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Author Archives: Steve Davis

 About Steve Davis

Stephen Lee Davis is the AVP for Transportation Strategy at Smart Growth America.
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Bury the BUILD Act and start over in 2027

After this week’s elections, the House’s main transportation committee will see massive turnover come January. So why does the likely Democrat leader on that committee want to start with legislation created by many of those outgoing members to develop a long-term transportation bill in 2027?

Back in May, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee passed their portion of a new five-year federal transportation law. The BUILD America 250 Act utterly failed to rethink or reform our country’s broken and bankrupt approach to transportation funding and policy. As I noted back in May, “as with the IIJA before it, the BUILD America 250 Act fails to orient this broken program toward the measurable outcomes that are promised over and over to the American taxpayer.”  The BUILD Act was just one more in a long line of bipartisan “compromises” on transportation where everyone agrees to undermine their own priorities in the name of keeping the program limping along and the money flowing.

But this week’s elections totally transformed the dynamics of the next Congress. The House T&I Committee will see significant turnover, with as many as a third of the seats changing due to retirements, lost elections, and new assignments. The full House never debated or voted on the BUILD Act and is unlikely to do so in the less than 20 working days left before the new Congress.

So why bring it back to life? Why would current Ranking Member Rick Larsen—who will take over the gavel on the transportation committee when Democrats take over the House in January—want to use the BUILD Act as the starting point for negotiations in the 120th Congress starting in January? Why start with a bill written at the pleasure of a Republican majority that no longer exists? Is this bill really the best deal that Democrats can get on transportation? 

Here are a handful of reasons why House Democrats should tell Rep. Larsen that it’s time to bail on the BUILD Act. Bounce it, bin it, boot it, bury it. Start over and create something better. 

TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress to bury the BUILD Act

Rushing through a reauthorization proposal from the outgoing Congress won’t fix our failing transportation system or deliver the better outcomes Americans need. It only takes a few minutes to sign our petition telling Ranking Member Larsen to go back to the drawing board and put together a better bill.

The BUILD Act was just more of the same

Back in the spring during a briefing for congressional transportation staffers, we asked them to stop and consider: What’s the purpose of the federal transportation program? Why do we need this bill? Why does this program exist? The answers we heard were not about accomplishing anything concrete: 

“To provide steady, predictable funding. To allocate transportation money to states. To make a ‘better’ transportation system.”

To be fair, most of their bosses think about the program in the same exact way. Most are interested in keeping the money flowing to their state in a predictable way. Just keep this thing moving. More money than last time. Maybe create some new programs for this or that noble purpose. 

Considering the total insolvency of the country’s transportation program and the terrible outcomes it consistently delivers, we’ve been hopeful that the House would respond with a law aimed at producing measurable progress on outcomes that matter. A bill that improves safety, reliability, and predictability. A bill that would produce real, measurable progress on the state of repair for our crumbling roads, bridges, and transit systems. A bill that would invest heavily in more ways to get around quickly and affordably.

Instead, we just got more of the same with the BUILD Act. This is what you get when “bipartisanship” is a more important goal than producing good policy that maximizes the measurable benefits for the traveling public in exchange for the mammoth levels of deficit spending required to cover this bill’s cost. 

We think everyone should be dissatisfied with getting so little for so much money. And with the changes coming in January, we ask: Do congressional Democrats really think that this bill is the best deal they could get in the new Congress? 

The BUILD Act went 0 for 3 on producing important outcomes

scorecard for BUILD America 250 Act showing three Xs for the 3 t4america principles

Repairing and caring for what we’ve already built, improving safety, and making it easier for everyone to get where they need to go are widely supported by the public, and should be fundamental purposes for the program. That’s why our three priorities encompass all three. But the BUILD Act struck out across the board on them.

Prioritize repair first

Nearly 80 percent of all voters believe the government should fix existing roads before building any new roads. The BUILD Act would do nothing to institutionalize this basic, commonsense requirement, which is perhaps the most basic aspect of running a transportation system with finite resources. The BUILD Act would not require states to demonstrate progress toward any hard and fast targets for road or bridge conditions. And it makes zero improvements to the current check-the-box performance management exercise, where states can set whatever targets they want with no accountability for improvement.  Performance optional.

Safety

We don’t need a new safety program. Say it again. We don’t need a new safety program. We don’t even need more money for the existing safety programs. With safety numbers that are among the very worst in the developed world, we need to orient the entire program around improving safety. The BUILD Act did preserve the Safe Streets for All local grant program, though with a massive 50 percent cut. And it did nothing to keep the Trump administration from continuing to weaponize the program by removing all mentions of vision zero and banning the use of bike lanes or other proven methods to slow speeds and improve safety and mobility at the same time.

Invest in the rest

It’s simple. The BUILD Act increases guaranteed funding for highways, and reduces guaranteed funding for transit. Two decades after completing the interstate system, the BUILD Act fails to invest in the rest and build a world-class transit system. And it did nothing to ensure that money they authorize for transit even gets spent over the next two years. Where’s the good deal, exactly? 

BUILD gives the Trump admin more money to control without any new safeguards 

Back in 2021, the IIJA created exciting new programs to support emission reductions, electric vehicle charging infrastructure, expanded transportation options, and safe street redesigns; provided historic funding for passenger rail; created a new program to reconnect communities divided by highways; and poured more money into transit than ever before. So what happened to all these things over the last two years, many of which were Democrat priorities? 

For the last two years, the Republican-led House and Senate stood by while the administration flouted the intent and will of the bipartisan agreement Congress made to create these programs. The BUILD Act failed to take the initiative to restore these programs, bring back canceled grants, or create any new protections to ensure that their intent is fulfilled by the administration.  

Why would Democrats strike a new “bipartisan” deal on transportation when only their priorities were eliminated in the last deal? 

The last time Democrats controlled the House, they produced a terrific bill

While the BUILD Act needs to get tossed in the trash on the merits, the past can also produce good ideas as the House drafts a new bill. The INVEST in America Act, produced by Chairman Peter DeFazio and the House T&I committee in 2020, was excellent. It went 3 for 3 on our priorities, and had bipartisan support for the best repair provisions Congress has ever produced. Unfortunately, the House then got steamrolled by the Senate during negotiations, which produced the IIJA, which was not nearly as strong. Incoming leadership in the House should look to the INVEST Act for inspiration in 2027.

A new Congress should produce a new bill

Incoming House leaders should not advance a bill that was produced with the help of so many members of Congress who just got sent home by their voters. And on the flip side, the huge influx of new members who were just sent to Washington should get their chance to craft a different approach to transportation—a new Congress should mean a new sheet of paper. 

The dynamics have certainly changed. A better deal can be had. Congress should bury the BUILD Act and start over fresh.

The interstate system was completed in 1992, but USDOT wants to pour billions of your dollars into “completing” it again

Road construction site where crews are paving a new asphalt path along a large roadway.

The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) has signaled that one of its most important priorities for the next reauthorization is pouring billions into the interstate highway system like it’s 1955. What they aren’t prioritizing is a plan to pay for any of it.

Earlier this summer, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent a letter to Congress outlining the administration’s priorities for the next federal transportation law due by September 30 this December. In that letter, under “Expanding and Modernizing Infrastructure,” Sec. Duffy asked Congress to create “a new competitive grant program targeted at expediting the completion and expansion of the Interstate system… The Administration’s objective is to launch completion of the Interstate Highway System, including the start of construction for unbuilt, congressionally designated highways.” (Emphasis ours.)

Even in a world of today’s uncreative thinking on transportation, this proposal is wildly out of sync with what people actually want and need from the federal transportation program, which is decidedly not “interstate system #1 was great, let’s run that back again!”

Here are five quick reasons this is a silly, counterproductive idea that would fit better in a black-and-white film strip from the 1950s: 

  1. 1990s priorities are not what we should be pursuing in the 2030s
  2. The interstate system doesn’t need “completing” since it was finished in 1992
  3. We can’t afford to maintain the existing interstate system
  4. Every single potential highway project is already eligible for “completion” through federal highway formula funding programs—and states don’t have to compete for those
  5. Why spend billions more within a bankrupt federal transportation program?

1) 1990s priorities are just not worth pursuing in the 2030s

There are somewhere around 33 or 34 “priority” corridors identified by Congress—mostly in the 1990s and early 2000s—for potential addition to the interstate network. But these designations did not result from careful study or thoughtful growth projections. (If such a thing actually exists.) And they are certainly unhinged from today’s realities. Many were “designated” by members of Congress who are no longer even in office and possibly no longer even alive.

Here are some other things that were important to us in 1990: Getting an updated copy of the Yellow Pages. Choosing a movie to rent at Blockbuster. Worrying about the Soviet Union.  Programming your VCR. Thinking about what to wear to hang out at the mall tonight.  Wondering if your 32-volume encyclopedia is current. Wanting a new phone with a longer cord so you can talk in another room.  Hoping the family computer was free. Waiting ’til tomorrow morning to read all the news in the paper.

Goodbye 1990s! Why should highway lines drawn on maps by members of Congress from that decade have any bearing on what we build to serve us in the 2030s, 2040s, 2050s, or beyond? I know the 1990s were pretty sweet for Secretary Duffy, but most Americans are thinking about tomorrow.

No one should ever forget that building the interstate system came at immense expense to certain people. The first part of our Divided by Design report explains how building the interstate system displaced more than 475,000 households and over a million people in less than two decades—most often in communities of color with lower incomes—and how today’s system hasn’t really changed and continues to inflict incredible damage. 

2) The interstate system doesn’t need “completing” because it was finished in 1992

We actually completed the Interstate Highway System in 1992.  Mission accomplished. Prep the ticker tape and start up the parade. There’s no reason to write a thousand words here—Chuck and Strong Towns wrote and released an entire report about it earlier this year.  

The United States set out in 1956 to build a unified, high-speed, limited-access highway network that would connect the nation, strengthen defense, and support commerce. That mission was completed in 1992 with the final link of Interstate 70 through Glenwood Canyon. The Interstate era — one of the most ambitious and successful infrastructure projects in world history — achieved exactly what Congress and President Eisenhower envisioned: a national system that stitched together regions, opened new economic frontiers, and redefined American mobility. 

Congress also acknowledged this fact in the 1991 and 1995 reauthorizations, by the way. 1991: “Congress declares that [these are] the final authorizations of appropriations and apportionments for completion of construction of such [sic] System.” 1995: “By 1991, that critically important mission—of connecting America and providing the core transportation infrastructure needed to sustain and promote interstate commerce and national economic prosperity—was largely accomplished.”

But the system hasn’t been in stasis. Even after its 1992 completion, states have continued to expand existing portions, build new segments, and convert existing highways into interstate-level roadways. The result is an interstate system that expanded from 200,000 in 1992 to more than 230,000 lane-miles today. Why? As the Strong Towns paper continues: 

But instead of winding down a finished program, Congress left the machinery of that achievement running. A federal transportation system designed for a clear, finite purpose was gradually transformed into a sprawling, permanent institution, one that now continues spending not because of any remaining national mission, but because the system has come to depend on its own momentum.

How many more lane-miles do we actually need? More importantly, how many can we even afford to build?

3) We’re underwater on maintenance costs for what we’ve already built

Expanding the interstate system would create billions in new repair obligations. Every single new mile of road locks in decades of ongoing maintenance costs that can actually end up costing more than initial construction. A new program focused on expansion with zero plan for maintenance got us into this current mess.  Read about the costs required just for ongoing maintenance in our Repair Priorities report from this year:

Maintaining the lane miles of roads that were in good and fair condition in 2024 would require an estimated $32.6 billion on average annually for routine preservation and maintenance. On top of that, addressing the existing backlog of roads in poor condition would cost an additional $10.6 billion per year over the course of a typical six-year federal transportation bill. In total, this amounts to $43.2 billion annually—more than $259 billion over six years—just to clear the backlog and keep the system in acceptable repair.

The $43.2 billion annual bill for basic state-of-repair road maintenance is more than what the gas tax brings in each year. (~$35-39 billion.) And that number doesn’t even include what’s needed for the 624,000-plus bridges eligible for federal dollars. No rational person would consider expanding a system that our current funding source cannot sufficiently pay to maintain—even if we devoted every single dollar of existing revenues to that purpose.

4) Every single possible zombie interstate expansion project can receive federal funding right now

A new grant program for “completing” interstates is unnecessary and redundant. Every possible interstate or highway expansion project is already eligible for nearly every single federal highway funding program. 

Does the North Carolina DOT want to “expedite” construction of its long-gestating Interstate 87 project to connect Raleigh’s Interstate 540 bypass east all the way to Interstate 95? Just put it on your five-year project list and start giving it some of the $1.3 billion in federal highway funding you received in FY27. States don’t even have to compete for those funds—they’re already in their wallet! 

If these projects haven’t been built yet, maybe they’re not that important to the states making these decisions? If states don’t deem them important enough to use their highly flexible federal dollars on them, why should USDOT create some new program for the same purpose? And why should any of us (or our grandkids) pay for it?

Creating a new grant program for this purpose is like your kid, who has a weekly allowance they can spend on anything they want, asking for a special new allotment to buy candy at the corner store. “Just open your wallet and use the money I gave you, if that’s what’s important to you. And before you ask, no, there is no more extra money.” 

Because…

5) The federal transportation program is bankrupt

The current program is bankrupt, and has been for nearly two decades. 

As noted above, Congress has spent more each year than the gas tax brings in, creating a long-term insolvency problem and forcing all taxpayers to bail out a program that was supposed to be fully covered by a user-pays trust fund. Drive your car and buy gas, pay into a system of roads built with those taxes. But that fundamental tenet of the program hasn’t been true since at least 2008. 

Where is the money coming from for a new competitive grant program to advance insanely expensive interstate projects that have been on the books but unbuilt for 20 to 30 years? Of course, USDOT isn’t proposing any particular funding source for this new program—that’s Congress’ problem. Which means it’s really your problem, because you (and all taxpayers) have helped foot the bill for the $275 billion in deficit spending on the current program so far. So dig deep once again, folks, as Congress passes the hat.

—

Back in 1991, the average price of gas was about $1.15 per gallon. General Motors hadn’t yet built and then killed the first production electric car. The median price of a home was $120,000. Since then, the ratio of home prices to median incomes has increased 25 percent.

We need new homes, not new highways. We can’t afford to keep chasing the marginal, diminishing economic returns of a new lane here or there on existing highways, and we certainly can’t afford the repair bill on a dramatically expanded system. As Chuck so eloquently said in Mission Accomplished, “It is time to declare the original mission accomplished, acknowledge the program’s drift, and rebuild the federal transportation role around the needs of the 21st century rather than the habits of the 20th.”

After prioritizing repair, it’s time to “invest in the rest” and build a complete transportation network that focuses on moving people and goods—not just vehicles—and building productive, resilient places full of opportunity.

And we don’t need a new grant program to do any of that. Spend what’s in your wallet, son.

What should Congress do to stop the scourge of pedestrian death?

A man walks along the shoulder of a road with no sidewalk as a yellow bus passes. A 35 mph speed limit sign stands nearby.

The newest addendum to Dangerous by Design shows which Congressional districts are most deadly in the country for people walking. What responsibility do members of Congress bear for what happens on the streets and roadways in their cities, counties, and states? And, most importantly, what can they do about it? 

The 2024 total of 7,080 people struck and killed while walking was higher than every year from 1982 to2020. Despite recent small year-over-year decreases, the overall trend line since 2009 is a steady upward arrow. As Dangerous by Design 2026 shows, this crisis has unfolded in part because our nation’s streets are dangerous by design, built primarily to move cars quickly at the expense of keeping everyone safe. 

A man walks along the shoulder of a road with no sidewalk as a yellow bus passes. A 35 mph speed limit sign stands nearby.

