Welcome to elected office: Transportation for America is here to help improve your transportation outcomes

Welcome to elected office! Maybe you’re new to transportation. Maybe you’re a seasoned transportation professional looking for ways to improve what you already know. Maybe you’re somewhere in between, but know that things need to change. Transportation for America (T4A) is here to help state and federal policymakers make decisions that fundamentally improve the transportation outcomes that people care about most.

A strong, modern transportation system supports prosperous communities where businesses thrive, and people of all incomes and ages can live healthy, productive lives. But that’s not what we’re getting from our investments. Despite spending billions of dollars on transportation, we’re not seeing measurable improvements in how the system performs because we’re not making spending decisions based on the results we want to achieve.

Safety, state of repair, and transportation choices are three outcomes that matter most to people who use our transportation system. Whether it’s concerns about traffic around your dinner table or complaints about potholes at your town hall, people are fundamentally unhappy with what they’re getting from our transportation investments. When you consider that we spend billions of dollars a year to maintain this poor performance, it’s clear something needs to change.

Transportation for America has tools to help state and federal policymakers address these essential dinner-table issues. The good news? Our comprehensive policy solutions get to the foundation of why our transportation investments fail to deliver on outcomes, and provide the tools to start making real change. The bad news? Fixing the foundation takes more than throwing money at the problem.

State policymakers can focus their DOT investments on outcomes that matter

Now is the essential time to refocus your DOT on achieving the outcomes you want, rather than throwing more money at the broken transportation system. It is time to stop asking “how much money should we spend?” and start asking “what are we getting from the money we’re investing?” to improve accountability and prioritize spending on the results promised to taxpayers—and the everyday experience of people across your state.

Learn more about how to refocus and improve your state DOT through priority setting, removing barriers to innovation, and updating project delivery here >>

Where to start:

Look into your state DOT’s ranking and see how their performance measures up (hint: it’s likely failing to meet outcomes).
Download the book, review it, distribute it across state offices, and determine paths forward to reform your state DOT.

Federal policymakers can focus their energy on reforming reauthorization

The federal program is failing to deliver on its promises, even with deficit spending of more than $275 billion. Despite spending more than $1.5 trillion since 1991, roadway safety has worsened, infrastructure conditions have stayed about the same, congestion has worsened, and emissions have increased. It’s time to replace the failing, bankrupt federal transportation program with something new and make it more accountable to taxpayers by building a new federal transportation program from the ground up.

Where to start:

Download the book, review it, send it to your newly elected officials, and start the conversation on better transportation outcomes before the new year.

Transportation for America is here to help

Transportation for America, a program of Smart Growth America, is a national non-profit working to create a transportation system that safely, affordably, and accessibly connects everyone to jobs, services, and opportunities. Subscribe to our emails, use our reports, and contact us to ask about our expertise or available support.

Bipartisan permitting reform bill is a step forward, but not a silver bullet

Permitting reforms in the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act may help streamline some transportation projects. But without prioritizing which infrastructure we should build, we will still fail to achieve a safe, cost-efficient, and well-maintained transportation system.

Current processes for building necessary infrastructure produce costly delays and lawsuits, especially for transit projects. But permitting reform alone won’t fix America’s inability to build.

Some provisions in the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act—which was introduced at the end of September and is expected to reach the Senate after midterm elections—would shorten agency review timelines and designate a lead agency to avoid duplicative reviews, potentially helping speed up projects. Parts of the bill could also successfully encourage state departments of transportation to prioritize state of repair projects.

As Stephanie Pollack noted in a blog for the Eno Center for Transportation:

“…critical projects would be relieved of NEPA delays or claims of controversy: rail agencies could correct dangerous highway crossings, transit agencies could add infill stations or make stations accessible, bridge owners could lift weight restrictions and correct structural problems, highway agencies could make roads resilient to flooding, high temperatures or earthquakes, and local agencies could build safe infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists.

Agencies that want to expand the capacity of a bridge or highway do not receive this exemption from NEPA: BAAJA excludes any bridge or highway project that results in additional travel lanes from the definition of lifeline infrastructure. Indeed, with NEPA review required for capacity expansions and eliminated for state of good repair projects, agencies may choose to direct more federal dollars to building the easier, faster ‘fix it first’ projects.”

But other changes could be harmful and limit opposition to bad projects like unnecessary, budget-busting highway expansions. With the bill still in draft form and many of the details left to implementation, it is unclear whether the bill will be effective at pushing state departments of transportation toward a “fix-it-first” approach.

Streamlining should still give communities clear opportunities to challenge bad projects

The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act would limit lawsuits to members of the public who commented on that specific matter during the given period. This may not sound like a major change, but it could create unfair advantages for more engaged and wealthy residents and interest groups, which are more likely to be aware of proposed projects and have the time and resources to submit formal comment.

Another part of the proposed legislation says that no federal agency would be “required to consider scientific or technical research that becomes publicly available after the date of publication of a notice of intent or decision to prepare an environmental document for a proposed agency action.” That means federal agencies would not be required to consider research that becomes publicly available after a certain point in National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review. As it exists, NEPA is an important tool for communities to speak up against harmful infrastructure decisions, and parts of this bill will undermine that. And some formal analyses of proposed agency actions are not finished before a Notice of Intent is released.

Highways get the fast lane while transit projects get stuck

This bill is also missing critical components to speed up new transit and active transportation infrastructure—the kind of transportation infrastructure that brings the most benefits, especially in accessibility and environmental outcomes. While 95 percent of transit projects already qualify for a categorical exclusion under NEPA, securing that exclusion takes time and effort, defeating the purpose of the exclusion in the first place. A categorical exclusion would help advance projects with no significant negative environmental impacts, allowing faster project delivery.

Unlike highway projects, transit agencies have to prepare extensive documentation and get approval from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) before work can begin. This requirement puts local agencies in delay-plagued holding patterns determined by FTA capacity and their eagerness to advance projects, which is at an all-time low under the current administration. Highway projects don’t face this same bottleneck because state departments of transportation are allowed to handle low-risk environmental reviews themselves.

For example, the Texas Department of Transportation has been conducting its own NEPA reviews since 2014. That allowed nearly 30,000 lane-miles of public roads to be added across the state between 2014 and 2024, while transit options barely changed. Groups across the political spectrum, from the Institute for Progress to the Build America Caucus, have suggested providing transit agencies the same opportunity as state DOTs to get transit projects moving faster.

Beyond that potential change, the federal transit program needs to be dramatically reformed to speed up project delivery and to ensure that projects are actually achieving their stated goals. For more on T4America’s reauthorization priorities for transit, see here.

Streamlining alone isn’t enough to fix our transportation system

Permitting reforms in the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act will fail to achieve their stated outcomes without other reforms. More than anything, we need policymakers to actually track outcomes and make decisions based on those findings. Capacity at all levels of government has been systematically undermined over the last 50 years, affecting our ability to collect critical information and get projects across the finish line. Changing an agency review period from 90 to 45 days is not going to be a magic solution to get America building again.

We don’t just need streamlined processes and more resources to create a modern, safe, and sustainable transportation system that achieves its intended outcomes. We also need new priorities for what we’re trying to build or accomplish in the first place—not just streamlining the building of the same expensive stuff that serves yesterday’s needs. For starters, we need transportation reauthorization to actually make state departments of transportation prioritize safety and hold them accountable for improving the condition of their roads, bridges, and transit systems.

T4America recognizes the need for permitting reform as one part of a new approach to transportation. But at the end of the day, any permitting reform that impacts the buildout of transportation infrastructure must center a fundamental value: It should not be easier to expand highways than to build new transit infrastructure or other low-cost facilities like sidewalks, crosswalks, and bike lanes that improve safety and connection within our communities.

