The Trump administration is implementing funds for safety grants at about ten percent of the speed of the previous administration
The Trump administration talks a big game about streamlining requirements and reviews. Speed is not everything, but when we evaluate the rates of getting actual dollars out the door and into real projects, it appears that politicized review requirements may be slowing down grant obligations to awarded projects, especially for those related to safety. Meanwhile, status quo, dangerous highway expansion projects from state DOTs keep chugging along.
Announcements are not obligations, and Presidential administrations frequently take advantage of the fact that this is not common knowledge to make flashier press releases. According to the Trump administration, the Biden administration left them a 3,200-project-long list of awarded grants without signed grant agreements. Since Secretary Duffy’s confirmation, the administration has announced that they have “approved” over one-third of the Biden administration’s awarded but unobligated grant backlog. But much like how an announcement under the Biden administration did not mean a closed deal, an “approval” under the Trump administration doesn’t either.
Transportation projects must clear multiple stages of political and environmental reviews to reach the construction phase, and it becomes especially complicated when they receive federal assistance in the form of a competitive grant. Under a competitive grant award, the awardee and the federal government need to work together to define their work with USDOT before coming to a grant agreement and having their awarded funding obligated to them.
Take the Emerald Trail project in Jacksonville, Florida, for example—in March, the city of Jacksonville won a $147 million award to build a network of walking and biking paths. But on July 4, 2025, the community lost all of that funding because the city and USDOT never reached a final grant agreement before President Trump signed the bill to claw back the program’s awarded, unobligated funding.
Hurdles
The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act created a plethora of new competitive grant programs to address issues like job access, climate pollution reduction, legacy bridge repair, disaster resiliency, accessibility, and transportation electrification. With the array of programs and unique eligibilities for new funding recipients (who were often inexperienced with federal grant processes), coupled with incredibly complicated policy mechanisms to meet multiple policy goals, competitive grants did not move fast under the IIJA. Take the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure program for example: while the IIJA passed in November 2021, it took until May 2023 to post the funding opportunity for communities to even apply. The opportunity prioritized the Biden administration’s policies, uplifting equity in award selection and reporting, workforce development, and domestically made parts (where there were few established supply chains). It took until January 2024 to post the first round of awards. Of those awardees, there’s such a large amount of funding yet to be spent in the program that the Trump administration is proposing to rescind the program’s unobligated funding in their Fiscal Year 2026 appropriations request for a political win against what it considers Green New Deal spending.
What’s going on now
The grant “approval” process Secretary Duffy described in recent press releases seems to be a new term, separate from “awarded, and obligated,” used to describe the internal competitive grant review for topics and project elements that fall outside the administration’s priorities list. For transportation projects, the competitive grant review process flags safety-enhancing infrastructure, like road diets and bike lanes, electric vehicle charging stations, green infrastructure, and studies aimed at improving outcomes for all transportation users equitably. Flagged grants, according to that memo, were to be revised, with project elements in conflict with the administration’s priorities excluded.
We assume that once approved, grants would move forward toward the obligation of funds and signing of grant agreements (despite significantly less staff capacity remaining in USDOT to administer those grants, and possibly even fewer staff in the future). As part of their effort to promote streamlining, the Trump administration continues to make announcements about how voiding reporting requirements in federal funding recipients’ existing grant agreements will save time and increase project speed. But sweeping changes can be confusing to grantees, and those erring on the side of caution may choose to continue with requirements in their existing contracts or hesitate to move forward at all. These changes, combined with reduced staff capacity, could be slowing down these communities’ safety projects.
To understand what is really happening when it comes to funding projects to improve safety and transportation access, we followed the money. Transportation for America evaluated funding obligations under a set of discretionary grant programs and compared the rate of funding obligations so far under the Trump administration with the Biden administration’s record.
Safety, active transportation, and multimodal transportation grant obligation speed
This analysis evaluates obligations logged to USASpending.gov under the Safe Streets and Roads for All grants, RAISE/BUILD program, SMART grants, the Reconnecting Communities Pilot, and the Neighborhood Access and Equity program. We compare how fast the Trump administration has obligated funds per month since re-entering the White House in January (over versus the Biden administration’s obligations per month since the passage of the bill (over 40 months). This biases the awards per month toward the Trump administration, as it counts time the Biden administration had to take to solicit applicants and select awardees. Right now, there is approximately $9.8 billion in announced funding remaining to be obligated.