The crisis won’t end until those in power—including members of Congress—upend that paradigm and refuse to accept business as usual. And they are in luck—the federal transportation program that they oversee expires at the end of this year, and the next Congress will be tasked with replacing it with a new five-year law.

The role of Congress

Congress writes the laws that govern every federal dollar that states receive. But its members have repeatedly neglected to require agencies receiving the windfall of taxpayer dollars to measurably improve transportation safety. Congress has decided that states don’t need to be held accountable for producing such terrible safety “results” that lag far behind those of almost the entire developed world. Congress has enshrined our current federal approach to safety in law, an approach largely defined by small, difficult-to-access, and competitive safety programs that can’t possibly fix the problems perpetuated by the billions that are building a network of roadways that are dangerous by design. 

Line chart showing U.S. pedestrian deaths overall increase between 2009 and 2024.

If members of Congress actually want different results than those in the chart above, they should use their legislative authority only to support transportation legislation that rewards good performance and refuse to pass laws that impose no penalties for continued poor safety performance. More on that in a minute.

We’re also dealing with an administration at the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) that has sought to undercut existing safety efforts by removing data-backed solutions from its websites, rescinding previously awarded grants to local communities, revising its roadway safety strategy to focus on nonsense like “reducing congestion,” and weaponizing the incredibly useful Safe Streets for All program to focus on things other than proven safety strategies. If USDOT is going to keep failing to take safety seriously, Congress should step up its active oversight of USDOT’s implementation of the law that Congress passed in 2021. 

Members of Congress also have a powerful bully pulpit and can take influential stands on proposed policy changes or projects to prioritize safety above all else. They can: 

  • Go to bat for the local street or transportation department that is improving safety by changing existing street designs—whether temporarily or permanently. 
  • Back their local elected leaders when they make changes that prioritize safety for everyone, even when those changes make a small minority of people upset. 
  • Help defend the use of proven, data-backed countermeasures in state or local street design to produce slower, safer streets. 
  • Show up in local communities by participating in Week Without Driving or World Day of Remembrance events, joining local walk audits, and touring some of the changes worth celebrating. 
  • Keep the spotlight on an issue that rarely gets enough attention. And back in D.C., they can create consequences for those who continue to ignore safety and incentives for those who lead. 

Here are five other specific actions Congress can take. Keeping in mind that 25 percent of all pedestrian fatalities occurred in just 50 (11 percent) of congressional districts, those members should be scrambling to lead the way on every single one of these actions.

  1. Direct the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to require states and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to have goals that progressively decrease roadway fatalities: Title 23 Section 148(c)(2)(C) requires states to adopt performance goals for safety, and states will set fatality goals for increasing roadway deaths, which is antithetical to the purpose of performance targets.
  2. Require grantees to improve roadway safety: Until we solve the pedestrian safety crisis, safety with accountability should be the top priority on all projects built with federal funds. 
  3. Conduct research and provide evidence-backed guidance for roadway design: This includes updating guidance to protect pedestrians, like making it easier to set context-sensitive speed limits and requiring that the posted speed and design speed be the same. 
  4. Support better Complete Streets policies: Create better Federal policy that gives Complete Streets power and flexibility to localities, not to the United States Department of Transportation.
  5. Give professionals the freedom to experiment: Localities know their transportation systems best. The federal government should give communities the flexibility and resources to build safety projects.

What the House’s BUILD America 250 Act did and did not do

The House of Representatives’ key transportation committee did advance a five-year proposal to reauthorize the federal transportation program this summer, though the House is unlikely to take up the BUILD America 250 Act (BUILD Act) before this Congress is officially dismissed in January. But unfortunately, the BUILD Act would do nothing to make improving safety a centerpiece priority across the entire program, and would do very little to reverse the U.S.’s roadway safety crisis. 

To put a finer point on it, see that list of five actions above? The BUILD Act wouldn’t move any of those forward. When the next Congress takes this work back up in 2027, they should throw the BUILD Act in the trash and start fresh. 

Points #1 and #2 above should be the bare minimum for the next reauthorization: Require states and MPOs to actually set goals to improve safety outcomes, and require them to get there with real penalties if they fail. (And provide rewards for those that make progress!)  If Congress managed to do those two things, it would move the needle in a real way. Congress needs to reorient the federal transportation program around safety above all else and prioritize the safety of the most vulnerable people. 

If anything, the BUILD Act would make our safety problems worse by supercharging highway spending and giving states even more flexibility in how they spend funds. This is precisely how we got into this mess in the first place: telling states that they have to prioritize safety but also congestion reduction, vehicle throughput, freight movement, economic development, infrastructure condition, and scores of other “top priorities.” When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

The question before the next (120th) Congress now is whether the BUILD Act is the best possible starting point for a new reauthorization proposal, or whether lawmakers should start from scratch to produce something better.  Tell Congress it’s time to put people’s safety first.

One thing is for certain: If you do what you’ve always done, you’re gonna get what you always get. So if members of Congress are interested in getting something different, they will need to do something different. That means leaving the BUILD Act in the past and rethinking the entire program that has produced so much death and so many injuries by design over the years. 

New York Times shines a spotlight on Trump’s transit intransigence

The Trump administration has made history…as the first to not approve or advance a single transit capital project in their first year and a half in office. Considering what we heard directly from USDOT Secretary Duffy last week, no one should believe that’s a coincidence. 

For decades now, Congress has provided funding each year—more than $4.2 billion per year during each year of the IIJA—to cover half or less of the costs of the capital improvements involved in building new transit service or dramatically improving or expanding existing service in communities across the country, with locals picking up the larger share of the tab. If your community is building a new light rail line, bus rapid transit expansion, or commuter rail, they have likely tapped this program. But since taking office, the administration has held the program hostage, failing to sign a grant agreement for a single one of the transit projects currently in the development process. 

Earlier this week, the New York Times took note and spoke to T4America and others about this unprecedented slowdown: (Gift link, we hope)

But since President Trump returned to office, the Federal Transit Administration has not signed a single new agreement under the program, known as Capital Investment Grants. Large projects ready to enter the final phase of the program’s yearslong pipeline have stalled there. The administration also tried halting payments to the New York and Chicago projects, forcing courts to intervene. …“It’s hard to look at the last year and see anything other than a deliberate slowdown of these grants,” said Steve Davis, director of the advocacy group Transportation for America.

While Trump’s USDOT slowed down transit grants during his first term, a new wrinkle this time has been the Office of Management and Budget’s move to firewall the transit capital funds provided by Congress over the last two years and not “apportioning” them to USDOT so they can be spent.  “More than $7 billion hasn’t been obligated to any project,” wrote Emily Badger and Alicia Parlapiano for the Times. More than $5 billion of that total has been earmarked for next fiscal year, though that’s still no guarantee it would get spent—it would still have to be apportioned to USDOT once October 1 gets here.

The long and short of this move is that, even if USDOT wanted to sign a grant agreement for one of these transit projects and get it moving tomorrow, there’s a chance that they wouldn’t be able to because OMB is holding onto the money—USDOT simply doesn’t have the money in hand. Transit expert (and T4America alum) Sarah Kline told the Times just how shocking this new move is: “I have never seen a situation where the F.T.A. says, ‘Oh, we don’t need $5 billion because we’re not going to have projects ready for that.”

What’s the end goal here? 

A statement from FTA had the expected platitudes about these projects just working their way through the federal pipeline before being ready to sign grant agreements. But you don’t have to squint too hard to see the endgame: 

The first Trump administration proposed ending the program, and just last year, USDOT floated a proposal to end all federal funding for transit—which was quickly shot down by the top Republican on transportation in the House, who said “I’m just not interested.” And then just last week, USDOT Secretary Sean Duffy sent a letter to the Senate to put the administration’s transportation priorities to paper for a long-term replacement for the IIJA. Take a wild guess on one of their top priorities:

We propose eliminating the Mass Transit Account and consolidating all Federal fuel tax revenues into the Highway Account. This will re-establish a direct user-pays model and address the Fund’s looming structural deficit.

Considering all these data points, it’s not too hard to believe that they would like for Congress to end this program and shift the $2-4 billion in annual transit capital spending over to the highway side to “advance the president’s vision for a bold transportation future,” whatever that entails.

As we’ve noted before, if your primary goal is shoring up the Highway Trust Fund by eliminating all other spending in the federal program, you will completely erode the broad, bipartisan coalition required to pass a long-term transportation law. They could propose ending everything else other than highway formula programs, and you’d still need billions in deficit spending to cover a highway program that still wouldn’t be paying for itself.  Why support a deal when only the priorities of a small minority are included? And make no mistake, the support for transit is bipartisan. 

Whatever the reason these transit projects are frozen, the unfortunate reality is that it’s the people in local communities who are paying and will continue to pay the price:

And any unspent grant money is something tangible not built — a subway station without elevators for accessibility, a bus line without dedicated lanes for faster travel, a commuter rail that can’t carry enough trains.

H/t to Emily Badger and the New York Times for their work to spotlight this important story.

Extend the IIJA for one more year—and potentially more

After we consistently predicted that Congress could not write and pass a new transportation law before the September 30 expiration of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), Congress has finally thrown in the towel and is moving to extend the IIJA before that deadline. What is an extension, how long should it be, and what should it include?

After we were lightly ridiculed inside and outside of the Capitol for consistently predicting that Congress was never going to get a new bill finished this year, you can nail that coffin shut on 2026 reauthorization: It’s not happening in this Congress. The House’s (bad) BUILD America 250 Act (we call it the BUILD Act) is not scheduled for a floor vote anytime soon, but even if a miracle occurred, the Senate is already working on an extension and would not consider it. Senator Shelly Moore Capito, who chairs the core Senate committee with jurisdiction, has already told reporters that the committee is working on text to extend the IIJA.

While it’s nice to (once again) be right, we can now ask: What will we see in that extension, and how long should it be? And most importantly, why should Congress keep passing extensions for the foreseeable future and refuse to negotiate on reauthorization?

Why and what is an extension?

One of the reasons we were so confident that Congress would never pass something before this year’s deadline was that doing so would have been completely unprecedented. They’ve simply never done it before! Extensions have happened every single time a reauthorization is facing an expiration in the modern era. Our Reauthorization 101 guide shows that the federal program has been operating on an extension literally a third of the time since 1997!

Originally due to expire in 2009, SAFETEA-LU was extended a mind-boggling TEN times for 33 total months before MAP-21 was passed to replace it in 2012. It’s notable that the same core issue Congress was stuck on back then—how to pay for a bankrupt transportation program that spends way more money than the gas tax brings in—is the same fundamental sticking point today.  

The reason for these past extensions is the same reason as today: To buy more time for negotiations and policy development because Congress couldn’t get the job done in the time allotted. But in this case, the issue will be punted to a new Congress in January.

The historical precedent is a “clean” extension

This is a phrase you’ve probably heard already. All this means is continuing existing programs at current year funding levels, with no major changes to the policy that Congress approved back in 2021 with the IIJA. No new major programs are created, nor are any existing programs repealed. Funding-wise, it’s basically a bonus year of IIJA, although with funding levels typically remaining at the same level as this current fiscal year, rather than increasing as they ordinarily do during each successive year of a long-term law.

The only major changes included in past extensions have been financing-related steps to transfer money into the Highway Trust Fund to keep it solvent for the life of the extension, which is almost certainly needed in this case.

There should be one exception to this precedent: Congress should include language that requires USDOT to restore rescinded grants and fully implement the programs and funding that they wrote into law in the IIJA. There’s a good chance that USDOT will just ignore any requirements Congress chooses to insert, just like they’ve already done with the IIJA. This is just more proof that Congress needs to force this issue and start complaining loudly and publicly about the ways the administration has undermined the bipartisan will of Congress. 

A new wrinkle in 2026: Advance appropriations 

One complicating factor that did not exist in past extension cycles is the novel mechanism Congress used in the IIJA called “advance appropriations.” This was a way for Congress to provide more money that would automatically become available in the future fiscal years of the IIJA, without requiring further action by Congress in annual appropriations bills. One example of this is the transit capital grants program that funds new transit. (Yes, the same one currently frozen by the Trump admin, which was covered this week by the New York Times.) In the past, this program would have funds “authorized” for it over the life of the five-year authorization law, but Congress’ appropriations committees would have to debate and approve money for that program each year. But in the IIJA, around a third of the total funding for transit capital grants was provided by guaranteed advance appropriations. Two-thirds of the historic $66 billion for passenger rail was also provided by this method. 


Extending the program for a year while potentially providing additional advance appropriations is definitely more complex than in the past, though it’s also still just another form of deficit spending, which is going to be required no matter what.

What now? Pass a one-year clean extension

When Congress is chugging along in the reauthorization process, with proposals moving through both chambers, shorter extensions could make sense to keep the pressure up and provide just enough time. But with just one chamber having passed a bill they should honestly scrap and forget about (The BUILD Act) and with an election looming just 33 days after expiration, that is not the context for this Congress. While many members will return,  reauthorization will ultimately be handed over to the 120th Congress, which will include scores of newly elected members. 

A year is the most prudent length to give the next Congress so that they have enough time to get seated and start their work, which will not get going immediately in 2027 as members will face a range of competing issues. A six-month extension would expire in March, giving them a ticking clock and almost certainly requiring another extension anyway.

Make it a year.

Forget about reauthorization—Congress should keep passing extensions

Yes, you read that right.

There is no deal to be made on a new long-term surface transportation reauthorization as long as this administration is failing to follow the existing law. Congress should keep passing one-year extensions of the IIJA until they see faithful implementation of the law by the administration and USDOT.

The administration is disrespecting both the intent of Congress’s bipartisan action on the IIJA as well as the American people and their local communities getting jerked around by USDOT’s unprecedented action to withhold or rescind funding for grant programs, delay (possibly indefinitely) all transit Capital Investment Grants, reinterpret grant-funding criteria, and weaponize programs like the Safe Streets for All program. Congress passes the laws; the executive branch implements them. USDOT is not, nor should it be, above that respect. 

Faithful implementation of IIJA would mean ensuring that authorized programs, competitive grant processes, and statutory requirements are administered according to the law and without unauthorized delay, reinterpretation, substitution, or withholding. 

We find it baffling that Congress—especially the Democrats and those leading the negotiations in the House and Senate—would choose to strike any deal to give this administration additional money when the same people are telling you loudly and publicly that they will not honor the full scope of whatever bipartisan deal you reach.  

Until Congress sees the full and faithful implementation of the IIJA, they should stay away from the negotiating table and keep extending the law one year at a time until there is an administration that can be trusted to implement the law as written.

Ten things to know about the BUILD Act’s failure to produce better outcomes

The BUILD America 250 Act, approved by a House committee early on Friday, May 22nd, is a lot like the IIJA—minus a whole lot of funding for transit, rail, and reducing emissions. Here are ten things to know about the bill and how it will fail to advance T4America’s simple three priorities.

After a year of hearing that “the House is definitely going to release and markup a draft bill sometime this month,” Lucy kept the football on the ground, and the House finally released a five-year, $474 billion reauthorization proposal last Sunday on the eve of this year’s Infrastructure Week. Predict the same thing every month, and eventually it will come true. 

How will Congress pay for this enormous bill? The short answer is they won’t—your grandkids will. A modest amount of new funding will come via a controversial new fee on electric vehicles, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the enormous gap between revenues and spending. Just like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), an enormous subsidy from all taxpayers would be required to cover annual spending that is roughly double what the gas tax brings in each year. And all that for a fairly status quo proposal that fails to meet the moment and will not deliver a transportation system that safely, affordably, and reliably gets us all where we need to go. 

But in a bill with less money than the IIJA, it’s transit and passenger rail that take the hit. 