Five reasons why transportation reauthorization matters in 2026

As Congress continues to work on the next surface transportation reauthorization, it’s important to understand what’s at stake, why it matters, and how today’s decisions will shape our transportation system for years to come. On top of that, the administration’s decisions to override or ignore Congress on transportation funding, rising costs, and emerging technologies present new challenges that underscore why reauthorization is an opportunity to build something better—if lawmakers are willing to rethink the status quo.

Every five years, Congress is supposed to renew the roughly $77 billion federal surface transportation program, which sets the policies, priorities, and funding for the nation’s highway, transit, safety, and rail programs. As we anticipated, lawmakers missed the end-of-September deadline to pass a new reauthorization and instead extended the current program, leaving out billions in funding for transit, rail, safety, and other priorities. (Extensions are nothing new: Congress has relied on extensions about a third of the time since 1997.)

New to reauthorization? Read our guide to understand what it is and how it works.

Rather than simply hitting pause to focus on the midterm elections, Congress should treat this extension as an opportunity to rethink the federal transportation program, ensure it will be faithfully implemented by any administration, and establish stronger accountability measures so the next one can actually deliver its stated goals. While every reauthorization offers another opportunity to make long-overdue changes, several issues make the current process especially urgent: The program’s failure to deliver on past goals, an administration refusing to implement the congressionally approved program, rising costs, and emerging technologies that require new rules.

Here are five reasons why this reauthorization matters more than ever:

1. Tracking progress on past goals

The lead-up to a new reauthorization is an ideal time to evaluate whether the program has made progress on its stated goals of improving safety and infrastructure conditions, reducing congestion, and protecting the environment and public health. Over the past 30-plus years, the U.S. has spent $1.5 trillion in taxpayer dollars without making any meaningful progress toward its goals. And despite a historic increase in funding, the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) doubled down on the same failing status quo—even before the Trump administration began withholding and delaying funds Congress had already approved for the program.

Take safety, which should be the number one priority in our transportation system. The U.S. faces a safety crisis unlike that of any other peer country, marked by a 72 percent increase in people struck and killed while walking on our roads between 2009 and 2024. If the U.S. had taken the same steps as every other peer country, 63,441 lives could have been saved over the last decade alone.

2. Protecting our priorities

The federal transportation program doesn’t have enough funding to cover every priority. Its funding model has been broken for years, with user fees failing to cover costs since 2008, requiring repeated infusions of additional taxpayer dollars. With funding levels under closer scrutiny and the Trump administration already withholding funding for public transit projects, transit investments face a very real risk of cuts during the next reauthorization.

The administration slowed transit funding during its first term, but made history during its second by not approving or advancing a single transit capital project—including metros, light rail, and bus rapid transit lines—during its initial year and a half in office. And stalling, canceling, rescinding, or pressuring changes to approved projects doesn’t seem likely to stop anytime soon. Last year, USDOT floated ending all federal transit funding, and this summer, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy proposed eliminating the entire Mass Transit Account.

Transit isn’t the only priority at risk. USDOT recently removed proven safety solutions such as speed cameras, bike lanes, and road diets from its official online list of Proven Safety Countermeasures, making it harder for communities to secure funding and make these improvements. Unless we closely watch the reauthorization process, any remaining support for these interventions could disappear.

Congress can use reauthorization to make safety the top priority by strengthening accountability and by encouraging more transparent data, roadway safety research, and evidence-backed guidance for roadway design. To make transit a priority, lawmakers should start by restoring recent cuts to the IIJA’s Division J advance appropriations, which slashed previous investments in public transit and passenger rail. And while drafting the next program, Congress can give transit the same funding levels and streamlined project processes as highways.

3. Gaining leverage with the current administration

This reauthorization offers Congress an opportunity to make agencies more accountable to taxpayers, especially as the current administration continues to withhold or delay funding for programs Congress has already approved.

As outlined above, the Trump administration has refused to advance projects through programs like Capital Investment Grants. If the administration is already undermining existing programs, why should Congress assume that a new bill—even one with meaningful policy improvements—would be implemented any differently? And why is there a rush to put together a new bill when the last one hasn’t even been seen through?

Congress shouldn’t be eager to advance the next reauthorization while the administration keeps refusing to implement the current program. That’s why we’ve recommended extending it for at least one year. Congress should use that time to include airtight language in the next bill that would ensure consequences for any administration that refuses to carry out the law.

4. Improving affordability for everyday Americans

Americans across the country face an affordability crisis across many aspects of daily life. Studies from 2023 show that nearly half of all people live in economically insecure families, and one-third of middle-class Americans cannot afford basic necessities. Transportation is already the second-highest expense for most households, and given the rising costs of owning and operating a car, reauthorization is a critical opportunity to provide much-needed relief.

In a recent letter to the bipartisan leaders of four committees, Senate Democrats acknowledged transportation’s role in addressing this crisis: “Families deserve affordable options for daily travel, including transit, passenger rail, walking, and biking. By developing other ways to get around, families can save money on fuel, reduce vehicle maintenance costs, reduce insurance costs, and even avoid purchasing additional vehicles altogether.”

Through reauthorization, Congress has the opportunity to invest in more rail, transit, and active transportation options that give people across the country cheaper ways to reach jobs, school, and other essential services. These investments could save the average American household an estimated $750 annually in gas and vehicle maintenance and $1,300 in vehicle depreciation.

5. Charting a course for emerging technologies

As we speed toward another major technological transformation with the emergence of autonomous vehicles (AVs), the federal government has not established meaningful guardrails, leaving the private sector free to operate with little oversight. Although they present an opportunity, especially for non-drivers, AVs could also threaten safety, public health, the environment, and the overall functioning of our transportation system.

We’ve already outlined how the federal government can ensure AVs meet their potential: require transparent data reporting on general operations, any incidents, and other anomalies; audit new vehicle models; allow localities to determine how AVs operate on their own streets; and penalize empty AVs that congest our roads. Without meaningful standards, empty AVs have already started crowding streets and even neighborhoods across the country.

To learn more about reauthorization, see our existing resources on the process, including our platform outlining the policy proposals we’d like to see and explainers on the process and how to engage.

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.

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.

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

USDOT letter shows it will likely undermine any bipartisan reauthorization deal

If there was any lingering confusion about the Trump administration’s willingness to faithfully and fully implement any current or future bipartisan deal on transportation reauthorization that Congress might consider, USDOT Secretary Duffy’s unhinged letter to Senate leadership about the administration’s reauthorization priorities should put a nail in that coffin.

Congress should extend the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) for a year to keep the transportation funding moving, and then they should not even consider coming to the negotiating table on a long-term bill until past grants that are rescinded are restored, frozen transit capital projects are restarted, and ironclad protections are put in place to ensure that USDOT faithfully implements whatever Congress assembles—whether it aligns with the administration’s priorities or not.

During the surface transportation reauthorization process, Congress sets policies, priorities, and funding levels for multiple years to come. USDOT’s role is to implement the law as Congress has written it, which includes issuing regulations and managing grant programs. But Congress—not the Executive Branch—decides the nation’s long-term transportation policy, strategy, and funding.

But these well-established roles have been upended by this administration.

USDOT has shown blatant disrespect for the intent and allocation of Congressional funding from the IIJA since the Trump administration took office in 2025.

USDOT has usurped Congress’s constitutional authority by withholding funding for projects and programs they oppose, delaying the Capital Investment Grants pipeline, killing research programs that they did not agree with, and reinterpreting grant-funding criteria to align with their agenda by weaponizing programs like Safe Streets and Roads for All by refusing to select projects that propose data-backed safety measures like new crosswalks, bike lanes, or lane configurations. Despite the courts saying that withholding congressionally appropriated funding is illegal, it is clear that the Executive Branch holds the fundamental belief that USDOT has unilateral discretion to determine how transportation funding should be spent, regardless of what the law says. Many of the specific priorities in Secretary Duffy’s letter for the next reauthorization align precisely with the ways the administration has already undermined the existing law on the books. This letter is another clear example of USDOT’s belief that if they disagree with a grant program that Congress codified into law, it does not need to implement it.

