The feds are finally giving out money again — but not everyone is getting their promised funds.
by Kea Wilson
After months of frozen funds and chaotic attempts to claw back federal dollars, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has finally released funding for a handful of projects — but the ones he’s excluded, and the agency’s larger disarray, could significantly hold back America’s transportation progress, advocates say.
The Trump administration announced last week that it would “get America building again” by advancing 180 of roughly 3,200 infrastructure projects that former Secretary Pete Buttigieg approved during his term, but did not complete formal funding agreements for, before the Biden administration was voted out of office.
In normal times, the journey between a grant announcement and a grant “obligation” is mostly a bureaucratic technicality the public doesn’t need to worry about, since states are rarely denied their promised awards. During the new Trump era, though, Secretary Duffy has repeatedly turned a spotlight on the finer points of the grant execution process.
In recent testimony to the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, for example, he pointed out that the Biden administration had approved about nine times more transportation projects between his election loss and Inauguration Day than Trump did before finally ceding office to Biden following the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Experts say that difference was largely due to the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law during Biden’s term — a massive bill which multiplied the amount of discretionary funding the DOT Secretary had to dole out by several orders of magnitude. The same law also funded an unusually high number of complex, long-term efforts like highway teardowns and new transit lines, which require multiple years to achieve that final rubber stamp.
Duffy, though, essentially accused his predecessor of both failing to do his job and doing his job too overzealously by micromanaging grantees with onerous environmental and equity requirements that slowed projects down.
“The last administration liked to grab the headlines, but didn’t want to do the hard work of building,” he wrote in a release. “They also tied road construction up with red tape and leftist social requirements – adding millions in costs and months of delay – all while our outdated infrastructure sat in disrepair. This administration has a different vision: drain the swamp and make government work for the American people.”
Some advocates, though, questioned whether the Trump administration’s efforts would actually speed up project delivery — especially in light of anticipated mass layoffs at U.S. DOT that they say will almost certainly slow down every step of the grant-making process.
And considering the specific projects the agency didn’t advance last week — a pool which represents roughly 90 percent of the Biden-era backlog — some feared that some of America’s most urgently needed initiatives might never get their money at all.
“There’s absolutely no denying that this administration’s actions have created chaos and delays in all of these infrastructure programs, which is having pretty devastating impacts in states across the country,” said Stevie Pasamonte, senior organizer at the National Campaign for Transit Justice. “They’re saying that they’re addressing this funding backlog, but that’s just not true. The reality is that they’re just creating further delays, sowing further confusion, and continuing to delay projects.”