Though leadership on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee describes it as a $580 billion bill, in reality, it includes only $474 billion in guaranteed funding, representing a cut from the $539 billion guaranteed by the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Nearly all of that difference comes from cuts to transit, passenger rail, and scrapped competitive grant programs. Highways? They get a healthy bump in guaranteed funding.

1) There was a notable attempt to prevent a repeat of the Trump administration’s massive flood of grant cancellations

This administration has been unwilling to follow the current transportation law, as evidenced most clearly by their abrupt 2025 cancellation of billions in grants that were previously awarded to states and local communities. The BUILD Act included some surprising language aimed at preventing a repeat: “the Secretary may not terminate, withhold, or delay the execution of a grant agreement for a grant or award (in part or in whole) made using funds made available under this Act” based on any arbitrary reasons or a change in preferences of a new administration.  While this provision would be a step in the right direction, it unfortunately does nothing to restore the billions in grants rescinded under the IIJA. 

Another way to think about this provision: it will successfully prevent the cancellation of grant funding for the kinds of projects that this administration will absolutely not select in the first place. This is a move in the right direction, but it’s slamming the proverbial barn door after the horses are already in another zip code.

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) did attempt to restore the canceled IIJA grants via this amendment during Thursday’s marathon committee markup. This amendment, which failed on a voice vote, would have retroactively applied to all grants awarded under IIJA, noting that “the Secretary shall obligate and execute grant agreements for any project that was selected, awarded, or publicly announced for funding by the Department on or after November 15, 2021” via the IIJA or Inflation Reduction Act, and prevent the Secretary from canceling them. When it was offered during the markup, Chairman Sam Graves backed the Trump administration’s decision to cancel these grants, noting that Sec. Duffy inherited a backlog of unobligated funds, so the only solution was obviously to cancel them all and take back the money. 

Rep. Huffman had some support, but considering the fact that canceled grants spanned republican and democrat districts alike, you’d think that a sizable number of committee members—but especially those in the minority—would be loudly standing up for those communities and making the restoration of these grants one of their fundamental prerequisites for support. 

Apparently not.

Grant cancellations aside, here are nine other things to know about the BUILD America 250 Act, organized around our three simple principles. (Note: We’re just calling it the BUILD Act from here on.)

Fix it first

Overall, this bill fails to make meaningful strides towards prioritizing maintenance and repair on our roadways. States are not required to demonstrate progress toward any hard and fast targets for road or bridge conditions before building new road capacity with federal-aid highway programs. There is no change to the current paperwork exercise of performance management, and states are not required to set any targets they’d be held accountable for meeting. (Read more about this T4America principle)

2) Dedicated bridge repair funding is back, but lacks accountability

Congress eliminated a dedicated bridge repair program back in 2012, but what’s old is always eventually new again, and the BUILD Act creates a new dedicated formula program for bridge repair. Some IIJA bridge programs are consolidated into a new $9.2 billion annual program—creatively called the Bridge Program. Each state would receive $75 million, plus an amount based on factors like bridge area and the amount of bridge area in poor condition. Some money is set aside to be spent on the thousands of oft-overlooked bridges not on the federal-aid highway system (though states can opt out of this), and 25 percent is set aside for states to run a competition for awards to locally-owned bridges. States have to produce a new report describing progress made on reducing the number of bridges in poor condition, but there are no real penalties for failure. 

Beyond this formula program, there’s a new $2 billion annual competitive grant program (without guaranteed funding) that’s focused on improving the safety, efficiency, and reliability of bridges on the National Highway System only. While the details are different, with dedicated funding and little accountability, the BUILD Act’s approach is not that dissimilar from our pre-2012 approach to bridge repair. 

3) The slightest of head nods toward repair accountability

The National Highway Performance Program (NHPP) is the largest highway-focused program that states have control of. Within this program, states will have to develop and maintain a state asset management plan. Under BUILD, any state that fails to develop and implement its asset management plan will see the federal share for projects within NHPP drop down to just 65 percent. While that sounds like a move in the right direction, there are no requirements that states set or meet binding, positive targets on repair. That’s not going to cut it.

UPDATE: This 65 percent provision already existed in current law. The updated language makes some small changes to how USDOT will assess compliance, but this is not a notable change in the BUILD Act. – Ed. 6/17/2026

4) Reconnecting Communities is functionally dead

This bill completely eliminates the Neighborhood Access and Equity Grant program, which was best understood as the authorized, long-term version of the Reconnecting Communities pilot program, which technically ended this year. This likely means the end of federal money spent on repairing divisive infrastructure, and the end of a program T4America helped create back in 2020. 

The concept of Reconnecting Communities survives as a project eligibility within a new grant program (STAG) that would replace the BUILD competitive grant program. (Yes, this is confusing. The BUILD grant program is the one formerly known as TIGER and RAISE.) But considering that this administration canceled nearly every single unobligated Neighborhood Access and Equity grant project, it’s unlikely that any reconnecting-style projects would win funding in this new grant program under this administration. The Senate should resuscitate this program, and there was an amendment offered during the markup to restore the Reconnecting Communities program and rename it.

Safety over speed

While there are a few changes that could be perceived as small improvements to safety policy, the program fails to make improving safety a centerpiece priority across the entire program and will do very little to reverse the U.S.’s roadway safety crisis. (Read more about this T4America principle)

5) Safe Streets for All local grant program survives

Tucson residents paint the street orange, green, blue, and white to draw attention to a bike lane in their Complete Streets demonstration project.
Photo courtesy of Living Streets Alliance staff. From Smart Growth America’s profile of Tucson’s Complete Streets policy. https://smartgrowthamerica.org/tucson-complete-streets-is-about-more-than-pavement/

Perhaps the best news in this entire bill is the survival of the Safe Streets for All (SS4A) grant program, which is only available directly to cities and local communities (including tribes) for projects to make concrete changes to their streets to improve safety.  SS4A’s survival is good news for safety, and it was also moved into the highway title of the bill and given guaranteed funding through contract authority, sparing it from future appropriations fights.  In IIJA, 40 percent of SS4A funds were (likely mistakenly) set aside for planning, and one of the eligible uses was for quick-build demonstration projects. The BUILD Act reduces that set-aside to a much more rational 5 percent. That might seem too low, but considering how much money has been put into planning over the last five years, it’s time to pour more money into implementation and actually building projects to improve safety.

The bad news is that the program is roughly half the size it was during the IIJA, and all mentions of Vision Zero were eliminated. And we’re putting a lot of faith in a program that has already been weaponized by this USDOT. USDOT has selectively canceled SS4A grants they didn’t like and also changed the criteria to let applicants know they won’t select projects that make people safer by removing parking or repurposing lane space. This USDOT wants to improve safety with SS4A grants, as long as those improvements don’t come at the expense of their other, higher priorities. 

6) States aiming for more people to die on their roads have to inform the Secretary

Under our weak system of measuring performance, numerous states have routinely set targets for more people to be injured/killed on their roadways. These targets have been posted publicly on FHWA’s website, but the BUILD Act makes a subtle change to require the Secretary to notify Congress when states do it in the future. But there will continue to be no penalty for setting these regressive targets, and Congress has not shown any appetite to create actual accountability for reducing roadway deaths. But it will be harder for Congress to claim they didn’t know that states were aiming for such bad performance. 

Invest in the rest 

While the BUILD Act increases guaranteed funding for highways, guaranteed transit funding is going down. There are a few changes to provide some modest flexibility to use capital dollars for operations, but there are none of the dramatic increases in transit capital or operations funding on par with what it would truly take to invest in the rest and build a world-class transit system. (Read more about this T4America principle.)

7) Guaranteed highway money is going up while transit is decreasing. 

IIJA provided an historic increase in guaranteed funding for highways and transit. That’s only the case for highways this time around. 

Though the bill’s authors are quick to note that transit contract authority is increasing over IIJA levels, the guaranteed amount for transit is actually going down, thanks to the loss of advance appropriations. Transit goes from $91.2 billion in guaranteed funding in the IIJA down to $87.6 billion in BUILD. Highways, meanwhile, jump from $351 billion up to $376 billion in guaranteed funding. This also means that transit is dipping below its typical 20 percent share of the overall bill. The 80/20 split has often fluctuated slightly above or below that 20 percent threshold, but the decrease is still notable.

8) Changes to the transit capital program…which is currently frozen by the Trump administration

No one should be celebrating any positive changes in the program for building and expanding transit systems, considering that it has been ground to a halt by the current administration. The bipartisan authors in the House have failed to recognize this reality nor have they done anything in this bill to attempt to require this administration to follow the law and administer this program in this new five-year proposal.

There are some changes to streamline transit capital project delivery, including rewarding transit agencies that have recently navigated the federal process successfully with a speedier process. Likely recognizing the increasing costs of bus rapid transit projects and other “Small Starts” projects, BUILD raises the funding threshold for these projects up to $1 billion (with a 50 percent max federal share) and changes their name to Streamlined Starts. The law would broaden the eligibility for Core Capacity projects, which could make it possible for projects to do things like investing in automation to increase throughput on a busy rail line. And transit projects in the pipeline can receive extra credit in the evaluation process for local policies in favor of housing development near transit. 

On the negative side, the IIJA-created program for procuring low- and no-emission buses is toast.

9) A new focus on transit safety, crime, and fare evasion

bus driver wearing mask adjusts mirror
Image from Flickr/MTA NYC

There’s a significant new focus on transit safety and fare evasion—both with funding set aside from transit formulas, but also in new policy requirements. 

Instead of just one percent, urban agencies will be required to spend 1.5 percent of their transit formula funds on a wide range of eligible transit safety and security projects, including fare evasion prevention, new technology, and new police officers. Agencies have to start gathering and reporting data to FTA on how much money they are losing to fare evasion, and there are requirements for making fare evasion a criminal or civil offense. There are no penalties for the states or cities that continue building streets and roads that ensure that anyone’s walking trip to transit might be the most dangerous part of their journey.

10) Passenger rail loses out big time

After $66 billion guaranteed in IIJA for rail, the BUILD Act provides zero dollars in guaranteed funding for passenger rail and reduces authorized spending below IIJA levels, while making some marginal improvements around rail permitting and Amtrak accountability, and logically combining several programs. 

The result of losing the guaranteed funding means that Congress will have to do something it didn’t have to do over the last five years: consider every year whether or not it will provide the authorized amounts of rail funding. Policy improvements aside, the rail title overall decreases federal investment in passenger rail and is a step back. We expect the Senate Commerce Committee to take a different approach.

The bill was approved by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on a 66-2 vote in the wee hours of Friday morning. Stay tuned on the blog for more on the law and the next steps.

USDOT’s historic failure to advance any new transit projects in 14 months may be a sign of things to come

As in their first term, it appears the Trump administration is again attempting to slow down or stop transit capital expansion projects across the country. Unlike those previous attempts in 2017-2018, from which they ultimately relented, they are employing new methods to flout the will of Congress on transportation yet again. Yet somehow, leaders from both parties are clamoring to send the administration more money via reauthorization.

The backstory 

During the first Trump administration, T4America’s Stuck in the Station raised the alarm about USDOT failing to advance transit capital expansion projects for which Congress was appropriating billions of dollars. During that time, USDOT publicly insisted they were faithfully advancing transit projects, but by 2018, USDOT had awarded less than 20 percent of the $2.3 billion Congress had appropriated for this specific purpose. “Future investments in new transit projects would be funded by the localities that use and benefit from these localized projects,” they said when defending their request for zeroing out the program in the president’s budget back in FY18.

After embarrassing hearings and public events where the FTA administrator had to answer for the slowdown, warnings from the Government Accountability Office that they were running “the risk of violating federal law,” and the unprecedented move by Congress of requiring FTA to obligate 85 percent of the transit capital program funds by the end of 2019, the administration finally relented and started signing grant agreements late in the first term. 

This time around, the Trump administration appears to be taking that hostility to a new level by tapping some novel mechanisms to achieve the same ends.

Considering the sorry state of transit in this country before these slowdowns and how the lack of quality transit affects mobility, the economy, and access to opportunity, alarm bells should be ringing big time on Capitol Hill. Consider the state of U.S. transit, via Yonah Freemark at the Urban Institute:

In 1990, 4 of the world’s 14 longest metro networks—or those that include monorail, subway, elevated, and automated light metro—were located in the United States. Today, not a single U.S. network sits on that list. Over the past few decades, the U.S. has not expanded its urban railway systems to keep up with population growth. Compared with other wealthy nations, where transit is much more available, a smaller share of our population has easy access to a subway or elevated station. Without transit alternatives, most Americans have little choice but to drive expensive, polluting cars. And those without access to a car might not have a safe, reliable way to get around. The lack of investment in urban rail contributes to the high carbon dioxide emissions from the U.S. transport sector. It’s also left people in the U.S. spending a large share of their income on transportation, as many Americans struggle with the high costs of living.

As oil prices have continued to climb and new cars are reaching astronomical prices, the administration has responded by making electric cars more expensive, seizing the ability for cities to decide how to keep people safe on their streets and roads, and, as we will chronicle here, slowing down badly needed new transit projects. 

Some quick background on federal transit funding: 

Broadly speaking, transit gets federal dollars in two ways:

1) The most consistent source is annual formula dollars from the Highway Trust Fund (specifically the Mass Transit Account), which are used for capital expenses like buying new railcars or buses, making track upgrades, upgrading electrical equipment, or repairing/upgrading other aspects of hard transit infrastructure. Larger transit agencies get this money directly each year based on their population and levels of transit service, while smaller agencies might get it through their state DOT. But this money is not sufficient to cover the kind of big capital expenditures involved in building new transit service. To support these kinds of projects, money comes from… 

2) The transit Capital Investment Grants program, which comes from discretionary spending each year. The five-year authorization (like the IIJA) sets the basic levels, but unlike the trust fund formula money that flows automatically, appropriators in Congress have to set aside this money each year. There are three types of projects: New Starts for big multi-year projects, typically light or heavy rail; Small Starts, typically for bus rapid transit projects; and Core Capacity for doing things like costly capacity expansions on existing transit lines. 

Transit agencies apply and then wind through a (too long, complicated, and onerous) process within FTA to tick a million boxes and receive a grant agreement in which USDOT agrees to give X transit agency Y amount of dollars over a certain number of years to cover a share of the costs—typically no higher than 50 percent but more often closer to 30 or 40 percent. (Contrast that with the 80-90 percent of highway costs that are covered by the feds.)

The money appropriated by Congress each year is always intended to cover a mix of 1) payments for multi-year projects already approved by FTA, and 2) a suite of new transit projects expected to be approved for construction and funded over the next year. 

And this is where new problems are starting to arise.

An unprecedented slowdown in transit construction grants

The Trump administration is the first administration in at least three decades to fail to approve a new transit project in its first year, as noted back in early March by Yonah Freemark for Urban. Since taking office in January 2025, USDOT has not signed a single full-funding grant agreement for a new metro, light rail, or bus rapid transit line. This is even slower than their progress in the first term. 

While it may be true that transit projects are just simply not ready to sign an agreement and proceed to construction, it’s hard to believe that not a single project was ready to go over the last 14 months. It’s also important to remember that successfully shepherding projects through the federal process quickly and successfully is FTA’s mission.

Tracking the “pipeline” of projects

USDOT is required by law to issue a report by February (which is always late) detailing the ratings for all transit capital projects in the pipeline, a list of projects with recommended funding amounts, and an overview of the program’s next three years. It’s incredibly striking to see the evolution in the detail FTA provides in this annual report to Congress over the last few years.