The administration’s track record and this letter should be a clear signal to Congress that, even if members negotiate in good faith and preserve bipartisan grant programs, putting those good-faith negotiations into the next reauthorization bill will not matter—because there is no guarantee that USDOT will actually implement them. This letter is just a preview of how the administration plans to carry out whatever deal Congress may make on reauthorization: However they please.

The Executive Branch’s audacity to intervene in this way signifies that we have reached the end of the premise of surface transportation reauthorization as we know it. Even if the Senate does the right thing and decides not to capitulate to USDOT’s requests, the damage has already been done.

The question now is whether Congress understands what this means for their attempt to pass a new “bipartisan” transportation law. If USDOT decides that it does not have to do what the law says, it begs the question of why members should continue to negotiate the law as though the old rules still apply.

Congress needs to decide between striking a deal that the administration will not implement, or waiting for proof that USDOT will faithfully implement the law before signing the next deal. This decision is more important than ever, because without assurance that the law will be followed, the bipartisan legacy of transportation is dead, and USDOT will have killed it.

“Fix it first” was common sense in 2020. Now Congress calls it radical.

U.S. Capitol dome rising above green treetops.

We are repeatedly told that it’s a bridge too far for Congress to require states to fix it first—to prioritize repairing their existing infrastructure before building new roadway capacity. Yet that’s the exact approach laid out in the House’s bipartisan INVEST Act proposal in the last reauthorization cycle.

One of the most common objections to repair-first transportation policy is that Congress cannot require states to prioritize maintaining existing roads before they build new ones. But why not?

As Congress works toward the next surface transportation reauthorization, lawmakers don’t need to start from scratch. They already have a blueprint from the negotiations that produced the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) in 2021.

In 2020, the House passed the INVEST Act, which included bipartisan provisions authored by Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-IL) and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI). Those provisions demonstrated that prioritizing maintenance isn’t just good policy—it is a politically viable approach with bipartisan backing.

Congress has both the authority and the proven legislative model for repair-first policy.

How the INVEST Act prioritized repair like never before

The INVEST in America Act was dramatically strengthened by a bipartisan amendment from Rep. García and Rep. Gallagher, who came together to codify new repair requirements that had never been included in a federal transportation bill. With that in place, the INVEST Act’s impressive final provisions included three core requirements:

First, it required transportation agencies to develop a maintenance plan for any new capacity they wanted to build to prove they had the means to maintain it. If a state wanted to widen a highway or add new lanes, it would have to publicly demonstrate how it planned to maintain the new infrastructure while also taking care of the roads and bridges it already owned. This is a minimum level of fiscal prudence that most voters are astonished to learn is not required in the federal program. Transit agencies are already expected to plan for long-term maintenance, and roads should not be treated differently.

Second, the amendment required states to use travel-demand models with a demonstrated record of accuracy when evaluating highway expansion projects. These models forecast future traffic volumes and estimate whether adding lanes or building new roads will reduce congestion enough to justify investment. Since these forecasts heavily influence decisions, their accuracy matters. Yet many traditional models assume steady traffic growth and overstate the benefits of highway expansion while overlooking induced demand and long-term maintenance costs. The amendment sought to improve decision making by requiring states to ground their investment decisions in more concrete evidence rather than these assumptions.

Third, the amendment required a more complete accounting of project benefits and costs. Instead of evaluating projects primarily on expected congestion reduction, states would need to consider a broader set of outcomes, including safety, greenhouse gas emissions, access to jobs and essential services, and other performance measures established in the bill. In practice, highway expansion projects are often justified by projections that promise faster travel times or reduced congestion, even though evidence shows those benefits are short-lived. As a result, projects that increase emissions, create barriers for people walking or biking, or consume limited transportation dollars that could have been used to repair existing infrastructure can still move forward because congestion reduction is treated as the overriding priority. The amendment sought to ensure that transportation investments are evaluated based on their full range of impacts, not just their ability to move more vehicles.

The Senate scrapped it all

Despite the progress made in the House, the INVEST Act never became law. The Senate pursued a different path with its own transportation reauthorization proposal, which utterly failed to include key reforms like prioritizing repair, improving project evaluation, or addressing emissions and equity outcomes. Unfortunately, that Senate framework became the basis for the IIJA, which largely carried forward the policy structure of the 2015 FAST Act rather than adopting the House’s more ambitious reforms.

The House’s current reauthorization proposal, the Build America 250 Act , fails to move the needle on prioritizing repair. It’s a far cry from what the House proposed (and approved!) in 2020 with the INVEST Act.

The BUILD Act preserves the status quo that has produced a system too big to maintain without borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars from our grandchildren. States retain broad flexibility to spend federal dollars on repair, expansion, or new construction, and the bill does not require meaningful progress toward reducing maintenance backlogs before adding new capacity. State DOTs and asphalt and concrete manufacturers win, and voters and the traveling public lose. Again.

This matters because despite historic amounts of funding being poured into America’s transportation system, the share of roads in poor condition has only declined by 3 percentage points between 2018 and 2024. States have failed to make meaningful improvements in reducing the share of the maintenance backlog, which is increasingly expensive to maintain. Simply increasing transportation funding without requiring states to prioritize repair over expansion will not fix the problem.

2026’s BUILD Act misses the same opportunity

Rep. García recently proposed an amendment to the BUILD Act that would have incorporated the same principles requiring greater accountability that he helped to advance in the INVEST Act, but it failed on a voice vote. (Rep. Mike Gallagher left the House in 2024.)

The cheap lip service continues: Congress continues talking about the importance of repair. Transportation agencies routinely say that maintaining existing infrastructure is a priority. Yet the federal program still allows states to expand systems they cannot afford to maintain. Instead of spending on highway expansion, we could invest in viable transportation alternatives that give households options when gas prices rise and other household costs increase. We could reduce future maintenance liabilities instead of increasing them.

The lesson from looking back at the INVEST Act is that fixing what we have first isn’t controversial, but common sense. Requiring agencies to explain how they will maintain new infrastructure, justify expansion with accurate analysis, and consider broader public outcomes is responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars.

The Senate now has another opportunity to prioritize repair. INVEST offers them a clear starting point, but the Senate can go further and deliver what voters actually want: fixing it first.

Tell your representative to vote “NO” on the BUILD America 250 Act

Camera looks up at the white facade that makes up the front of the Capitol building.

The House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure recently marked up and approved the BUILD America 250 Act to reauthorize the country’s surface transportation program. As we’ve previously stated, this rushed proposal continues the status quo established in past reauthorization processes, failing to improve or even maintain our system.

BUILD America 250 allocates $474 billion to the federal surface transportation program, but these funds aren’t set to improve safety, repair infrastructure, or support public transit, even as Americans face increasingly dangerous roads, rising gas prices, and an ongoing affordability crisis. Although the current bill includes language to address further grant cancellations by the Trump administration and preserves some safety programs, these programs are limited by weak structures and accountability mechanisms and are likely to be implemented in bad faith. For more details on the different provisions, read our recent blog.

Before Congress votes on BUILD America 250, we need you to join us in urging members to vote no. Use the form below to contact your representative.

Here’s how we will grade the next surface reauthorization bill

Empty scorecard to grade a bill against three principles: safety over speed, fix it first, invest in the rest.

With the IIJA expiring in September, a draft version of the next surface transportation reauthorization will eventually be released. As with previous bills, T4America plans to release a public scorecard on how well Congress’s proposal would steer the federal program toward achieving its stated goals. Here’s what we are looking for.

Transportation for America is ready to grade the next surface transportation reauthorization, and our rubric is incredibly simple.

