How to make repair the rule, not the exception

Our Fix It First principle represents an incredibly basic but fundamental shift in federal transportation policy: prioritizing the repair of existing infrastructure before funding new projects. But implementing this shift will require a new process for setting targets to improve infrastructure conditions, and more accountability for agencies to meet those targets.

Introduction to Fix it First

“Fix it First” is the first of Transportation for America’s three simple guiding principles towards transforming transportation policy. The federal government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on transportation over the past two decades. And yet, the results are underwhelming. Roads across the country are still riddled with potholes, and bridges are aging, some to the point of collapse. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, U.S. infrastructure received barely passing grades, with roads earning a D+ and bridges a C in their latest report card. What’s more troubling is that these scores have barely improved over the past 25 years—despite over a trillion dollars in spending and repeated federal authorizations that increased funding. A new approach is urgently needed—one that makes fixing existing infrastructure a prerequisite before building anything new. How are we going to do that?

T4’s policies to improve the state of the system

Under our principle of Fix it First, we have two overarching policy proposals. The first focuses on the changes required to prioritize existing maintenance needs before building new things: require grantees of federal funding to maintain their infrastructure by setting targets for improving road and bridge conditions, and then hold them accountable for doing so. This post will expand on the first four policies under that first idea:

1. Require grantees to maintain their infrastructure. If a grantee uses federal dollars (formula, competitive, or loan assistance) to build new road or bridge capacity, they must demonstrate the capacity to operate and maintain that asset throughout its useful life while improving the condition of their overall road and bridge system. Maintain the 80 percent federal match for repair projects, but lower the federal match for new capacity projects to 50 percent.

2. Require states and MPOs to set targets to improve road and bridge conditions. When setting targets under 23 USC 150, states and MPOs must set targets to improve the condition of pavements and bridges on both the Interstate system and the National Highway system.

3. Assist states and MPOs that fail to hit their repair targets. For states and MPOs that fail to achieve all of their targets to improve pavement and bridge conditions:

• No National Highway Performance Program (NHPP) or Surface Transportation Block Grant Program (STBG) funding or Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) credit assistance can be used for new capacity road or bridge projects
• No competitive grant award can be made for new capacity road or bridge projects.

4. Establish accountability and transparency.

• States and MPOs must detail in their STIPs/TIPs projected progress toward repair targets and how programmed funds will support that progress.
• All approved STIPs and TIPs should be posted on the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and Federal Transit Administration (FTA) websites and fully searchable.

The current system for setting targets is broken

The current federal performance management system, created by MAP-21 in 2012, intended to improve accountability by requiring states and metro areas to set measurable targets in seven areas, including infrastructure conditions for roads and bridges, safety, congestion, and others. We explained this existing program (and its many failures) in this previous post here, but in short, this new system has failed to deliver meaningful accountability, transparency, or progress on those key areas.

Requiring real targets—and accountability

Our proposed policy would require all states and MPOs to set progressive (i.e., good!) targets to improve the condition of both Interstate and National Highway System (NHS) pavements and bridges. Currently, federal law only requires states to set condition targets for the ~140,000-plus NHS bridges. We would expand this requirement to include targets for the hundreds of thousands of bridges that are not on the NHS. These bridges are typically owned by counties, towns, or cities. NHS bridges carry the most traffic per day, but they also account for only a relatively small portion of the nation’s ~620,000 total bridges. But these “off-system” bridges are critical local and regional connectors, providing essential access in rural and underserved areas. Their exclusion from federal oversight, combined with limited local funding, means they are frequently overlooked in planning and investment decisions, leading to deferred maintenance and long-term neglect.

A second critical element of this reform is requiring states to review and modernize their bridge inspection methods. Most routine inspections today still rely heavily on visual assessments. While visual inspections remain important, they aren’t the best solution for detecting early-stage deterioration or hidden structural issues. States should be supported (with funding) and encouraged to incorporate new, advanced condition assessment tools into their inspection programs. These technologies offer more precise, timely, and comprehensive insights into bridge health, enabling earlier detection of problems and more strategic, cost-effective maintenance decisions. Modernizing bridge inspections is not only essential for improving safety, but also for maximizing the long-term value of our infrastructure investments.

Planning transparency and performance accountability

States and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) must also be far more transparent about their plans and progress. Right now, it’s nearly impossible for the public, or even policymakers, to easily access or compare state investment plans. Some states publish clear, searchable transportation improvement programs detailing what they are committed to building over the next four years; others bury their plans in hard-to-navigate PDFs or provide minimal detail. We propose requiring all states and MPOs to publish clear, detailed documentation of their projected progress toward repair targets, including which program funds are supporting those efforts.

These plans should be publicly available in a centralized, searchable platform maintained by USDOT, so people can understand how their state is performing, and compare that performance across the country. You can’t hold someone accountable if you can’t understand the data, so it must be accessible and standardized, so people can understand what’s happening and why. Our investments are too disconnected from real results. Some states are setting goals that anticipate worsening conditions, even though they have the funding to do better. That should no longer be acceptable.

Consequences for failing to improve

One of the biggest flaws in the current system is that there are no real penalties for failure. We propose to change that. So if a state or MPO fails to meet their repair targets, they would lose the ability to use funds from the National Highway Performance Program (NHPP), Surface Transportation Block Grant Program (STBG), or Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) on roadway expansion projects. These are some of the largest and most flexible sources of federal transportation funding, and they are frequently used for major capacity expansion projects like building new highways or adding lanes. If you can’t improve the condition of your existing infrastructure, you should not be building more. Additionally, states would also become ineligible for competitive federal grants aimed at constructing new roads or bridges. Withholding these funds helps realign federal investment with outcomes that improve safety, preserve existing assets, and deliver better long-term value to taxpayers.

These incentives help direct public dollars to where they’re most needed: fixing and maintaining what we already have. Too often, flashy new projects get the spotlight while potholes and bridge cracks quietly undermine safety and economic growth. That’s because the current system rewards ribbon-cutting and expansion, projects that are highly visible and politically popular in the short term, even if they add to long-term maintenance costs and neglect existing needs. These proposed changes would realign incentives to prioritize long-term system health and performance, rather than short-term wins or political headlines.

Funding reform: Rewarding maintenance over expansion

Our current funding structure incentivizes expansion by allowing states to use flexible federal dollars to prioritize highway widening and new road construction, often at the expense of maintenance, without any penalties. We need more incentives to encourage repair ahead of expansion. So we propose restructuring federal matching rates to 80 percent for repair and maintenance projects, but lowering that maximum to only 50 percent or less for capacity-expanding projects. Make repair the more financially attractive choice.

Second, if a state wants to build new infrastructure, it should also have to prove that it can afford to maintain the new assets throughout their full lifecycle, while also maintaining their existing system. We already apply this principle to the federal transit program, where agencies must demonstrate financial capacity to operate and maintain what they build. It’s the same expectation we place on everyday decisions—if you want a mortgage, you need to show you can pay for long-term upkeep. No such requirement exists for highways. The result is a growing backlog of deferred maintenance while new roads (i.e., new fiscal obligations) continue to be added. It’s time to hold road projects to the same standard of long-term responsibility.

Looking ahead

These proposals are not meant to exist in a vacuum. They’re part of a broader push for transformational change to the surface transportation program. Without it, we’d rather see the federal program sunset than continue its current path. Let’s stop rewarding neglect and start funding responsibility.

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