Here’s what the detailed page of projects and budget requests looks like in the report from the last year (FY25) of the Biden administration, for which they requested a total of ~$4 billion for the upcoming fiscal year to cover five ongoing projects with full funding agreements, plus five new New Starts projects and ten Small Starts projects slated for approval—mostly BRT projects.  (p. 4 in the March 2024 report)

Screenshot from FY25 FTA Report

We would compare that to the same page in this year’s FY27 report from Trump’s USDOT, but it doesn’t actually exist. This is what the comparable page looks like from this year’s report: 

Screenshot from FY27 FTA Report

Just by comparison, even in last year’s report—the first issued after taking office—the administration was requesting a typical amount of money for projects likely to be getting approved: 

  • $1.4b for existing New Starts grant agreements, and $2.4 billion for new grant agreements for New Starts, Core Capacity, and Small Starts transit capital projects “that may become ready for a construction grant agreement” in the year ahead. They even listed 15 separate projects that may become ready.

Fast forward a full year later, after not signing a single grant agreement or awarding a single dollar of that $2.4 billion to any of those 15 projects, here’s their request for the upcoming fiscal year from this year’s report:

  • “$1.202 billion for existing FFGAs and other projects that may become ready for construction funding during FY 2027”

Keep in mind that Congress has now appropriated nearly $6 billion for advancing these transit projects. $1.2 billion—their request for the year ahead—is basically what is needed to fulfill their existing contractual agreements to ongoing projects with grant agreements. While they mention “projects that may become ready for construction,” they are requesting only enough money to fulfill current obligations.

New strategies to stonewall transit projects 

Despite the polarization, Congress has continued to provide USDOT with billions for transit construction each year. But this is where some of the newer shenanigans are emerging. 

Even though Congress has appropriated more than $6 billion for ongoing and new transit capital projects, the Office of Management and Budget has employed a new strategy of apportioning only a fraction of that amount. (Simply put, apportionment means transferring it into the USDOT bank account.) While it’s relatively normal for OMB to make available only what’s needed for payments in any given year, or even by month, in this case, they’re holding back far more than is normal. 

Without those funds available to them, USDOT couldn’t approve a new transit project if it wanted to.

Though Congress was expecting USDOT to spend roughly $2.4 billion on new projects expected to sign a grant agreement during this current fiscal year, OMB has sent (apportioned) just $500 million more than the $1.2b they owe to ongoing projects. That means OMB is stonewalling $4.9 billion that Congress has appropriated. While OMB may just be holding onto those funds until USDOT is ready to approve a project or shifting them into the next fiscal year, it could also represent a new tactic for stalling out new transit expansions for the duration of this administration. 

If USDOT doesn’t sign grant agreements, there are points of pressure that Congress can tap, as they did back in 2018-2020. But if USDOT doesn’t have the money available in its bank account, that’s another thing entirely. This issue has been popping up elsewhere, as it’s become a new form of rescissions from the administration. 

It certainly appears that the administration is laying the groundwork to stop all transit capital construction in this program.

Is Congress asleep at the switch?

It’s been fairly shocking to share these developments on Capitol Hill and be met with looks of surprise from various offices. Members should be livid, raising the alarm on another way that the administration is flouting Congress’s duly passed laws and budgets. Instead, Democrats on the House transportation committee are rolling ahead to support a reauthorization proposal that will look a lot like the expiring IIJA—at the precise moment that the administration is failing to faithfully implement the existing bipartisan bill, and their negotiating partners on reauthorization are silent about it.

Why strike a bipartisan deal when it’s only your priorities that get cast aside the next day? Why negotiate in good faith with those who are not doing the same?

It’s time to call a few committee hearings, send some letters to USDOT, and mandate more information about the progress of transit projects in the pipeline. Congress needs to wake up and remember that they make the laws, and the executive branch implements them. If they allocate money to advance and approve new transit projects, that needs to happen, or someone at USDOT needs to explain why it’s not.

The truth is that when transit projects get artificially slowed down by bureaucrats and political appointees in Washington, it’s not the political opposition that pays the price. It’s the taxpayers who have to pay inflated costs for needlessly delayed projects, and the riders who have to wait for new or expanded transit service that will improve connections and access where they live—those who are again going to be stuck in the station.

“Why do we do this bill?” Preparing congressional staff for surface transportation reauthorization

U.S. Capitol Building

Over the past month, T4America organized briefings for Hill staffers (one each for the House and Senate) about the federal surface transportation reauthorization process to help them advance their members’ priorities, but also hopefully to encourage them to take a more skeptical look at a program producing marginal and diminishing returns for taxpayers at enormous expense. 

Group of people seated at a table in discussion during Transportation for America Congressional staffer retreat.

When SGA president and CEO Beth Osborne asked the staffers present to raise their hands if they worked on developing the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) back in November 2021, maybe two total hands went up in either briefing. Ninety-five percent  or more of the staff who showed up are knee-deep in their very first reauthorization cycle. This isn’t just because the briefings drew interns or newer, younger staffers. These were staffers who, in most cases, had worked on the Hill for years and were specifically responsible for transportation issues. 

In T4America’s experience, this is pretty typical for most offices. The fact that reauthorization happens about every five years has one notable effect: There’s little institutional knowledge of the process or the policy within many congressional offices. Most members of Congress (and their staff) don’t think or do much about it during the 4-6 years between reauthorization cycles.1

But this once-every-five-years cycle is one reason why the bipartisan status quo has so much inertia—there’s little reason to interrogate the overarching purpose of this program, to look back at how it has performed, or what everyone is getting for the money.

In both briefings, we wanted to try to get everyone to take a step back and think about the purposes of the federal transportation program. Why do we need this bill? Why does this program exist? We asked everyone in both briefings, and the answers started out largely the same: 

  • “To provide steady, predictable funding.”
  • “To allocate transportation money to states.” 
  • “To make a better transportation system.”

Look carefully: These answers are not about measurable outcomes but are simply outputs. This underscores many of the structural problems and defines how most lawmakers tend to approach this program: How much money is in the bill overall, and how much is coming to my state? Many are also interested in things like “How much is going toward transit vs. highways, or is the small program I like getting more funding?” But very few members of Congress are asking harder, outcomes-oriented questions like “Are we making measurable progress on outcomes that matter with the hundreds of billions in general funds that we have been using to subsidize this program?”

Eventually, many of the staffers started answering with goals for the program more oriented around outcomes, including the performance measures specifically codified into the program back in 2012’s MAP-21:

  • “To make a safer, faster, reliable, more predictable system.” 
  • “To reduce congestion.”
  • “To finally fix our crumbling roads and bridges.

If these are truly core goals for the program (and they are!), how has the program performed? If we’re going to do what the big industry groups think we should do and borrow another $200 billion or more from our grandkids to do more of the same, we should ask some questions about the returns we’re going to get for that money. 

Here’s what Beth had to say on safety, the state of repair of our roads and bridges, and congestion: 

As we said last year, after spending over $1 trillion on transportation, our roads are still crumbling, unsafe, and congested. So we asked these staffers: Why should any member of Congress be lining up to support continuing this program without significant changes? And for those in the congressional minority, why should they be lining up to provide bipartisan support for a law where their priorities in the last bipartisan bill—the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act—have so often been meddled with, frozen, or eliminated outright by the White House? Especially while those with whom they forged the “bipartisan” agreement have largely stood on the sidelines and failed to defend what they collectively passed?

To that last point, as we’ve chronicled here, over the last year, billions of dollars in funding for community-led safety projects, electrification, transit, and passenger rail projects from the bipartisan-passed IIJA have been delayed, frozen, or outright cancelled by the administration’s USDOT.  But it’s not just the administration: Congress rescinded and reprogrammed over $2.3 billion in IIJA appropriations in the FY26 spending bill and even more in the partisan reconciliation bill. And this year, the Trump administration canceled another $963 million for clean transportation projects, targeting communities in Minnesota, Colorado, Illinois, and California.

It’s time to focus on opportunities and outcomes

Surface transportation reauthorization is an opportunity to reorient federal policy to address the issues that matter most to Americans. Such as making our streets and roads far safer for everyone who uses them. Or holding every single entity spending federal money accountable for actually repairing what they’ve built first, before building new stuff. Or focusing not on how much money gets spent on 1950s measures like congestion, but instead on making things more affordable by improving accessibility—making it easier and cheaper to get to what we need each day. Or finding ways to get more homes built in the areas that already have great transportation and transit access.

During the rest of the time in these two briefings, we had tables organized around issues like transit, rail, or safety, where staffers could dig into those issues with policy experts from other organizations and learn how those priorities can be advanced in the reauthorization process. 

More members of Congress (from both parties) should be more skeptically interrogating this program and asking: What are we getting for the huge price tag? Why should we deficit spend so much just to accomplish so little?

No more blank checks for unproductive infrastructure that makes life more unaffordable, produces terrible results on safety, and fails to actually improve the condition of our infrastructure. That’s the core message that we hope to continue communicating to these vital staffers and congressional offices who will be shaping what comes next after the IIJA.

Group of people seated at a table in discussion during Transportation for America Congressional staffer retreat.

Our sincere thanks to Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester (DE) for helping us to organize the Senate briefing, to the Congressional Progressive Caucus for helping to organize the House briefing, and to our many partners and advocates who came to help educate staff. 

A transportation two-fer: Save the highway trust fund and reduce emissions 22%

With only three real possible options to stave off the looming bankruptcy* of the nation’s transportation trust fund, a Senator has proposed choosing one of them: scale the nation’s transportation program down to the size of the revenues users pay into it. 

*No, the trust fund can’t actually go bankrupt—“insolvent” is the technical term. But for everyday people who cannot spend more money than they have, understanding it as “bankruptcy” is more helpful.

As we noted a few months ago, the nation’s transportation trust fund is in existential trouble. And it has been since 2008, when Congress started bailing it out with your general tax dollars. They’ve now poured in somewhere around $275 billion to cover the huge gap between how much Congress keeps spending on transportation and the far lower amount the gas tax brings in each year. And here we are again, back at square one, with the trust fund needing a massive bailout to cover a gap that will soon reach $40 billion annually.

There are three main options for tackling this problem: 1) (Continue to) deficit spend and bail it out, with every single taxpayer picking up the tab on top of whatever they pay at the pump. 2) Increase the gas tax (or create another tax) to raise revenues. 3) Live within our means by cutting spending down to the amount of revenue brought in each year. 

Spend what we have, nothing more

#3 is the path that Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) has attempted to forge with a simple new bill. 

His Balance the Highway Trust Fund Act would prohibit USDOT’s annual obligations (i.e, spending) for federal-aid highway programs from ever exceeding gas tax receipts to the highway account in any given year. To put that in real terms, CBO figures show that 2025’s highway spending was about $58.5 billion, which exceeds the $38.9 billion in gas tax receipts that were brought into the highway account by about $19.7 billion. So this bill would reduce highway spending by $19.7 billion.

The bill would do the same thing for transit, limiting annual obligations from the Mass Transit Account to the net gas tax receipts for each fiscal year. CBO estimates that amount would average about $5.75 billion annually during the next five-year reauthorization.

It’s debatable whether or not Sen. Lee is serious about advancing this proposal, given that he introduced it with no co-sponsors and no apparent media push (he’s proposed similar bills before). But this is, in fact, the only formal proposal in Congress right now aiming to deal with the looming bankruptcy of the highway trust fund. 

But that’s not the only way to categorize this proposal.

This is also technically the most ambitious climate bill in this Congress

As we’ve pointed out repeatedly over the last few years, the IIJA supercharged highway spending and massively increased overall transportation emissions, empowering state DOTs to commit to long-shelved or dormant expansion projects. Our Fueling the Crisis analysis showed that the IIJA could cumulatively increase emissions by nearly 190 million metric tonnes over baseline levels by 2040, largely due to all the added driving from the IIJA’s massive increase in unaccountable highway spending. That’s akin to nearly 50 coal-fired power plants running for a year. All this despite the hefty praise it received from the environmental world.

That analysis has likely only gotten worse, as many of the “good” programs for reducing emissions in the IIJA have been slashed or eliminated outright by the Trump administration, like electric vehicle charging infrastructure and grants for local projects focused on reducing driving or improving access. 

Here’s where the implications of Sen. Lee’s proposal get interesting.  

Assuming we scale down the size of the highway and transit programs to what the gas tax actually brings in, it would potentially reduce net emissions from the Highway Trust Fund’s programs by nearly 24 million tons. That’s a 22 percent reduction compared to simply extending the bill and getting the same outcomes.  

To emphasize: right-sizing the federal program would deliver more progress on emissions from transportation than any other climate bill that’s been proposed in this Congress. 

Sen. Mike Lee, accidental climate advocate? 

Compare those reductions to the potentially enormous growth in emissions likely to result if groups like AASHTO get their way and see the next reauthorization start at the same level of funding as in the IIJA (plus inflation).  Remember: their starting point is $400 billion over five years for the highway-only programs, which is somewhere around over $210 billion more than the gas tax will bring in over those five years! If Congress did roll over and decide to hand state DOTs another $210 billion of your money on top of what you pay at the gas pump, emissions would rise dramatically. 

The elephant in the room: transit funding

Unlike other proposals to kick transit out of the trust fund to try and save money, it’s notable that Sen. Lee is proposing to scale down the highway and transit programs in the same way: lowering spending on each one to the level of what the gas tax brings in. Nearly 3 cents of the 18 cents per gallon gas tax goes directly into the Mass Transit Account, and this bill would not change that—he’s not arguing to end federal support for transit funding.

As with highways, it would mean a significant cut in federal transit spending (a 66 percent reduction in federal funds, causing pain and fiscal ruin for transit systems across the country—especially smaller ones. 

But consider the position a proposal like this puts most transit advocates in: most will be loudly opposed to this proposal, even when it would massively reduce emissions from highway-related spending and finally end the runaway growth of the unaccountable highway program. We transit advocates get backed into a corner on proposals like Senator Lee’s because transit funding is inextricably tied to highway funding.

And so transit advocates will continue to have no choice but to be boosters for an enormous highway program, just to keep transit funding at the same paltry level that’s far less than what we need to truly invest in the rest and build a world-class system for all of our cities, big and small. The structure of this program requires transit advocates to essentially back AASHTO’s fever dream of deficit spending on historic funding for highways, more flexibility, and even less oversight. 

That’s the high price of keeping transit funding at the same levels.

People who believe that we need more and better transit in this country should not have to hold their nose and swallow insane amounts of unaccountable highway funds that undermine our transit investments. They should not have to support bank-breaking reauthorizations paid for by their grandchildren just to prop up a system that delivers such terrible results on safety, maintenance, and access to other options for getting around.

Especially when there is growing evidence that the Trump administration is killing grants for transit-related projects or failing to advance transit capital projects with money set aside by Congress. (Some breaking news we hope to expand on in the coming weeks: Trump’s USDOT has advanced zero new transit capital investment grants in the last 13 months, a new record for slowness.) 

All of this points to an uncomfortable reality that has been looming for years, and which transit advocates (including ourselves) need to eventually grapple with: The federal Highway Trust Fund is not a long-term, stable solution for funding transit in this country, and the time has come to have a conversation about other mechanisms for funding transit in the future. The future of transit needs to stop being tied to the fate of a supercharged highway program that is producing terrible results for taxpayers.

Sen. Lee’s proposal reduces the size of a program that produces bad outcomes. What we need instead is a smarter, virtuous funding mechanism that, for each dollar invested, supports good investments across all modes. 

Because the damage being done by this federal transportation program—funded by immense deficit spending for 18 years now—is too great to ignore. 

Five reasons why IIJA will expire without a replacement in September 2026

The general consensus starting to emerge around Washington these days amongst all the transportation trade groups, some in the media, and many legislators on Capitol Hill is that Congress will definitely pass a new five-year transportation law when the current one expires next September, and that it will have at least as much money in it as the IIJA did in 2021. This flies in the face of history and reality.