The federal government has spent $1.5 trillion over the past 30 years to achieve its stated goals of improving safety, fixing infrastructure, reducing congestion and emissions, and improving public health. The reality is that despite the massive amount of money poured into the system, we don’t have much to show for it. The success of the next transportation bill should not be measured by how much or how little money we put into the program, but by how well it holds the system accountable for achieving our national goals and being responsible to the American taxpayer.

Similar to our past scorecards, T4America will be grading legislative text on a pass/fail basis against our three core principles. In line with these principles, T4America will be looking for how the text prioritizes 1) safer roads over speed, 2) the maintenance of existing infrastructure, and 3) investing in more transportation options.

Safety over speed

The roads in most developed countries are safer than ours and continue to improve, but Congress continues to prioritize vehicle speed above all else, including safety. Safety needs to come first.

What we’ll be looking for: States and MPOs should be required to set concrete targets to improve roadway safety and reduce roadway deaths and to report progress on safety goals. When states fail to meet those safety targets, their flexible funding under the National Highway Performance Program and the Surface Transportation Block Grant Program should be dedicated to projects that are proven to move the needle on safety. Localities also need evidence-based guidance for roadway designs, and the federal government needs to overhaul its own road safety guidance and provide localities the freedom to experiment. Read T4America’s policy recommendations for prioritizing safety over speed in surface transportation reauthorization.

An emerging consideration: As the autonomous vehicle (AV) market continues to expand, it is vital to ensure that the rapid growth of this industry does not come at the expense of safety. The next law must promote transparency, make AV data public, and require reporting of collisions, malfunctions, and other anomalies. Local oversight also needs to be preserved, and localities should be able to determine how autonomous vehicles are deployed and operated on their streets. Finally, left unchecked, empty AVs could clog our roads while waiting for passengers. USDOT should establish a pricing mechanism that disincentivizes AV operators from allowing their vehicles to operate without passengers, preventing roads from being filled with empty cars. Read T4America’s other policy recommendations on ensuring AVs meet their potential.

Fix it first

Prioritizing roadway expansion and leaving maintenance as an afterthought, with no long-term plan for decades of maintenance costs, is nonsensical. We can’t afford to keep expanding the size and scope of the system without a clear plan to maintain what we’ve already built. Our last Repair Priorities report showed that we’d need $231.4 billion per year just to keep our existing road network in acceptable condition. Every new road, lane-mile, or bridge adds a costly new financial obligation for decades to come, pushing that number even higher. We need to be accountable to taxpayers and cannot continue to defer maintenance. Federal funding should prioritize fixing what we have before building anything new.

What we’ll be looking for: Legislative language must center accountability to ensure that maintenance is not on the back burner. If federal funds are given to grantees to increase roadway capacity, recipients should first demonstrate that they can maintain that asset over the course of its entire lifetime. Grants should not be distributed to agencies that cannot maintain the capacity they claim to need. States and MPOs should be required to set clear, measurable targets for improving pavement conditions, and when they fail to meet those targets, USDOT should step in and reorient National Highway Performance Program and Surface Transportation Block Grant funds toward repair. See the rest of T4Americas’s policy recommendations to prioritize existing maintenance needs.

Fixing roads should also include reconnecting communities and addressing the harms of previous infrastructure decisions. Projects built in the 1950s (and continuing through today) destroyed local economies and undermined the health and connectivity of people living near highways. Language that expands programs like the Reconnecting Communities Program (RCP), a competitive grant that funds the redesign and deconstruction of outdated infrastructure, must be included in the text (we’ll be looking out for the REPAIR Infrastructure Act, which continues the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program). Opportunities like RCP offered communities the chance to improve access to daily needs such as jobs, schools, food, recreation, and healthcare resources by building complete streets, fixing sidewalks, and investing in access to public transit. Additionally, models need to be updated for accuracy so agencies can accurately assess the impacts of highway alternative projects, and agencies must be transparent with the public about which models they use. Read the rest of our policy recommendations for an idea of what we are looking for in the next surface reauthorization bill to fix our past infrastructure history.

Invest in the rest

As the U.S. has built out the highway system, there has been too little support for other modes of transportation. Households need choices for how to get around, and we do not have freedom if there is a monopoly on mobility. The next surface reauthorization bill text must ensure we can build out a world-class transit system, a strong passenger rail network, and take charge of the electric vehicle market (EV).

What we’ll be looking for: One of the biggest challenges localities face is securing reliable funding for transit operations. Fare revenue does not cover the full cost of transit operations, and only smaller systems are allowed to use their federal funds on operations. Larger systems do not have that flexibility, and even if they did, that flexibility comes at the expense of money for capital improvements. In the next surface bill, T4America will be looking for policies that provide robust support for federal transit operations (similar to the Stronger Communities Through Better Transit Act). Rural communities also rely on transit, and we will be looking for language that improves mobility services in rural areas by streamlining funding from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Read T4America’s full policy recommendations on how to build out world-class transit.

Passenger rail needs to be preserved and expanded on in the next surface bill. Amtrak’s national network of long-distance and state-supported routes provides vital transportation connections for communities. We are looking for policies that restructure roles and responsibilities, so that Amtrak’s board includes representation from individuals with demonstrated interest in the system and regular experience using passenger rail. The legislation should also encourage residential, commercial, and mixed-use development near rail stations to support transit-oriented development. Read T4America’s complete policy recommendations on building world-class passenger rail.

Federal transportation policy should position the U.S. to build a competitive advantage in electric vehicle manufacturing. An important part of supporting this market is expanding a reliable charging network by increasing the flexibility within the EV fueling program. The surface bill should include reducing unnecessary restrictions on the National Electric Vehicle (NEVI) program and ensuring that EVs pay into the system just like gas and diesel cars do. Read T4America’s other policy recommendations on investing in the EV market.

Looking ahead

T4America will look closely at any reauthorization proposal and grade it against our three core principles—priorities with broad support from voters across the political spectrum. Bills that fall short of these very attainable goals will be rated accordingly, while proposals that deliver the mark will earn a ringing endorsement. We will publish our scorecards and determine whether the next surface reauthorization law would actually deliver measurable and improved outcomes.

Congress only proposes delusional ideas to fix the highway trust fund

Large highways running through a community.

Congress will propose nearly anything other than raising the gas tax to fix the highway trust fund. If Congress actually addressed the program’s total failure to deliver outcomes, maybe it would be easier to build broad support for raising significant new transportation funding.

Since 2008, the federal highway trust fund has received infusions from the general fund totaling over $280 billion. The federal gas tax has not been increased above its current level of 18 cents per gallon since 1993. With every reauthorization of the program, there is always a looming date (currently 2028) when the Highway Trust Fund will go broke. Yet, every time we come around to discussions on the next surface transportation reauthorization, delusional thinking about how to fund the federal transportation program emerges.

For nearly two decades, rather than increasing the gas tax, Congress has resorted to infusions from the general fund to pass a multi-year transportation bill. Congress has come up with all sorts of convoluted machinations to delude themselves into thinking they aren’t increasing the deficit.

For the 2012 MAP-21 transportation reauthorization and its short-term extension in 2014, Congress used many questionable budget maneuvers to make it look like they were paying for the infusions with cuts elsewhere. The most memorable of these was“pension-smoothing,” a bizarre accounting trick that delayed pension contributions—and the tax relief that comes with them—to more than 10 years in the future, beyond the horizon the Congressional Budget Office considers when calculating the impact on the deficit. This means we lose more tax revenue today to pay for the 2012 MAP-21 transportation bill than we would have back then.

Congress has also made a few attempts to adopt a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) user fee. In fact, a federal pilot program supported the adoption of voluntary VMT fees in several states starting in 2015, but none of them ever incorporated it into their mandatory fee structure. However, a few states allow drivers of fuel-efficient and electric vehicles (EVs) to choose VMT fees as a more affordable alternative to higher registration fees. For example, Oregon will make its OReGO VMT fee an alternative to higher registration fees for fuel-efficient and electric vehicles (EVs) starting in 2028. Virginia, Utah, Hawai’i, and Vermont are actively pursuing similar strategies. A federal VMT fee is extremely unlikely in the foreseeable future because of privacy concerns, states’ limited capacity, and Congress’s lack of political will.

