as providing a host of direct and indirect benefits for all U.S. residents.
Under the second proposal, Congress would strip states' ability to "flex" their highway funding to transit projects, essentially eliminating local self-determination, which had long been championed by conservatives as a bulwark against federal power.
Worse, the two proposals still wouldn't put a dent in the Highway Trust Fund's decades-old deficit, which the Congressional Budget Office projects will swell to roughly $40 billion a year by 2027. That deficit has grown in part because Congress has essentially allowed state transportation departments to keep expanding highways way past the point they can afford to maintain them, without increasing the federal gas tax or other revenues to match.
If the White House's proposals advance, experts warn that it could deepen car dependency and increase strain on the nation's crumbling roads, as well as spurring car crashes, congestion, and more. At the same time, the move would saddle states that do value transit with staggering new bills to keep those systems running and no clear path to pay them.
"This proposal would not solve the Highway Trust Fund's issues when it runs out of money; it would only kick the can down the road by about a year," said Corrigan Salerno of Transportation for America. "This is not really a red state/blue state thing. ... All states rely on transit. And, really, more states that are traditionally thought of as red or rural actually depend on the Mass Transit Account and federal highway funding flexing more than [blue, urban states do].
"Not only is this really bad for transit — it just doesn't solve any actual policy issues," Salerno added. "[Eliminating the mass transit account] wouldn't just fail to solve the federal budget issue — it would also put giant holes in states budgets."
The problem with nuking the mass transit account and flex funding
Salerno explained that public transit may be coded as a blue-state priority in the minds of many right-wing politicians, but federal transit funding disproportionately benefits communities across the political spectrum that can't rely on fares to fund their networks — and those communities, in turn, are concentrated in red states.
Many rural and suburban communities get upwards of half the money they rely on to run even sparse transit networks from the mass transit account, while urban areas get only 11 percent because they have more robust ridership. In blood-red, deeply rural Kansas, for example, a staggering 43 percent of all cash for transit agencies statewide came directly from the fund, not including other federal sources of shared transportation money.
That's part of why the mass transit account was created under President Ronald Reagan in the first place — and why a 2012 GOP proposal to eliminate it was quickly shot down.
"Part of this, I think, is about getting in a partisan hit — this urban/rural divide that the administration has been trying to hammer on," Salerno added. "But it's just truly misunderstanding the facts of what this mass transit account does. I think [the administration] assumes that most people don't know where this money goes and who benefits the most from it — and who would suffer the most if it was gone."
Of course, eliminating federal funding for transit doesn't mean that federally-reliant transit agencies would all just shut their doors overnight — especially in rural communities where a disproportionately high share of residents rely on buses and trains for their basic needs.
It would mean that state and local governments would need to pull money from other priorities amongst already stretched-thin budgets just to keep people moving — or else face the wrath of voters who just lost their only affordable transportation option, employers whose workers can't make it to the job site, or hospital systems that are overwhelmed with patients as car crashes and pollution-related health conditions continue to mount.
The White House's second proposal, meanwhile, would also disproportionately harm the communities that the president pledged to protect the most.
For instance, Salerno says that 28 percent of federal transit expenditures in blue-state Vermont were "flexed" from the state's federal highway formula funds; in deep-red Nevada, though, 35 percent was, because neither state could afford to run its networks on fares and state/local funding sources alone. Still, because so many of America's transit networks are so sparse, Politico points out that all 50 states' "flexed" transit dollars totaled just $1.6 billion in 2024 — a tiny fraction of total transportation money.
"States usually don't use flex funding nearly to the extent that they could to support transit — especially considering that most of their federal dollars are being misspent in the first place [by] not prioritizing repair [over expansion,]" he added. "There's plenty of federal highway dollars to go around. But with funding flexibility, states are actually able to decide for themselves whether or not they want to be moving towards a more transit-oriented system. A lot of states are doing that — and it's not just the Marylands and Californias and New Yorks of the country."
The 'user-pays' myth
Perhaps the most galling thing about the Trump administration's proposals, though, is what its authors claim is motivating them: the so-called "user pays" principle that "highway funds should be spent on highway projects."
Salerno explained that contrary to popular belief, U.S. drivers haven't been paying fully for the roads they use since 2008, the first time Congress was forced to bail out the Highway Trust Fund after gas taxes failed to cover the costs of the ever-growing highway network — and as state and transportation leaders failed to invest enough money into transit networks that would take pressure off that massively overbuilt system.
In the years since, lawmakers in Washington have had to repeat that bailout an astonishing nine times, totaling more than $275 billion in general fund appropriations paid for by Americans at large — whether or not they drive.
Of course, Congress could have thrown its weight behind the "user pays" principle at any point over the last two decades by increasing the federal gas tax — but it didn't, because members of Congress believe that Americans in car-dependent communities would revolt if fuel prices rose.
Seen through that lens, Salerno argues that the existence of the mass transit account is, in some ways, the last firewall between the flawed federal transportation program and outright chaos, because it at least gives the third of Americans who can't reliably drive something to show for the billions of dollars in general fund revenues they've been essentially forced to pump into a Trust Fund that builds endless highways they'll never use.
"[The 'user pays' principle] has not been the case in the United States for decades for a reason," Salerno added. "The mass transit account has been in place since before most people were in Congress, and part of the reason why we're able to [do] as much as we do on the federal gas tax is simply because of [its] inclusion. I don't think that it's really possible to get any consensus around this level of funding again without it."
More to the point, Salerno argues that all the fuss about the "user pays" principle fails to meaningfully challenge what we're getting in exchange for all this money — no matter where they money comes from.
"The money is going to come from somewhere, and we do need to figure out from where," he added. "But the outcomes for that money matter significantly more than freaking out about whether or not the moral principles of the tax are ideal. What really matters is ... safety, whether or not [the traveling public] can rely on the roads in the future because of their state of repair, and whether or not they have the option to take more affordable transportation modes if they need it. When you're talking about taking away money from transit, which is able to solve all three problems by taking cars and trucks off the road, your proposal is flawed from the get-go."
The USDOT and the White House did not respond to a request for comment.