Whether from press releases from trade groups, testimony in early hearings before Congress on reauthorization, or just conversations here and there, it has somehow become the conventional wisdom that we’ll see a new transportation law pass in September 2026 when the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act expires. Sure, there might be a short extension while Congress hammers out some details in the fall, but “transportation has always been a bipartisan issue,” and “our country’s infrastructure is too important,” and “they came together last time to pass historic amounts of funding for highways, transit, and rail, so they’ll definitely be able to do that again.”

Anyone who has been around for the last ten years should know better. And there are countless signs on the wall that we are headed not just for a massive delay but for some fundamental changes in whatever ends up passing in 2026. Or 2029. Here are five reasons why nothing is happening by next October 1, starting with the most obvious:

  1. Reauthorization failing to pass on time is the standard
  2. Continuing the program at IIJA funding levels would require enormous deficit spending
  3. The novel spending mechanisms used to paper over the massive deficit last time won’t work this time
  4. The bipartisan coalition is already fragmenting as the administration unilaterally undermines the law Congress passed in 2021 
  5. If the majority tries to remove all non-highway spending from the program, that coalition dies

1) Reauthorization has never passed on time. Why would it happen now?

Just save this graphic to share anytime you read some rosy optimist prognosticating that Congress will find a way to pass a new law on time, or maybe by the end of 2026 at the latest. 

Since 1991—a time when we were swimming in gas tax surpluses and Congress just had to figure out how to spend all that extra money—the country has operated on a short-term extension of an expired transportation law for a full third of the time. And when we moved past those surpluses of the 1990s and the insolvency of the trust fund became the most pressing issue when SAFETEA-LU expired in 2009, it took Congress 33 months and 10 separate extensions to get to MAP-21 in 2012—which only covered two years because Congress couldn’t find enough money in the couch cushions to pay for anything longer. Financially speaking, which era is our transportation program closer to as it wildly outspends what the gas tax brings in each year? 

So, for the first time in modern history, something that has never happened before is definitely going to happen? Ok, if you say so! Especially considering what’s coming next:

2) The budget reconciliation bill, which added $3 trillion to the federal deficit, likely killed the appetite for further deficit spending

The budget reconciliation law passed on July 4 blew up the federal deficit, adding over $3 trillion to the deficit while making painful cuts to popular programs that ordinary taxpayers understand, like Medicaid. The appetite for further deficit spending by this Congress will be non-existent, especially when it comes to doing it for transportation, which we like to say is right at the top…of everyone’s second page of important issues. There are already conversations about finding ways to restore some of the most unpopular cuts in the reconciliation bill, but doing so would require more deficit spending. Does anyone think that transportation is going to rank anywhere near the top when we’re talking about restoring health care for millions of people who are losing this basic, essential benefit?

3) Congress will not be able to rely on the creative spending mechanisms it used last time to cover the gap

The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act—which is the current transportation law—provided the highest levels of funding ever for transportation. There were massive, historic increases across the board, for roads, rail, and transit, as well as $200 billion plowed into existing grant programs and so many new competitive grant programs that you couldn’t count them with several hands full of fingers. How in the world did Congress manage to find so much money for infrastructure when the gas tax brings in less and less money each year,  roads are getting pricier, and it doesn’t come anywhere near close enough to cover the IIJA’s price tag? 

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and behold the magic of “advance appropriations” and deficit spending! Even back in 2021, we were highly skeptical about how this novel funding mechanism was going to work: 

In a notable change from historic practice, these supplemental [i.e, deficit spending] funds will be appropriated in advance of other priorities in the annual budget process.   … As far as how these “advance” appropriations are going to work out in practice, no one is really sure what to expect in reality over the next five years as Congress could change several times over during the 2021 infrastructure law’s lifespan. In theory, these programs provided with appropriations in advance (like transit and passenger rail) should be safer than other programs that are wholly discretionary and left up to future appropriators to decide funding each year, but it’s a real possibility that a new Congress could certainly find a way to undo some of the advance funding for programs that they deem unworthy. This will be an issue that we will be keeping a close eye on in the years ahead.

We have indeed been watching closely, and this Congress is right now 100% “finding a way to undo some of that advance funding for programs they deem unworthy” during the ongoing appropriations process for FY26. While the budget reconciliation law already took back more than $2.4 billion in funds for reconnecting communities through the Neighborhood Access and Equity grant program, House appropriators are now proposing to take away more than $100 million in Reconnecting Communities funds that were “advance appropriated,” and they are redirecting supposedly “advance appropriated” funds for the National Electrical Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program into airport spending.  This is a great segue to…

4) The traditional left-right bipartisan coalition that produces these massive bills is already fragmenting

Members of Congress who were around back in 2021 and signed IIJA are now watching as their bipartisan, five-year agreement they thought they set in stone is being undermined by the Trump administration at USDOT and undone by the majority controlling the country’s purse strings. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) was around for IIJA, and during a confirmation hearing for USDOT Assistant Secretary Sean McMaster, the Senator gave a foretaste of the kind of break in the traditional right-left coalition on transportation that we could see during the debate over IIJA’s replacement. From Philip Plotch at Eno: 

Senator Whitehouse told McMaster, “The chair and I both intend to deliver to you a robust bipartisan surface transportation.” But, he warned, “The gateway to success, to ultimately passing those bills, is confidence that this administration will faithfully execute the laws we pass and clear the projects we have already approved, appropriated, and obligated.” He said, “This administration has repeatedly unlawfully disrespected congressionally authorized and appropriated spending.” Looking directly at McMaster, Whitehouse rhetorically asked, “Do you understand how it would be hard for the minority to agree to a bipartisan bill if the upshot of that agreement was that only the majority’s parts of the bill were actually implemented and everything that we wanted got binned by the executive branch?” 

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. 

That should be the lesson for smart members of Congress who are paying attention. Why spend your political capital on a bill where your priorities get shelved 3 years later? Any member of Congress—especially those in the minority—willing to cut a deal on a long-term transportation law without first exacting a promise from the administration and their colleagues to restore all of these cuts has failed to learn this lesson. Shame on them.

These actions have both undermined the use of a trust fund and the concept of a five-year authorization, where these decisions are made at once and then everyone abides by them for the law’s duration. It is yet more proof that the trust fund is dead, and the coalition that has made these past reauthorizations possible is on life support.

5) The only possible way to pass a law without deficit spending or advance appropriations is to eliminate the coalition that has made each law possible

Let’s do some math. The gas tax, which funds (a shrinking) portion of the federal transportation program, is projected to bring in about $44 billion in 2028. If the federal transportation program continues at IIJA spending levels, more than $102 billion would be going out the door, leaving a deficit of $58 billion per year.

One idea that will almost certainly be suggested at some point—especially as USDOT signals their preference for “refocusing” the federal program on core priorities—is removing a bunch of stuff from the federal transportation program, like transit, passenger rail, and other competitive grants that fund things they don’t like. This will present two problems for those who do this: 

  1. The highway formula program alone costs more than $20 billion over what the gas tax brings in, so removing everything else doesn’t solve all of the problems.
  2. Kicking all of those other programs out of the trust fund would be the nail in the coffin of the coalition that has made it possible to pass these expensive bills.

Does the majority feel confident that they could pass a transportation authorization on a party-line vote? If so, the Republicans will get to choose between a balanced bill that also cuts $20 billion per year from the highway program, or $20 billion in further deficit spending to finance a bill that they will need to pass entirely on their own.

 

The politics that have defined the passage of these laws since 1991 have been best described as “everyone gets what they want.” (And they all collectively undermine all of their priorities to do it! But that’s a conversation for another day!) Without this coalition where everyone gets what they want, it becomes infinitely more difficult to pass a law like this—especially one where Congress is deficit spending or making major structural changes.

A long-term law is not passing in 2026, so go ahead and get ready for extensions and uncertainty. It’s virtually guaranteed.

 

More money, no results: How states avoid accountability for crumbling, deadly roads

Two crucial parts of our policy platform are requiring states to set targets to improve safety and the state of repair on their roads and bridges, and then holding them accountable for meeting them. But before we can explain those ideas in depth, it’s vital to understand the deeply flawed approach to “performance management” that Congress created 13 years ago—and how our proposed approach would differ.

A bad trade: A brief history of performance management

Every time anyone wants to justify the massive deficit spending in the federal transportation program, elected officials and transportation leaders make promises about the enormous benefits just right around the corner, if Congress will just cut the check. But we get sold a bill of goods every time. The lofty rhetoric used to justify the enormous deficit spending never matches the reality of how the money gets spent. The country’s civil engineers agree: even after $1.5 trillion spent on surface transportation, things are basically the same.

Thirteen years ago, Congress passed a two-year transportation law called MAP-21. 2 In that law, Congress made a deal with state DOTs and the broader world of transportation stakeholders: Give them more flexibility to spend (more) federal transportation money however they wish. And in exchange, the public would get more transparency into how they’re spending the money, and be able to hold transportation agencies accountable for making measurable progress on seven core goal areas: 3

Goal Area Goal Statement
Safety Achieve a significant reduction in traffic fatalities and serious injuries on all public roads.
Infrastructure Condition Maintain the highway infrastructure asset system in a state of good repair.
Congestion Reduction Achieve a significant reduction in congestion on the National Highway System.
System Reliability Improve the efficiency of the surface transportation system.
Freight Movement & Economic Vitality Improve the national freight network, strengthen the ability of rural communities to access national and international trade markets, and support economic development.
Environmental Sustainability Enhance the performance of the transportation system while protecting and enhancing the natural environment.
Reduced Project Delivery Delays Reduce project costs, promote jobs and the economy, and expedite project completion by eliminating delays, reducing regulatory burdens, and improving work practices.

 

Over several years, USDOT worked to establish this new system, soliciting reams of public feedback and finalizing the measures in 2017. But once launched, this program was administered by the “grantees,” not USDOT. States would decide on their targets. What percentage of bridges on the National Highway System in state X should be in poor condition next year? How good or bad should state Y’s pavement be, after spending all of that infrastructure law (IIJA) money? How many people should die on state Z’s roadways next year? States would answer those questions as they set their targets.

States won the flexibility they so prized, but the accountability and transparency promised to taxpayers never materialized.

“Transparency” turned out to be pretty opaque, and “accountability” became a paperwork exercise

Nearly a decade into the implementation of this system, it’s devolved into a box-checking exercise that provides neither greater transparency nor accountability for accomplishing anything tangible.

Transparency doesn’t mean an enormous PDF posted online of transportation projects planned over the next five years. Transparency means making spending decisions clear, accessible, and useful—so people can actually understand what’s happening and why. Real transparency also actively connects the dots. E.g., how does project X move the needle on a state’s safety targets? How will this collection of projects affect a state’s goals to reduce the number of bridges in poor condition? Actual, proactive transparency builds trust, invites accountability, and makes the process feel less like a black box and more like a public promise.

That is, in a word, not what we got with our current system.

Do you want to find and evaluate the transportation projects your state is planning over the next four years? You can probably google and find your state’s Statewide Transportation Improvement Plan (STIP), but good luck understanding or being able to decipher the list of projects in it. And while you can probably find the federally required biennial reports with your state’s targets for safety, repair, congestion, etc, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to easily compare those targets to their actual performance. 4

The transparency is bad, but there are two major reasons why the accountability has been even worse.

1) States set targets however they like, including targets to get worse. Most states have set targets within both repair and safety to get worse rather than improve. As one example on repair, Arizona has set targets for their interstates in good condition to decline (pictured below) and for the percent of interstates in poor condition to increase.

On safety, Florida, one of the most deadly states in the country, treats this system like a joke, continually setting targets of zero deaths or deaths/injuries, even though more than 3,200 people outside of vehicles were killed or injured in 2022. 5 12 states in total set targets for more people outside of vehicles to be injured/killed in 2024 compared to 2022.

You might not be able to find Florida’s targets for each year because that purple line is at the bottom. The orange line is reality.

2) States face no penalties for missing the targets they set. As noted above, Florida continues to set targets of zero each year for all traffic fatalities and fatalities + injuries for people outside of vehicles. And when they fail to achieve those targets in pretty astonishing fashion—more than 3,500 people total were killed on their roadways in 2022 instead of their target of zero, there are no penalties or requirements for them to change a single thing about their fundamental approach to transportation producing this carnage. But states don’t have to be as extreme as Florida in this system: they can also just set targets to stay the same or get worse and then outperform them slightly and proclaim success.

AASHTO, the trade group representing state DOTs, believes that this system is a box-checking exercise that does not work “due to lack of appropriate coordination of requirements for target setting methods, timelines, reporting, and consequences of not meeting targets.” They’re not wrong on some of that. But their proposed solution for performance management is comically out of touch: get rid of the system entirely, because they believe funding should not be contingent on performance. (p.15):

Resolved, That transportation funding apportionments or other distributions should not be contingent on achieving performance targets.

AASHTO—an organization currently telling Congress and taxpayers they need to pony up $210 billion in deficit spending for roads and bridges—is saying that “performance” should have no bearing on how much federal transportation money a state gets, even when most of it comes from every single taxpayer, whether they drive or not.

T4America’s proposal: Take this box-checking exercise and make it matter

Congress needs to understand the choice before them. The choice is not between transforming this performance management system into something other than a box-checking exercise OR getting rid of it, as AASHTO would prefer. The choice at hand is between creating a new system of actual accountability and transparency, or scrapping the entire federal transportation program altogether.

That may sound radical, but unlike AASHTO we think positive performance should be intrinsic to the structure of this program. Especially when Congress has “borrowed” money from all taxpayers to prop it up for nearly two decades—$275 billion in general tax dollars since 2008. Here’s our “radical” take: If the transportation agencies taking our money can’t guarantee that they will make measurable improvements that we can easily track and evaluate on core goals like safety and state of repair, they should not get any more of our money. It’s that simple.

Under our approach to measuring performance and setting targets for safety and repair, a few important things would be dramatically different:

  • States and MPOs would be required to set targets to improve safety and infrastructure conditions. No more setting targets to get worse or stay the same. 
  • States and MPOs would be held accountable for reaching those positive targets by losing flexibility within (or access to) certain federal funding streams. No more missing their own targets without consequences.
  • If states/metros can’t make progress on the state of repair and safety, then USDOT will assist them by taking away the distractions, like highly flexible money often used to build new highway capacity that they clearly can’t afford to maintain because their state of repair isn’t improving.
  • There would be major improvements on how the performance data and information are presented to the taxpayers footing the bill, to provide real transparency.

So when we start to unpack our policy proposals related to new targets under our first two guiding principles of Fix it First and Prioritize Safety over Speed, understand that we are not talking about reforming/reshaping this existing system, or simply adding new boxes to check.

We are talking about reorienting the entire program and making funding contingent on positive performance. Accomplishing something meaningful and measurable for the American taxpayer and the traveling public should be the bare minimum for this program’s $77 billion a year price tag.

This post is part of our Rethinking reauthorization series, which explores T4America’s detailed policy proposals to replace the existing transportation program and come up with something new and more effective. Organized around our principles—Fix it First, Invest in the Rest, and Safety Over Speed—each post takes a closer look at a specific recommendation we want to see included in the next surface transportation reauthorization bill.

The highway trust fund isn’t on life support—it’s been dead since 2008

Our failing federal transportation program is supposed to be completely paid for with gas taxes, but since 2008, Congress has taken an additional $275 billion from taxpayers (on top of all gas taxes) to cover the difference between gas taxes and their spending. And it’s only getting worse.