The latest insult-to-our-intelligence proposals to address federal highway trust fund insolvency are punitive federal EV fees. Most states have already adopted punitive EV registration fees that are far higher than what gasoline-powered car drivers pay in gas taxes. House Transportation and Infrastructure Chair Sam Graves proposed highly punitive annual federal EV registration fees: $250 for EV owners and $100 for hybrids (who also pay the gas tax). These proposed EV fees are more than double what gas-powered car owners pay on average in federal gas taxes. In 2019, the average fuel economy was 22.3 miles per gallon for an average of 11,484 miles driven. This means the average car driver’s 18.4 cents-per-gallon federal gas tax added up to $94.76 annually.

EV drivers need to pay their share, especially as EVs become a larger share of cars on the road. However, there’s a problem with trying to solve a fiscal issue on the backs of a tiny minority of drivers. Highly punitive fees would slow EV adoption without changing the projected date that the Highway Trust Fund goes broke.

Transportation for America wants to see changes in this broken program before we put more money into it, and all these ridiculous funding proposals and machinations have drawn our attention away from a central question: The gas tax is simple, efficient, directly linked to the use of our nation’s roads and highways, and is already in place. Why has Congress not had the political will to raise the gas tax for more than a generation?

To answer that, you need to ask what the federal transportation program is accomplishing with the hundreds of billions it has spent over the last few decades. And the answer isn’t pretty. The highway trust fund was created in 1956 to build the interstate highway system, which has been completed for over three decades. Since then, the program has staggered forward on autopilot with diminishing and even deleterious returns. Congestion is up in every major metro area; road deaths are up, especially for people walking; state of repair has not markedly improved; and transportation is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and is the only sector with increasing emissions. The program’s approach of doling out vast sums of formula funding to state DOTs with little accountability, and the state DOTs’ penchant for widening highways instead of investing in basic repair, is obviously not going to fix these failures.

Until we can reorient the program to address today’s needs and require greater accountability for achieving outcomes in safety, access, environmental impact, and state of repair, Americans have no good reason to support increased taxes to pay for the program. Show us something better we can get for our money. Then we’ll see public support for raising revenue to pay for it.

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

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.

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.

What’s in the tangled FY26 transportation spending bill?

With the Senate passing a new FY26 appropriations package with contentious funding for the Department of Homeland Security removed, Congress looks likely to soon pass a funding bill including fiscal year 2026 Transportation-Housing and Urban Development appropriations after a brief partial government shutdown. Here’s what’s inside the compromise:

Last week, Congress looked like it was on track to pass a package of fiscal year 2026 funding bills, including the Transportation-Housing and Urban Development (THUD) bill, ahead of the January 30 deadline to avoid a government shutdown. After passing in the House on January 22nd, it looked like it was on its way to passing in the Senate, up until federal agents employed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) killed another American in Minneapolis. In response, Senate Minority Leader Schumer vowed to withhold Democrats’ votes for DHS funding unless new reforms to hold the agency accountable are included in law. With DHS funding tied together with several other “must-pass” funding bills in H.R. 7148 (THUD among them), Congressional leaders were in a difficult position to avoid a shutdown. However, late on January 29, Congress and the White House announced a deal to keep the government open by separating out the DHS bill and extending funding at current levels for two weeks to negotiate a deal on DHS accountability.

Congress now has to thread the needle to pass the funding packages on time, and there’s a chance there will be a brief government shutdown over the weekend as Congress negotiates policy provisions with holdouts (all outside of the scope of the THUD bill). Whatever funding package passes, and whenever it does, will likely contain the following fiscal year 2026 transportation funding details.

What’s in the bill, though?

When it comes to topline funding numbers for USDOT, the bill is a bipartisan compromise. However, it’s important to evaluate how this Congress got to those toplines.

While the Senate’s draft of the bill won out over the President’s and the House’s preferences for drastic cuts and potentially harmful policy riders, not every program or grantee was so lucky. Over $2.3 billion in Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funding was either rescinded or shuffled around in the bill, undermining trust and confidence in the supposed certainty expected with a five-year surface transportation reauthorization bill.

Transit

The bill provides $16.7 billion for the Federal Transit Administration (FTA). As expected, $14.6 billion would go to the Mass Transit Account for transit formula grants. On top of the formula grants, there is $211 million for Transit Infrastructure Grants. $147 million is for “Community Projects” earmarks proposed by members of Congress. This is a major increase over 2025, since last year’s funding bill included no money for earmarks. However, like with other areas in the bill, that increase is from rescinded and reprogrammed funding— in this case, nearly $10 million for ferry programs, $40 million from FTA oversight funds, and $138 million from the Federal Railroad Administration’s oversight and technical assistance funds from the Federal-State Partnership for Intercity Passenger Rail Program.

Congress falls especially short in supporting transit when it comes to the Capital Investment Grant program, which is intended to build out America’s project pipeline of major transit infrastructure improvements. The bill provides only $1.7 billion for the program, about $500 million below the funding levels set last year. It’s not all bad news, though, as some $194 million in old grant funding is repurposed exclusively for transit projects to support the FIFA World Cup and 2028 Olympics (fulfilling a wish of T&I ranking member Rep. Rick Larsen)—but again, that’s all old money. Overall, the bill cuts transit funding when you discount expected Mass Transit Account funds.

Passenger rail

The bill “provides” the FRA $2.9 billion for FY26, but Congress once again reached this top line by using various transfers of funding for the Federal-State Partnership program and CRISI grants. The bill took $150 million from IIJA advanced appropriations for the Federal-State Partnership Program, instead allocating $110 million to CRISI grants and $40 million to FY26 Federal-State Partnership Program projects. Compared to previous bills for fiscal years 2024 and 2025, the FY26 bill flips the script on how funding is distributed between Amtrak’s National Network and Northeast Corridor. The bill provides $850 million for the Northeast Corridor (a decrease of $291 million relative to FY25) and $1.57 billion for the National Network (an increase of $291 million relative to FY25).

Pulling from old, unobligated funding sources—includinga grant the administration cancelled for California High Speed Rail—the bill permanently rescinds nearly $1 billion in unobligated funds. This includes roughly $2 million in rail funding left over from appropriations made in the 109th through 114th Congresses, $14 million in Maglev grants from the 116th Congress, a massive $929 million made for California High Speed Rail from the 111th Congress, and finally $20 (yes, $20) for Amtrak funds originally appropriated in 1996, sending these funds back to the treasury.

Highway programs

Federal Highway Administration programs are funded at $65 billion, with $62.6 billion for highway formula programs and $2.4 billion for general fund programs. This is a major $1.34 billion increase over last fiscal year, and that increase mostly comes from $1.3 billion in reprogrammed funds.

National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program funds are among the funds being traded for highway program earmarks in the bill. This comes after a judge recently ruled in favor of states seeking to use NEVI after funds were frozen by the administration at the start of last year. Over $503 million in NEVI funds that would have gone to state DOTs as formula funds are rescinded—but notably, this rescission is made in proportion to how much a state has obligated out of their first fiscal year of IIJA funding. That means states that were slower to obligate this funding for building electric vehicle charging infrastructure will lose more than those that moved fast. While that may potentially be a silver lining for state DOTs still eager to build out new electric vehicle chargers, EV adopters are losing out across the country as plans for a comprehensive national charging network are being surrendered to highway program earmarks. We estimate what that might look like here.