You may have heard about the looming “fiscal cliff” for the country’s federal transportation trust fund in 2028. We can climb a cliff—but this is more like a chasm: The Congressional Budget Office projects that, by 2027, the gap between trust fund revenues and spending will reach $40 billion annually, resulting in an overall deficit of more than $240 billion by 2033. To put that $40 billion gap in perspective, the entire federal-aid transportation program spends about $77 billion per year. 

This deficit is happening for one basic reason: Congress keeps spending far more than the gas tax brings in. 

But first, how did we get here? 

There’s a much longer version of this story, but let’s start with the shorter one. 

Every time you buy gas, 18.4¢ per gallon (and 23.4¢ for diesel), as a “user” of the transportation system, you pay into a protected federal trust fund for transportation called the Highway Trust Fund.6   (Despite its name, the fund also has a Mass Transit Account because transit benefits drivers too by taking all of those potential drivers off the road.) There are other small fees on tires and related things, but 90 percent of the trust fund’s money must come from fees charged to the users of the system.7 

Here’s how trust funds work: Users pay fees directly into a protected trust fund over a long period of time, and then those funds must be spent to benefit those users. The users (those who buy gasoline) pay directly for the system (roads and transit systems.) This allows the transportation program to be protected from the typical annual appropriations fights over a program’s funding levels. Gas taxes roll into the trust fund and then get distributed back to states via a multi-year authorizing law, usually five years for transportation. For example, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 allocated those anticipated user fees for five years.

Since its inception, the bedrock principle of our federal transportation program has been that the user (through the trust fund) covers 100% of the cost of the federal transportation program for highways and transit. And, other than a rocky start in the 1950s and 60s, users did cover that full cost for years. Until 2008.

The trust fund is not “threatened”—it died in 2008

In 2008, after rosy projections of growing gas tax revenue by Congress in the 2005 surface transportation reauthorization law failed to materialize as growth in driving slowed, Congress was forced to make an emergency bailout of the trust fund, transferring $8 billion in general funds into it to keep it from becoming insolvent. 8  But this September 2008 bailout just turned out to be just the first of many. Flash forward to 2025, and Congress has now made a total of nine transfers totaling $275 billion—taken from all taxpayers, regardless of how much they drive or how much fuel they purchased—to keep the “trust fund” solvent.

To put that number in perspective, the total price tag for the entire five-year 2005 federal transportation law (SAFETEA-LU) was only $244 billion. The reality looks even worse if you start to consider its status without those nine transfers: 

The “user pays’” principle isn’t on life support—it died a long time ago. 

Here are two basic reasons why: 

First, the gas tax hasn’t increased since 1993, even as the fuel efficiency of vehicles has improved, and inflation has steadily reduced its purchasing power. 9

This means that annual gas tax revenue declined by $10 billion per year from 2010 to 2025. There’s also compelling evidence that the largest factor in the erosion of gas tax value “is the massive increase in road construction costs—the cost-per-mile of the United States highway system grows larger each year.”  

Second, 2008 was also the beginning of a structural imbalance created by how much the gas tax was bringing in and (most importantly) how much money Congress was committing to spend each year. Rather than keeping overall spending matched 1:1 to the amount of gas taxes projected to come in, Congress has continually committed to spending far more than the gas tax brings in. State DOTs received 50 percent more in flexible formula funding in the 2021 IIJA compared to the 2015 FAST Act, which was itself a 15 percent increase over MAP-21 in 2012. All while gas tax revenues were failing to grow at the same rate. 

Everyone has paid to fill the gap since 2008, whether you’ve ever bought a gallon of gas

Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the loudest debate during reauthorization was about the states who received more gas tax revenue back than they paid into the program. But because of the $275 billion taken from all taxpayers to plug the gaps in the trust fund, this phenomenon simply no longer exists. Every state is receiving more than they paid in gas taxes. The Congressional Research Service estimates that more than a quarter of all “trust fund” spending has come not from users but from general tax dollars or other sources since 2008. That number has gotten worse in recent years: when it expires in 2026, close to a third of all IIJA spending will have come from sources other than users. 

And despite what you will surely hear about the #1 problem being that we spend gas tax revenues on non-highway projects, Congress is spending $20 billion more per year than the gas tax brings in on highway formula programs alone.

One more time: The trust fund and its core concept are not mostly dead; they are completely dead.

What’s next for the trust fund 

Because of this looming fiscal fiasco, the loudest refrain you will hear from the transportation industry and lobby groups and Congress over the next two years will be about money. You won’t hear much about making dramatic changes to get better outcomes out of this program, but you will see headlines and quotes about how we need to “find more money,” and “solve the funding issue,” and “address the trust fund’s insolvency.” Indeed, the trade group representing state DOTs has already staked out this position: We absolutely must grow the size of this bankrupt program, and taxpayers (every one of you!) need to collectively find $210 billion for them to keep doing the same thing that fails to deliver results. AASHTO’s proposal:

Why is the default assumption that we have to continue increasing the size of a program that no longer pays for itself while failing to deliver on what matters?

There are only three basic options for moving forward

As Taxpayers for Common Sense wrote a few weeks ago, “the Highway Trust Fund’s looming insolvency is not just a transportation problem—it is a taxpayer problem.” There are three broad options at this point:

  1. Take billions more from all taxpayers (whether they buy gas or not) by deficit spending, transferring billions into the trust fund, and having all taxpayers pick up the tab
  2. Take billions more from taxpayers by raising revenues in some fashion (increasing gas taxes or establishing new taxes)
  3. Cut the size of the program’s spending down to the amount of revenue brought in each year and live within our means

These first two options require taking more money from taxpayers to prop up a federal program that is failing to move the needle on repairing our crumbling infrastructure, reducing congestion, reducing emissions, or improving safety.

It’s time to start thinking about that third option: Scale the program down to the size of what the gas tax brings. Similar plans have been suggested before, including a slightly different 2014 proposal by Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and 28 Senate Republicans to mostly phase out the federal gas tax—except for a few cents to fund interstate maintenance and repair only—and leave it to states to make up for the lost funding. 

End this program as we know it

There was a time in T4America’s history that we joined the chorus of those who thought Senator Lee’s above idea was a terrible one. Back then, we believed—as a lot of others still do—that we just had to accept billions in destructive highway building and bad outcomes in order to get some transit funding, pennies for bike lanes or sidewalks, or competitive grants for creative, multimodal projects. But we simply cannot continue ignoring this program’s damage and terrible performance.

It’s time to wind down the federal program. 

As we say in our platform for reauthorization, “this program doesn’t need a facelift; it needs to be blown up and replaced with something completely new.” It has completely failed to deliver on its promises, and it’s taken obscene amounts of money from all taxpayers above and beyond what vehicle owners pay at the pump to do it. 

Scaling the program down to the size of incoming gas tax revenues is probably the best first step toward transitioning to a radically different federal program oriented around setting priorities, picking projects that will deliver on those outcomes, and providing greater accountability for taxpayers. This is the only conversation about funding that T4America will be having: What are the best possible options for scaling down the federal transportation program and creating something new?

This program has been a bad deal for a long time, and it’s time we stop accepting it. It’s not time to rescue the trust fund, it’s time to write its eulogy.

The country’s civil engineers agree: $1.5 trillion didn’t produce good infrastructure

Despite historic levels of investment in infrastructure over the last twenty years, America’s 2025 infrastructure grades for roads, bridges, safety, and transit look mostly the same. No one should consider putting a single penny more into a program with such bad results. Unfortunately, raising new money is at the top of the list for our country’s association of civil engineers.

The 2025 infrastructure Report Card, released by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) today, grades every aspect of U.S. infrastructure every four years.10 While ASCE has made some notable improvements (we’ll cover some below), they’ve also stuck to their guns: The #1 solution to the poor condition of our roads, bridges, and transit systems is to spend more money. We just aren’t spending enough.

Consider:

  • Roads scored a D in 2001 and a D+ in 2025
  • Bridges scored a C in 2005 and 2025

Noting that these failing scores happened during a period with a huge infusion of funding in the 2009 stimulus and historic amounts of money for roads in the 2021 infrastructure law, perhaps it’s finally time to stop calling for more money as a potential solution?

There’s an obvious problem with telling taxpayers the price before they tell us what we’re buying. (Especially coming from those employed in building the stuff. ) ASCE has been described by Strong Towns over the years as part of the “Infrastructure Cult”—those who believe that prosperity can always be achieved through more growth, and that any and all infrastructure spending is always a good financial investment that leads to growth. ASCE’s report cards of years past were sometimes comically half-baked when it came to the math: Chuck at Strong Towns examined the numbers in the 2011 report:

…The total cost to households and businesses is $1.042 trillion. Well, ASCE states that to reach “minimum tolerable conditions” (a pretty sad standard) would take an investment of $220 billion annually. Over 10 years, that’s $2.2 trillion. Yeah, you read that right. The American Society of Civil Engineers wrote a report suggesting that over the next decade we spend $2.2 trillion so we can save $1.0 trillion. And you wonder why we’re broke.

Credit where it is due

ASCE has made some significant improvements to their specific recommendations and how they talk about some of the problems. Having read these report cards for 15 years now, they have truly evolved and improved many of their specific recommendations, even just compared to the 2021 edition. (“Solutions That Work” in their parlance.) But there’s a real likelihood that these specific improvements in their recommendations will just get lost in the overall clarion call to the public and the media this week of “bad U.S. infrastructure needs more money.”

The obsession with many states and transportation agencies to fight congestion and delay is a fool’s errand, according to ASCE. We need to instead “dedicate resources to preserving a state of good repair, because no nation can build its way out of congestion,” according to this year’s recommendations. That’s a pretty stunning admission you’re not likely to hear from your state DOT and definitely not from the trade association for concrete manufacturers. They recommend focusing instead on “travel time reliability,” which is much closer to what people actually care about.

And they call for more frequent, accurate, and up-to-date data on road/bridge condition, along with more transparency within state DOTs to explain how they chose individual projects. For bridges specifically, they rightly note that the rate of improvement for repairing bridges in poor condition has drastically slowed in recent years, and they call attention to the skyrocketing number of bridges in “fair” condition, which is really where deferred maintenance shows up as good bridges degrade because maintenance is deferred.

When it comes to roadway safety, they are coming around on the power of design in impressive ways: “Incorporate infrastructure design choices that can help save lives, including reducing lane width and implementing low-cost features such as asphalt art, which can heighten the visibility of crosswalks.”

All of these changes represent a pretty significant departure from past report cards, and a pretty stark break from how they talked about these things 16 years ago. But if no new money is coming, how hard will they fight for more disruptive ideas like halting the expansion of the system in order to prioritize repair? We have learned a clear lesson from numerous reauthorization debates over the years: once new money is identified and in the bank, the impulse to talk about any policy changes evaporates.

More money will not get us where ASCE wants without making some hard choices

Here are a few facts on infrastructure spending:

  • We can’t even afford to maintain the system that we currently have. ASCE says we need to spend $87 billion per year from 2018 to 2038 just for basic rehabilitation of highways. By comparison, states reported in 2022 that they spent ~$89 billion collectively across all capital costs for roads.
  • We certainly cannot afford to keep expanding our system. Each new lane-mile costs ~$24,000 per year to preserve in good condition. (And those are estimates from 2019!)
  • From 2008 to 2018, even with the one-time infusion from the 2009 stimulus, the share of roads in poor condition eligible for federal funds got worse overall, increasing from 16 to 23 percent.
  • The 2021 infrastructure law (the IIJA) increased highway funding by 50 percent. In 2022, states reported that they spent $22 billion on highway expansion.
  • Voters don’t want to keep expanding highways. In a 2020 T4America poll, 79 percent agreed the government should fix existing roads before building new ones and 73 percent said state governments should have to justify building any new roads. In another 2023 poll, “building new highways and freeways” was the least popular long-term solution for reducing traffic.

It’s clear that ASCE values their role as the clear-eyed engineers in the room, and they do not want to prescribe how new money should be spent. But they fail to understand: To refrain from prescribing how money should be spent is to reinforce the broken status quo of how that limited money is currently spent.

The INVEST Act—a much better version of what became the 2021 infrastructure law—included an unprecedented change. States aiming to use formula highway dollars to build new road capacity would be required to demonstrate that they could maintain that road long-term. Paired with other provisions in the law, the INVEST Act would have finally started to prevent states from expanding their road networks when it comes at the expense of their repair needs. This incredibly responsible approach from 2020 was not mentioned in either the 2021 or 2025 Report Cards as a real world solution.

We really need groups like ASCE (and others) to look more critically at a federal program that has failed to deliver on priorities like safety and maintenance and may have outlived its usefulness. Can ASCE think in these terms? Despite all the good recommendations throughout this report that we really like, they’re still focused on an overall number: According to ASCE’s Bridging the Gap report, surface transportation needs from 2024 to 2033 about $3.5 trillion, of which $2.2 trillion represents the nation’s roadway system. If funding levels included in the IIJA become the new baseline for annual investment, the nation’s roadways will have a funding gap of $684 billion over the next 10 years.

Just to translate that a bit, if the IIJA—which increased highway funding alone by 50 percent—becomes the new baseline for federal transportation investment for the next 7 years, we’d still need $684 billion more? And that’s just for roads.

After 27 years, ASCE has evolved. But they aren’t quite ready to admit that the federal government has spent $1.5 trillion since 1991 on surface transportation and it’s resulted in subpar transit systems, crumbling roads and bridges that aren’t improving enough, historic levels of traffic deaths, and the largest sector for emissions. If you think that doubling that price tag is going to improve those outcomes, I’ve got a (poor condition) bridge to sell you.

We don’t need a penny more for a program with failing scores that have barely changed in 25 years—no matter how you measure them. We need better priorities.

What President Trump should tackle on transportation

If President Trump is interested in claiming the mantle of “infrastructure president,” here’s a list of specific actions the president can take to make significant improvements to the federal transportation program.

As we’ve done for past presidents, we’ve put together a list of specific actions that President Trump should take on transportation in his final term. Buckle up for this detailed list of 14 specific to-dos across five different areas:

  1. Finally fix stuff
  2. Actually improve safety
  3. Streamline the process
  4. Reconsider the (broken) models
  5. Improve transparency

As T4A director Beth Osborne wrote recently, the federal transportation program has been failing to deliver for decades. Spending more money has failed to improve congestion, emissions, efficient access to jobs and daily needs, or reduce the number of people struck and killed while walking. President Trump could make a powerful statement by acknowledging that our current strategy isn’t working and urging Congress to beach this rudderless ship of a program that’s sailing off in no particular direction at all.

1) FINALLY FIX STUFF: President Trump can be the first to finally focus federal spending on fixing things first

He should aim to have “the best” infrastructure rather than just “the most”

Unsurprisingly, the American public doesn’t know much about the federal transportation program.11 Most Americans do not realize there’s no requirement to first repair existing infrastructure before building new assets that require decades upon decades of new, additional maintenance costs. Requiring states to repair things first would likely have immense public support if Congress proposed it, yet a bunch of supposedly fiscally conservative Senators lost their minds at USDOT merely suggesting that states consider doing so.

At some point, we will have to stop expanding a transportation network that is already too large to realistically maintain, or go broke trying. Repair Priorities showed that we’d need $231.4 billion per year just to keep our existing road network in an acceptable state and bring the backlog of roads in poor condition into good repair over a six-year period. Yet across all units of government, in 2015, we spent just $105.4 billion on all highway capital projects. Step one is to stop digging the hole, especially when the gas tax, the primary source of federal funding, has only been covering a fraction of checks that Congress has been writing since as far back as 2008.

President Trump should step in and tell the freeloading members of Congress that the free lunch is over. Tell them their states can’t just expand their transportation system forever with zero thought given to how their children and grandchildren will pay for its upkeep.