On top of that formula cut, $300 million will come out of NEVI’s little-discussed 10 percent discretionary grant set-aside for localities and states. Since the set-aside program was used to increase Round 1B and Round 2 Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Program funding awards, existing awardees under that program could be affected. The Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Grants program is among those we previously noted were slow to obligate under the Trump administration, with some funding at risk of expiring or already expired, so it’s likely these grantees never had a chance to spend their funding down. SMART grants, which funded things like advanced traffic signal management and autonomous and connected vehicles project pilots, were also slashed by over $200 million, likely affecting existing awardees.

Some oversight and common sense

In response to USDOT’s disruptive implementation of programs during its first year under President Trump’s second term, many of Congress’s policy provisions in the bill focused on improving transparency and oversight of the agency. Among other changes detailed below, the bill would require DOT to deliver Congress status reports on grants that have been awarded but not obligated—a huge issue throughout this past year since the administration took office and began either canceling or slow-walking grants that they don’t like.

While the only thing in this country stronger than law is the Trump administration’s willingness to bend (or break) it, the bill makes great efforts, especially given the composition of this Congress, to bring some much-needed transparency to DOT’s policies, processes, grant cancellations, organizational changes, and available data.

USDOT would be required to be more transparent in its actions, including by giving Congress advance notice before making cancellations, compiling details on cancelled or impacted grants, and putting together a report on the grant review backlog, including findings on how staffing reductions may have played a role in worsening delays. This backlog update requires a status update of all awarded but not obligated competitive grants and earmarks—something we’ve specifically advocated for with Congress over the past year. Additionally, old Notices of Funding Opportunity, grant award lists, and guidance from the administration must be kept online for at least ten years to ensure continuity between administrations.

One positive in the highway program is $30 million for reconnecting communities projects that lost their grant funding under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Unfortunately, those funds come at the expense of other rescinded programs and are available only for a handful of very large awards over $145 million. Additionally, the excessive 40 percent planning set-aside for the Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) grants is reduced to 30 percent, freeing up millions for useful capital projects. (The final year of SS4A grant funding will open up this spring, with a likely June application deadline for implementation and planning/demonstration grant applications.)

Standing issues

So, while Congress seems to have threaded the needle to avoid another shutdown, the baggage from the previous shutdown remains unresolved. The Gateway Tunnel project, the largest transit project in the United States and an economically critical infrastructure connection in the Northeast Corridor, remains frozen at the President’s behest, with little justification. Obligation rates for competitive grant programs that the administration dislikes remain low.

If Congress fails to meet the deadline to pass the appropriations bills required to keep the government open, it’s not unlikely that the Trump administration will once again look to transportation program funding as another lever to pull to increase the pressure on Congressional Democrats to reach a deal. It certainly would not be the first time the administration has used the threat of withholding transportation funding to pressure states and federal funding recipients to conform to its priorities.

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.² (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.³

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. ⁴ 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. ⁵

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:

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
Take billions more from taxpayers by raising revenues in some fashion (increasing gas taxes or establishing new taxes)
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.

Four ways our federal leaders can invest in the rest

Photograph of a street facing the U.S. Capitol with bike lanes down the middle and pedestrians utilizing a crosswalk

While we might have the most extensive highway infrastructure in the world, the U.S. is delivering pitifully poor results compared to our peers when it comes to cost, efficiency, emissions, and safety. What can Congress and USDOT do to invest in the rest?

Under federal transportation policy, funding for highways greatly outpaces transit. Worse, it is hard to overstate how little of total funding has been allocated to building sidewalks and bike routes. For Americans who are unable to drive or lack regular access to a car, the lack of alternative options has very real consequences. In addition, when we fail to invest in opportunities to walk, bike, and take public transit, communities lose out on the wide-scale benefits these options provide. Multimodal transportation investments that make transit and walking more practical options for people promote ecologically and fiscally sustainable options for economic development.

Our system today costs us much more than we think, with poor outcomes for all users, including public health and climate outcomes, which have a disproportionate impact on Black and low-income communities historically marginalized from transportation decision-making. We continue to invest in road capacity expansions as our go-to strategy to alleviate congestion or drive economic growth, despite proof that this strategy does not work. As a result, cities remain locked in a Sisyphean strategy that continues to leave us stuck in traffic, even after COVID-19, with more remote work options than ever.

A bar chart compares transit funding with highway funding in federal investments from 1991 to 2021. In every bill except the 2021 ARP that only funded transit ($31B), highway spending dwarfs transit spending, with the largest discrepancy appearing in the IIJA ($432B for highways and $109B for transit). Cumulative spending since 1991 is also significantly higher for highways than transit, with cumulative spending by 2021 reaching $1413B for highways and $359B for transit. — *Across recent major bills, federal investment in highway programs has vastly outpaced investments in transit.*

Instead of continuing oversized investments in the bloated federal highway program that fail to deliver results, the next transportation reauthorization bill needs to invest in the rest to build a world-class, multimodal transportation system. Here are some steps Congress and USDOT can take to get started.

1. Fix the data

We need quality data to make quality decisions. Transportation generates plenty of opportunities to collect data, from vehicular speed and throughput to how many miles of bike lane are being built. However, ensuring data quality matters much more than raw quantity of measures alone. While we have plenty of data-oriented solutions and measures to advance and plan specific transportation projects, the data underlying our system is full of holes.

Right now, it’s difficult for policymakers and advocates to determine how we are spending our money and to identify the actual effects of spending trends. Critical performance measure data tracked by the Federal Highway Administration can take years to update or be presented incomplete, missing data entirely. But even quality data is insufficient when we interpret it through the same old flawed processes that take us to the same old conclusions that lead us to the same bad outcomes.

We need better information to make better decisions at the federal, state, and local levels. Practitioners should have access to tools that effectively model and account for induced demand, land use changes, greenhouse gasses, and access to jobs and services in ways that can inform investment decisions away from strategies that have not worked in the past. Current and planned transportation investments should be reported on a more standardized basis in order for state advocates to understand where their funds are actually going.

2. Better utilize federal programs

The transformative investment levels required to provide a world class transportation system won’t be met with small, individual discretionary grant programs alone. The real workhorses of the federal transportation program—the Surface Transportation Block Grant and National Highway Performance Program—often provide a significant portion of federal funds for states to invest how they see fit, which almost always means building more roads. Spending on new road capacity is delivering diminishing returns and should be rededicated to opportunities to take public transit or walk, bike, and roll.

Under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), there are many programs available to create more transportation options. However, finding and applying for these funds can be a strain on communities. Congress should consider consolidating the number of programs and expanding the size of smaller programs that provide funding access for local communities to address local safety, access, and resilience priorities. In implementing these federal programs, USDOT should streamline grant applications for smaller localities and jurisdictions while continuing to provide specialized assistance and relevant application information for lower resourced communities.

3. Fund transit operations, and use funding to boost frequency

When properly supported, transit provides immense value to communities and users from all walks of life. Unfortunately, transit has received significantly less support over the years compared to highway projects.

In order to unlock the transformative economic, climate, and equity benefits that transit can bring to a region, transit service needs to be frequent and provide access to jobs and services. We can do this by helping to fund transit operations and structuring federal grant programs to provide a pathway for transit agencies to reliably increase service and frequency to get people where they need to go.

Pairing the above with walkable, denser development around transit and a method to raise revenues that captures the value transit brings to a region could help advance investments in building out our transit systems, making them even more valuable resources.

4. Build out the passenger rail network

The IIJA is proving to be a launchpad for a passenger rail revival in the United States. There’s no doubt we’ve come a long way. However, as projects develop, there’s still much more work to be done and it takes a long time to bring a train up to top speed. If we want to build off our successes, reauthorization should ensure that we don’t stop building our rail network commitments now. Continuing our investments in national connectivity, and service is the best path forward to a strong national rail system. Learn more about how federal leaders can help advance passenger rail here.

The stakes

Congress and USDOT can play a major role in supporting a multimodal, world-class transportation system. Providing a floor for consistent investment in transit and active transportation infrastructure will be vital in ensuring that every American can reach their destinations safely, conveniently, and efficiently.

It’s Invest in the Rest Week

Click below to access more content related to our third principle for infrastructure investment, Invest in the Rest. Find all three of our principles here.

Four ways our federal leaders can invest in the rest

While we might have the most extensive highway infrastructure in the world, our system is delivering pitifully poor results compared to our peers when it comes to cost, efficiency, emissions, and safety. What can Congress and USDOT do to invest in the rest?
Week Without Driving showcases the need to invest in the rest

Last week, Transportation for America joined organizations and advocates nationwide in the Week Without Driving challenge. During this week, all Americans, including transportation practitioners and policymakers, are encouraged to travel without a car, allowing them to experience local barriers to walking, biking, and taking public transit firsthand.
Time to tip the scales in favor of more transportation options

For decades, federal highway funding and funding for all other types of transportation (public transit, opportunities to walk and bike) have been severely unbalanced. In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, pedestrian deaths, and traffic, the Department of Transportation must invest in more transportation alternatives.

Congressional briefing emphasizes electrification and public transit to meet climate goals

The sun rises behind the U.S. Capitol, casting the dome in a golden glow

54 years since the first Earth Day, the US is still focusing on highway expansion. In light of increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, due in part to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), Transportation for America and its partners engaged the Future of Transportation Caucus to brief Congress on transportation decarbonization. We explained that to truly decrease emissions we need to electrify transportation systems and support travel options beyond private vehicles.

In a briefing on Capitol Hill, T4A Policy Associate Corrigan Salerno showed how highway expansion funds in the IIJA dwarfed historic investments in public transit leading to disastrous GHG emissions increases. The short and sweet of it is that mode-shift needs to be coupled with electrification to decrease our GHG emissions. Taylor Reich from the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy explained that coupling electrifying transportation with mode shift (opportunities to travel outside of a car) will save the government and private citizens trillions, lower energy consumption, and lower emissions.

Miguel Moravec from the Rocky Mountain Institute and Move Minnesota advocate Katie Jones described how states are already incorporating electrification and mode shift into policy. Minnesota’s Climate Action Framework and Colorado’s GHG Transportation Planning Standard require transportation infrastructure projects to abide by local GHG reduction targets. Thanks to these regulations, major highway expansion plans have been set aside in favor of bus rapid transit, active transportation networks, and transit oriented development.

The path forward

Most of the funding for highway expansion projects comes from formula funds with few strings attached, giving state departments of transportation (DOT) the option to expand aggressively. With the Senate voting 53-47 against mandating DOTs and metropolitan planning organizations (MPO) to track their GHG emissions, Congress is not helping increase transparency into our state transportation investments or halt endless highway growth.

Colorado and Minnesota are already implementing solutions and Maryland is trying to catch up. The federal government must meet their decarbonization efforts by bringing these state-level approaches to a national scale.

And there’s a path forward to do just that. Legislation such as Senator Markey’s GREEN Streets Act requires minimum standards for GHG, vehicle miles traveled (VMT), and air pollution reductions. It would also require DOTs and MPOs to publicize the environmental and health impact data for large expansion projects.

We already know that transportation decarbonization is necessary for fighting climate change. Electrifying all cars, a lofty goal on its own, won’t be enough to solve our climate crisis. Goal setting and transparency are integral to decarbonization. Without building more public transportation, establishing more active transportation infrastructure, and giving people the freedom to travel outside of a car, we won’t make significant progress. To truly respect our planet, our federal leaders must do more to address mode shift and electrification.

Four young professionals stand inside the House Chamber, smiling at the camera — *The four presenters at the briefing (from left to right): Miguel Moravec, Katie Jones, Taylor Reich, and Corrigan Salerno.*

Why we need the Stronger Communities Through Better Transit Act

A diverse set of passengers (women and men, young and old) rides a bus down a sunny street

Representative Hank Johnson (GA-04) reintroduced the Stronger Communities Through Better Transit Act, which would establish a federal funding program for transit operations, providing $20 billion in annual funding over four years ($80 billion) to expand the service of buses and trains. We are joining the National Campaign for Transit Justice, the Transport Workers Union of America (TWU) and the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) in support of this bill.

Public transit is essential to communities, local economies, and the lives of millions of people across the country. As they work to deliver frequent and reliable service, transit agencies can use federal funding to repair and maintain their systems and to build out new services—but they can’t use it to help cover the cost of operating their systems, which accounts for two-thirds of a transit agency’s total expenses. Agencies have to turn to local taxes, fares, and fees to cover this gap.

Faced with fiscal cliffs in the years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic plus escalating inflation, many transit agencies have been forced to reduce service rather than focusing on increasing ridership back to—and beyond—pre-pandemic levels. This crisis has demonstrated that the current approach is failing to meet the needs of millions of Americans who rely upon transit to reach their essential destinations.

The Stronger Communities Through Better Transit Act would modernize transit operations funding by creating a new formula grant program that can be used to make “substantial improvements to transit service.” Furthermore, the bill aims to allot funding for places that need it most, clearly defining funding for areas of persistent poverty and underserved communities—places where transit ridership tends to be highest.

“Getting people to work and providing essential services is the primary purpose of the transportation system, and it fails if it can only do that for people who have the money and ability to drive. With the Stronger Communities Through Better Transit Act, Rep. Johnson not only offers needed support for increased transit service to connect people with the things they need, but for the high quality, dependable transit service that people require for true access to opportunity.” —Beth Osborne, Director of Transportation for America

The U.S. relies on public transit to make our economy work. Americans depend on transit to get to where they need to go and help their businesses thrive. The U.S. needs to invest in frequent, reliable, and affordable transit, and the Stronger Communities Through Better Transit Act is a crucial step forward in achieving this vision.

Take Action

Setting priorities at Future of Transportation Caucus Roundtable

Representative Chuy Garcia sits in the center of an oval table, surrounded by advocates and legislatures

With federal transportation funding set to be reauthorized in three years, the congressional Future of Transportation Caucus met with advocates to discuss the country’s most pressing funding priorities.

A crucial conversation about our transportation priorities

With every passing day, reauthorization for federal surface transportation funding grows closer and closer. Our current framework, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), expires in 2026, and it’s critical that the country gets its funding priorities right by then. If our dollars don’t go towards the right initiatives and objectives, spending more money on transportation and infrastructure will only result in the same poor outcomes. With many competing priorities, discussion between policymakers and advocates about the current state—and future of—our national transportation system remains essential.

Last Wednesday, July 12th, the Future of Transportation Caucus, led by Representatives Ayanna Pressley (MA-07), Jesús “Chuy” García (IL-04), and Mark Takano (CA-39), led a roundtable discussion with advocates on transportation electrification, public transit, active transportation, public health, and road safety. These leaders met to talk through transportation priorities and find common ground.

What does our transportation funding need to focus on?

Advocates covered a wide range of issues, including transportation electrification, operations funding for public transit, and road safety. Advocates discussed the need to electrify public transit and medium/heavy-duty vehicles as well as affordable, safe, and equitable charging for electric vehicles (EVs). Regarding operations funding, advocates spoke about expanding and supporting operations in the face of transit fiscal cliffs, increasing service frequency, and exploring solutions to reduce barriers and increase transit ridership. Finally, road safety advocates discussed improvements for bicyclist and pedestrian safety as well as the dangers of poorly thought-out autonomous vehicle (AV) rollouts in cities.

One point in particular proved to be an underlying thread throughout the conversation: a need for the basics—the baseline infrastructure essential for cities—to be focused on people, at the very minimum. Advocates emphasized the importance of good bus systems and facilities, functional sidewalks, and more, recounting how much of a difference that investing in these essentials made in their communities and socioeconomic outcomes.