(A) Reward areas that are making improvements in the condition of their roadways with competitive grants and limit the grantmaking for those who are not.
More than $200 billion of the $643 billion in the IIJA went to competitive grants, and every administration puts its own stamp on the projects they choose to advance. Add in criteria to reward those who are being the best stewards of the other federal dollars they have received. Those who are begging Congress for more free taxpayer money to expand roads they can’t afford to maintain should not be rewarded with more grant funding to do anything.

(B) Before providing funding for anything new, require transportation agencies to demonstrate they have funding for its maintenance and repair throughout its useful life.
This is another fact that tends to shock people we’ve surveyed: agencies don’t have to prove they can afford to maintain anything they are building. And they can build something new even if it will jeopardize their ability to maintain things they’ve already built. If you or I are buying a house, we have to prove to the bank that we have stable and sufficient income. But when your state DOT takes federal highway formula money and decides to build a new highway with it, they don’t have to prove to anyone that they have enough money to maintain it even for just the next five years, let alone the next 50. It’s time for that to change. USDOT could institute a requirement like this tomorrow with many competitive programs. For formula programs, President Trump can tell Congress to institute this change in the replacement for the IIJA, which is due in September of next year.

(C) When infrastructure fails, whether by natural disasters or otherwise, require that it be updated for current needs.
When floods, fire, extreme heat, or other changes in weather lead to the loss of a road, bridge, transit line, or anything else, transportation agencies should consider whether that asset needs to be replaced, what needs to be done to reduce the chance of a repeat failure, and how the design should be updated to improve priorities like safety and connectivity. Expanding that asset should only be considered if there is a plan to maintain it, as discussed above.

(2) ACTUALLY IMPROVE SAFETY: Stop paying lip service to safety and get the U.S. off the bottom of the rankings

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy came in with a stated interest in improving safety. It’s sorely needed—the U.S. sits at the bottom of the rankings of the developed world on traffic safety. The numbers are even more dire for people walking. Safety is always described as a top priority, though states face no penalties for injuries or fatalities increasing on their roads. It’s time to put safety above all else, penalize those who use federal dollars to make it worse, and reward those who are moving things in the right direction.

(A) Reward improvements in safety.
Reward the cities, metro areas, and states with roadways that are getting safer with increased access to competitive grants, and limit the grantmaking for the places that are not. Consider serious injuries in addition to deaths, and especially evaluate the numbers for people walking, biking, or getting around outside of vehicles.

(B) Make it clear that cities and states can and should be testing to see what safety improvements work in what conditions, and fund them to do so.
The Secretary should write a memo making it clear that the guidance in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) is never an excuse to stand in the way of progress on safety. If provisions in the MUTCD are leading to bad safety outcomes, states, and other agencies should not follow that guidance and submit reports to USDOT about provisions that make safety worse. USDOT should consider updating the guide to better prioritize safety or, even better, pare it back entirely to only cover the design of signs, markings and signals. The MUTCD was never intended to govern street design.

(C) Cap vehicle safety ratings at four stars for any vehicles that impede the driver’s ability to see in front of or around them.
As the vehicle fleet gets bigger, taller, and heavier on average, people in older vehicles, and especially people outside of any vehicle, are more at risk. Collisions that were only injuries 20 years ago are becoming fatalities today. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and other relevant USDOT offices should stop dragging their feet and update the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) and the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) on crashworthiness and crash avoidance systems to account for people walking and biking. This is something that’s already been proposed by the National Safety Council. (Page 42)

(3) STREAMLINE: Cut red tape and speed up (good) projects

The President and Secretary Duffy are partially right—good projects do take too long. While we’re also glad that terrible, destructive projects also take too long, there’s absolutely some low-hanging fruit when it comes to improving the process by which projects get planned, designed, and built. Here are three:

(1) Streamline the grant application process for all USDOT grants so that rural and lower-capacity agencies can better compete.
While not easy for any unit of government to navigate, smaller and midsized cities face an uphill challenge with the complex process of applying for USDOT competitive grants. USDOT could do two things to improve that process: First, create an online application and a simple plug-and-play benefit-cost analysis (BCA) calculator so that these places don’t have to hire overpriced consultants. Second, reduce the paperwork and speed up the process for signing a grant agreement. What you might not know when you see that list released of RAISE grant winners (or any other grant program) is that it can take months to years to receive any funding because they have to negotiate a grant agreement with USDOT. Speed that up and simplify that process.

(2) Ensure that project streamlining efforts consistently extend to all modes, all regions, and all transportation agencies.
One reason transit projects get built more slowly (and at higher cost) than highway projects is because Federal Highways (FHWA) district offices and Federal Transit (FTA) regional offices interpret many of the same rules differently. For example, FHWA applies streamlining laws and regulations much more liberally than FTA does. Environmental review should be bypassed or abbreviated for more projects that have clear benefits. And the state DOTs demanding streamlining changes from Congress or USDOT, who subject their local governments to arduous requirements when they subgrant money to them, should stop. This process disproportionately harms the smaller and rural areas this administration claims to prioritize because these places don’t have the funding to take over the project or the size and clout to push back.

(3) Remove burdensome federal requirements to bring down costs.
Highway agencies often feel pressure from FHWA under existing design standards and project development protocols to do things that increase costs, like designing roadways with lanes that are unnecessarily wide for streets where lower speeds are the goal or having to do a costly traffic study before making commonsense improvements like new crosswalks or signals. FHWA claims that state and local agencies have flexibility, but their experience counters that claim.

(4) RECONSIDER THE MODELS: Stop wasting money based on bad data and travel models

(A) Take down the Secretary’s value of time memo.
Rescinding this single memo would have a significant impact overnight. USDOT’s enshrined guidance on the “value of time” leads to an enormous waste of federal money, with billions going toward trying to save certain people a few seconds at a time, claiming that those seconds add up to tens of millions of dollars in economic benefit. Rather than explaining further, just watch our video:

We’ve had the technology for years now to measure the actual time of trips instead of assuming that “slightly faster vehicles on road X = a better system.” The time for inaccurate and misleading proxies has long passed. President Trump should direct Secretary Duffy to rescind this memo yesterday.

(B) Review the accuracy of travel demand models.
Traffic models predicted unimaginable congestion without widening The Katy Expressway in Houston. Yet even after widening it to 26 lanes in some places, traffic got worse, failing to deliver on the projections from the flawed traffic models used to justify the billions spent on it. Yet those same models will be used again and again to justify other similar projects. Agencies (or Congress) almost never look back to evaluate if new projects delivered on the promises made or if the new reality comes close to the rosy projections. Like a weather forecast, we’re mostly just concerned about the predictions for tomorrow and rarely go back five years to consider the accuracy of a past forecast. USDOT should start rigorously comparing past projections with actual outcomes, reporting their findings, and updating the models when there are discrepancies.

graphic combining 20+ increasing projections of VMT

This near-comical graphic from the Frontier Group combines past federal projections of future growth in vehicle miles traveled. The darkest line is reality. Every year the models continued to project basically the same growth in miles traveled, even though every one continued to prove false.

(5) IMPROVE TRANSPARENCY: Make it easier for taxpayers to understand where their money is going and what is being accomplished

The simple truth is that it’s nearly impossible to get up-to-date data on where transportation money has been spent, and the conditions and performance of the transportation system. In fact, when the IIJA expires in September 2026, we’ll just have (an incomplete) picture of where the money went during its predecessor (the FAST Act) from 2015-2021. This means that the members of Congress who will decide how much of your tax money to invest in transportation and how to invest it, have almost no idea about how well the money has been spent for the last 3-4 years. Would you give your employees a raise when you have no idea if they’ve done a good job for the last year? This is yet another reason why public faith in the federal program is incredibly low.

(A) Require project sponsors to report on what their projects have accomplished.
Understanding where and how money is being spent is only part of the question. The administration should also make it easier for taxpayers to learn what has been accomplished with the billions handed out to states and metro areas each year. USDOT should create a new requirement for project sponsors to submit simple reports five years after completion to report on the performance of the project. Did the project deliver all the promised benefits? Did the promised congestion relief materialize? Did the project accomplish its stated goals for improving safety? How does today’s reality match up with the lofty promises used to justify each project?

(B) Standardize transportation spending data format and availability for annual state/metro area spending.
The State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) is a four-year list of projects a state has committed to funding, planning, and building. Though these STIPS are intended to help the public understand how and where their tax dollars are going and hold leaders accountable, good luck deciphering (or even finding, in some cases) your state’s STIP. USDOT should standardize the format and availability of this data so that the public can easily understand how their tax dollars are spent, compare spending across states and metropolitan planning organizations, and hold their agencies and elected leaders accountable.

(C) Require transparency regarding compensation in leadership positions, including bonuses at Amtrak.
One way to fulfill Amtrak’s mission of reliable, quality passenger rail service is by ensuring that every dollar possible helps them improve or expand service. It’s not unreasonable to provide good compensation to smart, motivated, and competent staff or executives, but salary and bonuses should be tied to serving passengers and justified by quantifiable, measurable results in improved service and travel experience. There should also be accounting for the total number of executive staff, their salaries, and all bonuses.

Stay tuned! We’ll be checking in on these items from time to time throughout this administration and reporting back.

Five for ’25: What to expect on transportation in the new year

January will bring in a new presidential administration and a new Congress for the run-up to the reauthorization of the country’s transportation law in 2026. Though uncertainty prevails as power and leadership shifts in Washington, there are a few things we’re expecting to see in 2025. Here are five:

  1. The status quo trade groups will start producing their (typical) wish lists for the next five-year reauthorization
  2. The trust fund that pays for transportation will inch closer to bankruptcy
  3. Expect policy moves like ending federal funding for transit, or slowing down transit capital spending
  4. Discretionary grant programs will fund different winners
  5. Existing or pending regulations will be repealed or shelved

1. Trade groups will assemble their (typical) wish lists for the 2026 reauthorization

If you can believe it, we’re already nearing the end of the “infrastructure law” passed by Congress in November 2021. The five-year Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) will expire on September 30, 2026, so the incoming Congress will hold hearings and develop a proposal for the bill to replace it. That means that the big-monied machine of trade groups and interest groups, which count on perpetually increasing federal infrastructure dollars, are already spinning up their efforts.

You can already see some of their letters calling for more funding for the same programs and same results. In the new year, the transportation policy/funding “wish lists” will start to emerge from groups spanning the spectrum from old-guard trade groups like the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), which represents the interests of state DOTs, to groups like the American Highway Users Alliance (founded by GM!), which are primarily interested in building more highways in all places. (Your grandkids can worry about the maintenance.)

AASHTO is already halfway through their timeline for the next reauthorization though one can already predict what they’ll be asking for in the next five year authorization, as it’s changed very little:

  1. More money distributed to state DOTs through guaranteed formula programs
  2. More flexibility to states in how those funds are spent
  3. No requirement to produce any particular outcome — no reward for performing well and certainly no punishment for doing poorly

To be fair, our platform is pretty simple too, but instead of focusing on money, ours is focused on common-sense outcomes that have broad and significant support from the people who depend on our transportation network: Stop expanding at the expense of repair, make safety the actual top priority, and prioritize investing in the transportation we’ve neglected for over 50 years.

Unlike a platform of “give state agencies more taxpayer money without any accountability,” our priorities have broad support with the taxpayers who cover the full cost of this program…which brings us to #2.

2. Without further giveaways from taxpayers, the transportation trust fund will inch closer to insolvency

The most important thing to understand about funding for transportation is that the bedrock idea of “the user pays” for the transportation system through fuel or gasoline taxes has been dead for a long, long time. The federal program currently spends ~$20 billion more per year than the gas tax brings in. Because the gas tax has not changed for more than three decades as the fuel efficiency of vehicles has improved and inflation has reduced purchasing power, the highway “trust fund” has stayed solvent only because we have taken more than $280 billion in extra tax dollars from all Americans since 2008—whether they drive or buy gas or not.

This is why the Congressional Budget Office currently projects that in 2028 the federal government will only bring in enough funding for the Highway Trust Fund to cover a fraction of the transportation program authorized in the IIJA. And it’s why the first thing you’ll hear Congress (and most transportation industry groups) talking about in 2025 won’t be policy, or outcomes, or accomplishing anything specific with this $500B program. Instead, the reverberating refrain will be the need to “find more money.” (We’ll have more on the trust fund in a future post but this short explainer by the Peterson Foundation is a great place to understand the history and where things currently stand. But notice that the cities they list as the most congested are some of the best places.)

The two bookend options for addressing this structural imbalance are:

Take billions more from all taxpayers or rack up debt to prop up a federal program that is failing to move the needle on repairing our crumbling infrastructure, reducing congestion, reducing emissions, and improving safety,

OR

Scale the program down to the size of what the gas tax brings. This second option has been suggested before, including a 2014 proposal by Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and 28 Senate Republicans to defund the nation’s transportation system—except for a small interstate maintenance fund—and leave it to states to make up for the lost funding.

3. Transit could face significant cuts (only partially because of the looming insolvency)

About 20 percent of the federal highway trust fund goes to transit each year. This 80/20 split was conceived during the Reagan Administration in the 1980s as part of a compromise to raise the gas tax. To get support, a deal was made to devote a portion of the increase to transit and provide stable support. (Imagine a day when members of Congress and advocates would demand bold change in policy and approach before they supported more funding for the existing program.) This funding split has become the historical practice, supported in a bipartisan fashion over the years. But not always.

When the Republicans controlled the House during the Obama administration in 2012, they proposed addressing a funding shortfall for highways by kicking transit out of the trust fund for what eventually became the MAP-21 two-year authorization law in 2012. T4America organized opposition from an enormous spectrum of more than 600 groups, from chambers of commerce to labor, and the proposal was abandoned in the face of bipartisan opposition when it was clear it would fail on the House floor. (However, MAP-21 was only two years long instead of the usual five because there wasn’t enough support for the additional deficit spending needed to cover a longer bill.)

There certainly could be a similar proposal in the next year, though it’s worth noting that this idea did not resurface during the last Trump administration.

Another possible development is a repeat from the first Trump administration: using their authority to call for needless and repetitive studies or analysis to slow down the process of awarding transit funds, costing local communities millions in delays (all while calling for relaxation of federal community protection regulations to speed highway projects). A different Congress could also certainly decide to cut the funding for expanding or building new transit, which is almost entirely discretionary rather than protected like formula programs.

(This was our progress report on awarded transit funding a year and a half into Trump’s first term—less than a third sent to projects in the pipeline.)

4. Changes to competitive grant programs

Every administration puts their own stamp on discretionary programs by choosing who/where to award them within the criteria created by Congress. For example, during the last Trump admin, the RAISE program shifted toward projects that states could fund but had deprioritized (largely rural road projects and fewer multimodal projects) rather than encouraging more innovative and multimodal projects. This will almost certainly be the case once again.

There has also been some chatter about de-funding some competitive programs in the next Congress, many notable ones are likely to survive as T4America Director Beth Osborne notes in this Q&A with David Zipper from November:

Switching toward highways, Project 2025 proposes terminating competitive grant programs like RAISE that allocate billions of dollars to state and local governments for high-priority projects. How realistic is that?

I don’t think Congress will let the Trump administration get rid of competitive programs, because legislators get so much credit for that spending. Federal formula programs just go to the states, and the states do what they want. But for the competitive grant programs, Congress gets a notification about new awards, and they have three days to do whatever event around them that they wish. Basically, Project 2025 was suggesting that Congress never get credit for federal spending in infrastructure again. Maybe that sounded good to the Heritage Foundation, but there’s a lot of Project 2025 that is divorced from the reality of how anything happens in the real world.

Some are also concerned that grants announced but not locked in by a grant agreement or obligated (meaning legally committed) could be revoked. The Trump Administration might try to do that for grants to projects they don’t support. But to do that, they would have to let the Congressional delegation know that a project they likely announced is now being taken away.