Leadership makes a difference. Thanks to @RepChuyGarcia @RepPressley and @RepMarkTakano for the great conversation about improving safety in transportation, transit service and ridership, and electrifying vehicles. https://t.co/WCouBMQXRi
— Beth Osborne (@BethOsborneT4A) July 13, 2023

Looking ahead to the 2026 reauthorization

It’s essential that Congress gets the right transportation funding priorities in line before the next reauthorization cycle rolls around in 2026. With a massive rise in pedestrian fatalities, a focus on expansion that leaves , and a climate crisis that has only begun, America can’t afford to continue with more of the same. Instead, we need to rethink what our current funding dollars are going towards. T4A’s three key principles for transportation infrastructure investment—prioritize maintenance, design for safety over speed, and connect people to jobs and services—can serve as a guiding framework for a plan that brings the country towards safe, convenient, affordable transportation for all.

We need to move past the outdated “80/20” highway/transit funding split and resist getting distracted by fantasies that promote car dependence like smart cities dominated by AVs. Rather, our federal funding needs to prioritize the maintenance and repair of existing infrastructure, advance safer streetscapes centered on people first, and prioritize access to goods and services, including increasing operations funding for public transit so agencies can expand the crucial services that people rely on.

At the end of the day, we need to commit to investing in our vision of an accessible and equitable transportation system that strengthens communities—one that focuses on moving people, not just vehicles.

House threatens funds for reconnecting communities

The House’s debt ceiling package, H.R. 2811, proposes cuts to several programs, including the Neighborhood Access and Equity Program established under the Inflation Reduction Act. In response, T4A Director Beth Osborne issued the following statement:

“The Neighborhood Access and Equity Program is a valuable, needed investment that will support local economic development and knit communities back together across overbuilt and obsolete roadways. Governments across the country are looking for federal partners to build safer, better connected, and more prosperous communities. The program has not even begun, so now is not the time to strip the program’s funding. But that’s exactly what the House’s debt ceiling package H.R. 2811, also known as the ‘Limit, Save, Grow Act,’ would do.

“That’s why we’re leading a sign-on letter with organizations nationwide calling on Congress to keep the Neighborhood Access and Equity Program fully funded so we can realize the benefits of these critical investments.”

This letter can only be signed by elected officials and those authorized to represent their organization.

Sign the letter.

Greener Fleets: How federal dollars can supply the demand for clean transit

Electric buses line up in a brightly lit warehouse with an American flag in the background

The Low and No Emission Vehicles (Low No) program saw a big increase in funding in America’s historic infrastructure law, but an outdated and arbitrary requirement is pushing transit agencies toward buses that still pollute. Here’s how Congress and the Federal Transit Administration can avoid locking in emissions for years to come.

While scientists have rung the alarms on climate change for decades, the 2021 infrastructure law is American policymakers’ first significant response. While unfortunately allowing for much climate-damaging investment in highway expansion, the IIJA also invests significantly in public transit systems including $5.5 billion over its five-year appropriation period for the Low or No Emission Vehicle (Low No) program—six times more than the program’s previous five years of funding. As the title suggests, the Low No program helps transit agencies transition their fleets to low- and zero-emission buses. Additionally, the IIJA provided nearly $2 billion in funding over five years for the closely-related Bus and Bus Facilities Program. While these programs are record-breaking for their level of investments in clean buses and supporting infrastructure, this legislation has flaws that are holding the nation back from cleaning up the bus fleet.

In October of 2022, Transportation for America filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) for a synthesis of all applications submitted to the Low No and Bus and Bus Facilities programs in fiscal year 2022 (FY22). We wanted to better understand how the programs are serving U.S. transit agencies’ needs and supporting America’s climate goals and emission reduction efforts. What we found was worrying.

As we wrote in Greener Fleets, a white paper we’ve submitted to Congressional leaders, we found that the program encourages transit agencies to buy diesel hybrid and compressed natural gas (CNG) buses instead of zero-emission buses running on electricity or hydrogen. The root cause: 25 percent of the Low No program’s funding is reserved for low-emission (as opposed to zero-emission) projects. This is artificially constraining the supply of zero-emission funds, locking in unnecessary transit emissions for decades.

Low No is coming up short

Applications for grants in FY22 for zero-emission projects of the Low No and Bus and Bus Facilities programs were in extremely high demand, composing 86 percent of the combined two programs’ grant requests.

The Bus and Bus Facilities program does not place constraints on fuel types when considering awards, focusing on the applicant’s project rating (Highly Recommended, Recommended, Not Recommended). Still, as shown in the graph below, zero-emission projects had a one in six chance of being awarded while consuming 83 percent of the program’s available funding.

Bar chart showing FOIA findings. Notable: over $2,780,000,000 was requested for no emission funding, but only $456,694,932 was awarded. Compare this to about $295,000,000 requested for low emission and $17,721,272 awarded.

The strong demand for zero-emission buses and facilities shows that transit agencies have gotten comfortable with relatively new electric and hydrogen bus products and are more ready than ever to invest in the zero-emission transition.

Bar chart depicting probability of winning a grant across all programs. Notably, low emission projects had a 100% chance of winning Low No funding, while zero emission projects had a 33% chance. On the Bus & Bus Facilities side, no emissions projects had an 18% chance, compared to a 27% chance for all other fuel types (low emission and traditional). More information in the paragraph below and in our white paper linked at the bottom of this post.

The Low No program is statutorily required to reserve 25 percent of available funds for projects using low-emission fuels, such as CNG, diesel-electric hybrid, and propane. In other words, even though 88 percent of applications were for no-emission buses and facilities, FTA was required to award 25 percent of the funding to more polluting low-emission projects. Due to this requirement, as shown in the graph above, nearly 100 percent of the low-emission projects received an award, while more than two-thirds of clean zero-emission applications were rejected. There weren’t even enough low-emission projects in the application pool to meet the 25 percent requirement.

We were concerned that this funding acceptance rate would encourage American transit agencies to give up competing for zero-emission funds (in extremely high demand), and instead apply for the less competitive low-emission funding. Based on early trends in FY23 applications, our concerns were justified. More transit agencies are competing for low-emission project funding than in FY22, putting them on track to deploy buses that will continue polluting for a decade or more, and slowing the development of an EV transit bus supply chain.

How did the 25 percent requirement come to be?

In 2015, the law that outlined the details of the Low or No Emission Vehicle program was passed by the U.S. Congress and Senate. Senator Toomey of Pennsylvania argued for a mandate to require funds be reserved for low-emission vehicles in the legislation. He successfully included a statutory requirement that 25 percent of the Low No program funding go to projects using low-emission fuels, such as CNG, a key product of Pennsylvania, whose natural gas production is second only to Texas. This statutory requirement to subsidize fossil fuels in an age of energy transition leads the IIJA to invest 1.4 billion over this 5 year authorization period in buses that still pollute.

Change the status quo

The Low No and the Bus and Bus Facilities programs are essential to ensuring American transit agencies can replace their aging bus fleets with low and zero-emission vehicles, and transit agencies are clearly eager to rise to the challenge. Congress can do more to ensure that these programs are working to accomplish emission reduction goals. They could start by eliminating the outdated and arbitrary requirement that 25 percent of Low No funding goes to low-emission vehicles. But they should go further: increasing funding for both programs to meet the overall demand for buses and facilities; creating incentives for both programs to leverage other funding sources; and increasing transparency of the program by making basic application and award information available on FTA’s website and looking for ways to simplify the application process.

Ultimately, Congress and FTA should work together to form a vision for how the Low No and Bus and Bus Facilities programs can support American transit agencies in providing excellent transit service in our communities and converting their operations to zero-emissions rapidly enough to meet greenhouse gas reduction goals and improve air quality in the communities they serve.

For more information on this problem and how to solve it, read Greener Fleets: Meeting the demand for cleaner transit.