Congress could also look to unobligated funds to pay for the next transportation bill or a tax bill, and this has happened in the past with unspent earmarks. But generally this has occurred only after communities have had many, many years to spend their funding and it has become clear that they are unlikely to get their projects into the ground. One risk is that a Republican Congress decides to defund a program, like the passenger rail program, by saying the funding isn’t moving and needs to be put to a different priority that can use that money now.

5. Administrative actions will stop and change

USDOT has a lot of latitude to create and enforce rules and regulations to improve the effectiveness and safety of the transportation system, so it’s reasonable to expect that many good existing or pending rules will be shelved or reversed.

First, NHTSA’s proposal to create new requirements to finally consider the safety impacts of larger vehicles on people outside of the vehicles is almost certainly not going to be finalized. It will either be pulled completely or weakened. Second, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards which require more efficient vehicles will likely be frozen or even rolled back. (There are already a number of loopholes which allow automakers to trend toward larger, fuel-inefficient trucks and SUVs.)

And third, while companies are currently testing autonomous vehicles with almost no oversight in several states, we could see a resuscitation of the AV Start Act (read our archives here), the industry-led move to codify that practice into law nationwide. That would usher in widespread testing of autonomous vehicles across the country with almost no guardrails to ensure their safety, no requirement to collect and report data on their performance, no notifications to the public about when and where those tests are happening, and no oversight other than the voluntary oversight of the manufacturers and testers.

There will certainly be some negative developments over the next two to four years that we will need to organize and fight. And some hoped for actions that will not come to pass. But anyone who thinks that Republicans seizing control of the presidency and Congress means only a destructive reauthorization in 2026 fails to understand that past few reauthorizations—including the IIJA—that caused plenty of damage were fully supported by the majority of Democrats and how programmatic changes were put in place by the Biden administration over the last 4 years (check out Fueling the Crisis; additional analysis that will be out in the next few weeks). As we said during negotiations over the IIJA, Democrats and Republicans regularly join forces “to undermine their own goals for the sake of ‘bipartisanship,’ consistently passing bills that make U.S. transportation inefficient, expensive, unsafe, unsustainable and in poor condition. They both favor flexibility and deference over accountability for good outcomes and guaranteeing the taxpayer a good return for their investment.”

There will almost certainly be some negative developments ahead but on the whole, expect the same status quo to prevail. Which is not good news either.

Supercharge your community’s quick-build safety demonstration projects with Safe Streets for All

Overhead photo of a three-lane street in Chattanooga, TN, where a quick build demonstration project has resulted in additional crosswalks, activated sidewalks, and bollard-protected bike lanes

Because of a mistake by Congress in the 2021 infrastructure law, 40 percent of the new $1 billion-per-year Safe Streets for All program must be directed to planning rather than constructing tangible infrastructure projects. A clarification that the planning grants can support quick-build safety demonstration projects presents an enormous opportunity for cities and towns to directly tap the available $400 million and experiment with low-cost temporary street safety projects. This is the first of two blogs regarding opportunities to use this funding. To learn more, read part two here.

Overhead photo of a three-lane street in Chattanooga, TN, where a quick build demonstration project has resulted in additional crosswalks, activated sidewalks, and bollard-protected bike lanes
Photo by Kurt Martig, courtesy of the City of Chattanooga.

Cities and towns can typically make street safety improvements in one of two ways: they can spend their own local money on streets that they control, which comes with its own set of challenges, or they can engage their state DOT which controls federal formula transportation dollars and many of the most dangerous streets. The new Safe Streets for All (SS4A) program was so crucial because it created a new way for cities, towns, and counties to directly access federal funds to quickly create and execute on Vision Zero plans.

After Congress’s mistake requiring 40 percent of SS4A to go toward planning grants, USDOT wisely broadened their definition of planning to include demonstration projects. This creates an incredible opening for cities to receive funding to pilot temporary street design changes.

The program has $5 billion over the life of the infrastructure law, or about $1 billion per year. The next round of funding is expected to be made available this month, and cities of all sizes should consider applying for planning grants that can support quick-build demonstration projects.

What are quick-build demonstration projects?

Quick-builds, also known as demonstration projects or tactical urbanism projects, are temporary, low-cost improvements to test new changes to street design.

These quick, light, flexible, adaptable projects allow everyone involved—community members, transportation staff, elected leaders—to test specific designs and interventions that measurably improve safety and convenience for everyone who uses the street, all while gathering valuable feedback. They incorporate methods and designs that are proven to reduce crashes, injuries, and fatalities—documented and supported by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA).

Even though temporary, these projects are a vital first step toward making real, tangible changes. And many demonstration projects often end up staying in place indefinitely, or (more typically) forming the basis of the design for a permanent project to come later. The process of creating and executing them builds new knowledge and partnerships—within the transportation department and even with other jurisdictions, related agencies, and advocates—that are vital for building permanent projects.

Tucson residents paint the street orange, green, blue, and white to draw attention to a bike lane in their Complete Streets demonstration project.
Photo courtesy of Living Streets Alliance staff. From Smart Growth America’s profile of Tucson’s Complete Streets policy.

Why should a community consider quick-build projects?

Doing something concrete—even temporarily—is a powerful way to improve safety for people walking, biking, rolling (and driving), and demonstrate an ongoing commitment to protecting all road users. It also shows how stemming the tide of preventable traffic deaths and injuries requires immediate action, creativity, and a willingness to test new things. Despite the urgent need to make streets safer immediately, even the most simple, common sense projects to build new crosswalks, widen sidewalks, add a new bike lane, or make other improvements for safety and convenience can take a lot of time and money.

Quick-build projects are one way to make some level of improvement nearly overnight at an incredibly low cost, while providing a venue for gathering valuable feedback, testing the impact of the changes, and surfacing potential pushback from community members who might oppose a permanent project. In some cases, quick-build projects end up staying in place until capital budgets and planners can execute a permanent project.

Smart Growth America will soon be releasing a summary of their 2023 Complete Streets Leadership Academy, where they worked with 10 cities and four state DOTs to design quick-build demonstration projects on state-owned roads. Stay tuned!

Demonstration projects can also be incredibly cheap. We’ve supported numerous successful demonstration projects over the last few years with grants as low as $5k-15k. Imagine what a city could do with $1 million to support a Vision Zero planning effort that’s paired with as many demonstration projects as they can build with several hundred thousand dollars?

Nearly $1 billion will be available for planning grants alone

The notice of funding availability (NOFO) from the US Department of Transportation is expected to be released sometime in February, so cities, towns, counties, metro areas or others interested in putting an application together should be getting their act together now. Unlike other USDOT grant programs that are oversubscribed, this one is far less competitive: Nearly every jurisdiction that applied for planning grants so far has been awarded funds.

In fact, over the first two rounds, USDOT didn’t receive anywhere close to $400 million in applications for planning grants. This means that nearly $450 million is rolling into this round and between $900 million and $1 billion is expected to be available for planning activities (and demonstration projects!) in this round alone. That’s an enormous sum.

This is only a temporary fix—in more ways than one

Congress made this mistake, and Congress will have to be the one to fix it. But a legislative fix is a long shot and changes to the makeup of Congress or the administration next January could complicate things further. This is just the second year of SS4A funding, and many cities already have Safety Action Plans created. As more planning funds are awarded, cities will need more capital grants instead of planning dollars. A million more demonstration projects would have a significant impact, but we need permanent changes on our streets, and more of the SS4A program should be devoted to making those permanent changes.

Finally, while demonstration projects are productive for all the reasons listed above, they’re still just short-term solutions to the long-term crisis of streets that are unsafe and inconvenient for people to use without a car. The best quick-build projects will make people safer today while also supporting and advancing local plans to apply for future implementation dollars, or create a foundation for other long-term solutions to address fatalities.

Final grant clears the way to restore Gulf Coast passenger rail service

Last week’s announcement of a $178 million federal grant to make track and infrastructure improvements along the Gulf Coast rail corridor represents the last major funding hurdle to restoring passenger rail service from New Orleans to Mobile, AL.

Residents of Mobile welcomed the Amtrak inspection train during a stop in February 2016. They are close to getting their wish.

It’s been a long journey.

Seven years ago in February, a special Amtrak inspection train rolled along the Gulf Coast corridor to both preview the route and build support for restoring passenger service that was wiped out by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, nearly 11 years earlier. Making brief, 10-minute stops in Gulf Coast towns along the way, it was greeted by thousands of cheering residents clamoring for passenger rail to return. I was there in 2016, and—a little overwhelmed by the level of support—I wrote about seeing “rich people, poor people, black people, white people, young people, old people — all asking their elected leaders for the same thing: We want passenger rail back on the Gulf Coast.”

The last major funding barrier has been breached. Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker last week announced a $178.4 million federal grant to make a litany of infrastructure investments in the corridor, including track, sidings, signals, new platforms, and other improvements. We’re not quite at the end yet, but this grant caps off a decade of work by the Southern Rail Commission, local and state advocates, and Transportation for America.

These improvements will allow new passenger service to start up in the first quarter of 2024, hopefully in time for Mardi Gras. Once launched, there will be two trains daily between New Orleans and Mobile, with stops in: 

Bay St. Louis…

the backs of women in colorful wigs and costumes looking at amtrak train in background

Gulfport…

wide shot showing big crowd of people with parking garage behind and amtrak train at left

Biloxi…

wide shot of big crowd at railroad crossing in biloxi

and Pascagoula.

closeups of people, some with signs reading "Amtrak - welcome back to Pascagoula"

About the grant

The grant is from the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements (CRISI) grant program, which was created in the FAST Act (federal transportation authorization) in 2015. To secure federal funding for this specific project in a post-earmark world, T4America helped create a new national program to support it and other necessary infrastructure improvements for passenger service across the country. Washington state, California, Florida, and the District of Columbia also received CRISI grants in this batch.

The CRISI grant is the last major funding domino to fall, but everyone involved has committed resources along the way, which is perhaps the most important lesson from this story: The effort was both top-down and bottom-up. Partnerships across jurisdictions, state lines, and party lines made it possible.  At the very center of that effort is our work with the Southern Rail Commission, a Congressionally established tri-state rail compact with members appointed by the governors of Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. 

Mississippi and Louisiana were out front early, committing state money to match these federal grants. Norfolk Southern, CSX, the Port of Mobile, and Amtrak also committed money to the CRISI application to complete the required match. Amtrak is training crew and preparing equipment for running the new service. This is actually not the first CRISI grant awarded to the project, and another federal grant received years ago will help cover start-up operations costs (from the Restoration and Enhancement grant program.)

What’s next for Gulf Coast rail? 

Most of this grant will go toward immediate construction on improving the right-of-way and sidings on trackage owned and used by CSX and Norfolk Southern freight railroads, improving on-time performance. Amtrak is paying for the ADA-accessible platform and siding in Mobile out of their own pocket, but if Mobile wants a proper station, they will either have to build it themselves or apply for one of the available grants for doing so. All the infrastructure work will have to be done in partnership with the freight railroads, so leaders in influential places will be leaning on them to get this vital work done as fast as possible.

These new infrastructure improvements are the last barrier standing in the way of people buying a ticket and riding the rails on the Gulf Coast once again. We expect to see trains running in spring 2024.

Win after win

The last eight years have been a tremendous success for new investments in passenger rail across the country. This effort in the Gulf Coast—and its champions like Senator Wicker—have created new opportunities and federal programs (like CRISI) that are having an impact all across the country. 

We’re looking forward to detailing the longer, full story of T4America’s decades-long quest to restore Gulf Coast passenger rail in some future posts so other regions can learn from their example. There are numerous benefits to expanding and improving passenger rail service, which is precisely why T4America (and Smart Growth America) have focused on it over the years. It’s a great way to better connect residents to opportunity, expand their economies, lower emissions and protect the climate, and provide another clean, efficient option for getting around—all things which are at the heart of our collective mission. 

All photos by Steve Davis / Transportation for America

VIDEO: How an obscure federal measure justifies the hefty price tag of destructive, divisive roadway projects

Still shot of a busy highway with the text "Value of Time" emblazoned across it on a blue banner

Our newest video, part of Divided by Design, helps explain how federal guidance known as value of time gets used every day to justify the cost of building incredibly expensive highways (or additional highway lanes) that divide our communities, produce more congestion and pollution, and ultimately make it harder to get around in nearly every way.

Our new Divided by Design report examines how the transportation models, policies, and practices we use today took root in the highway era, and they continue to inflict the most harm on people of color. Value of time is just one example of the outdated tools transportation planners and engineers use today that perpetuate harm.

When moving vehicles quickly on all roads is the number one goal for transportation agencies, agencies focus on time savings to drivers at the expense of nearly every other type of user or activity. Value of time encourages agencies to increase speeds and eliminate congestion at all costs, but its emphasis on vehicle speed alone ultimately leads to longer trip times and divided communities.

It’s time for a more equitable approach to transportation. Watch our new video, and read our report Divided by Design.

New Community Connectors grant program and resources for advocates

A new grant program from Smart Growth America will help advance locally driven projects that will reconnect communities separated or harmed by transportation infrastructure and tap available federal and state funds to support them.

Removing divisive infrastructure is largely uncharted territory in the United States, but the need to fix the damage it has caused is imperative. Transportation infrastructure like divisive highways and dangerous arterial roads often separates and harms the communities living around them. This is particularly true for Black and Brown communities, who are more likely to live near large roads and have to live with the environmental, economic, and social harms they cause.

The movement to remove divisive infrastructure has often required communities to be pioneers and the lack of a roadmap and the nature of the work often meant that there were few others to easily learn from. The Community Connectors grant program aims to change that by providing financial resources to help build local capacity and advance these projects, but also by connecting local leaders to experts and other cities attempting to accomplish similar things.

Applications are due before July 15, 2023 at 11:59 p.m.

Learn more and apply here

Who is eligible to apply for the program?

Community Connectors welcomes diverse, multi-entity project teams from small to mid-sized U.S. cities (between 50,000–500,000 in population) to apply for the program. Teams may consist of non-profit community-based organizations and advocates, government agencies (including U.S. territories), and tribes. For-profit entities may be part of the wider project team but are not eligible to receive any of the funds directly or indirectly disbursed through the grant or technical assistance.

What support will selected teams receive?

Selected teams will receive grants of up to $130,000 for capacity building and to advance their projects. In addition, the selected teams will also receive customized technical assistance and participate in a learning exchange program over the next 18-24 months, which includes an in-person convening in Atlanta, Georgia, in November 2023.

What kinds of projects are eligible?

We encourage teams to submit proposals for projects or concepts to reconnect communities separated or harmed by transportation infrastructure through an integrated transportation, land-use, housing and economic development approach. Applications for proposals at all stages are welcome. Teams are not required to have applied for or formalized an application for U.S. Department of Transportation programs.

The Community Connectors program is led by Smart Growth America in partnership with Equitable Cities, the New Urban Mobility Alliance, and America Walks and is supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Bonus: New tools for all “Community Connector” advocates

In coordination with this new grant opportunity, we have launched a brand new suite of resources to support all Community Connectors in communities of any size. These are the advocates all across the country who are working to reconnect their communities: fighting freeway expansions, advancing projects to remove old highways, making wide, dangerous arterial roads a little safer for people to cross, or just improving basic infrastructure people depend on each day.

While the new grant opportunity is limited, Transportation for America’s Community Connectors portal is for anyone, providing tools and information for advocates to decode the complex and confusing maze of programs, acronyms, and decision points that determine what gets built with federal and state transportation dollars.

Dive into the portal

Expect to hear much more about this new portal of resources. Our team will be regularly updating it with new explainers and stories over the coming months.

Want to get updates on new content? Be sure to sign up for our email list here.