Sum of obligations for these selected programs: $5.9 billion
Trump obligations per month: $46.6 million
Biden obligations per month: $141.7 million
Total obligated out of both administrations: $5.86 billion
Total obligated by Trump admin: $233.3 million
Total obligated by Biden admin: $5.6 billion
The Trump administration is obligating funds for the competitive grant programs below at 33 percent the speed of the Biden administration. No obligations have been reported.
Safe Streets and Roads for All
The Safe Streets and Roads for All program is a competitive grant opportunity that enables communities to directly receive federal funding to build local-led safety projects, plan for them, or build safety demonstration projects. Despite the program’s explicit purpose of improving safety for everyone using proven methods, the Trump administration specified in the most recent funding opportunity that reductions in lane capacity, a key component in safety-enhancing road diet projects, were to be disfavorably evaluated in the latest grant award process. This may have resulted in a chilling effect for applications to the recent funding opportunity that closed two weeks ago. Though the full impact is yet to be seen, we know at least anecdotally that the administration’s announcement of new priorities to cooperate with ICE and bans on DEI policies in recipients’ offices have scared off a few applicants. Grants under this program have been subject to USDOT’s political grant review process for DEI elements and the reduction of vehicular capacity for bike infrastructure.
Total funding from IIJA: $5 billion
Total obligated funds: $525 million
Trump obligations per month: $1.4 million
Biden obligations per month: $12.9 million
The Trump administration is obligating funds for the Safe Streets for All program at 11 percent the speed of the Biden administration.
Reconnecting Communities Pilot
The $1 billion Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program is intended to improve access to daily needs and repair past harms by removing or mitigating divisive infrastructure, particularly in disadvantaged communities. This program has been targeted by the administration for its focus on equity.
Total funding from IIJA: $1 billion
Total obligated funds: $77 million
Trump obligations per month: $0
Biden obligations per month: $1.9 million
The Trump administration is obligating funds for the Reconnecting Communities program at 0 percent the speed of the Biden administration. No obligations have been reported.
Neighborhood Access and Equity
The Neighborhood Access and Equity program, funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, put an additional $3.2 billion toward Reconnecting Communities projects, enabling redevelopment, safety enhancements, and transportation access across the country. Approximately $776 million in funding was obligated to 60 out of 98 awarded states and communities before its rescission as part of the H.R. 1 2025 Reconciliation Bill (AKA “One Big Beautiful Bill”). Approximately $2.4 billion for 60 awarded projects was rescinded, clawing back funds despite communities having invested hundreds of staff hours in winning the awards and securing the millions of local-match dollars.
Total funding from IRA: $3.2 billion
Total obligated funds: $777 million
Trump obligations per month: $1.9 million
Biden obligations per month: $32.6 million
Prior to rescission in the 2025 Reconciliation Bill, the Trump administration had obligated funds for the Neighborhood Access and Equity program at 7.5 percent the rate of the Biden administration.
RAISE/BUILD program
RAISE/BUILD is one of the most popular competitive grant programs because nearly anyone can apply for it, and it can fund almost any type of project, including complex multimodal projects that have a hard time getting other funding or that bring together numerous different jurisdictions. In previous presidential transitions, priorities for what are now known as RAISE/BUILD awards shifted according to the priorities of the administration. In Trump’s first term, awards were more likely to be directed to road expansions than transit or active transportation projects in rural and exurban areas.
Total funding from IIJA: $15 billion
Total obligated funds: $4.1 billion
Trump obligations per month: $43.2 million
Biden obligations per month: $98.6 millio
The Trump administration is obligating funds for the RAISE/BUILD program at 55 percent the speed of the Biden administration.
SMART program
The Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation (SMART) Grants Program, established in the IIJA, put forward $100 million each year to provide grants to public sector agencies seeking to advance transportation efficiency and safety, along with new technology for projects like pedestrian detection and transit priority traffic signals.
Total funding from IIJA: $500 million
Total obligated funds: $149,284,719.00
Trump obligations per month: $0
Biden obligations per month: $3,732,117.98
The Trump administration is obligating funds for the SMART program at 0 percent the speed of the Biden administration. No obligations have been reported.
Federal Aid Highway Program formula funds
And while projects awarded to towns and cities to improve safety problems in communities often ignored by state DOTs now languish in limbo, state DOTs themselves have had no real trouble spending their funding apportionments under this administration. Federal Highway Administration formula program dollars, which are given out regularly to states, receive far less scrutiny than competitive grant programs but are funded at a greater scale. Mistakes made in these status quo programs are often the impetus for the very discretionary grant programs that are being slowed down. These FHWA formula programs include the National Highway Performance Program, Surface Transportation Block Grant, National Highway Freight Program, Congestion Mitigation Air Quality Program, Carbon Reduction Program, and PROTECT Program.
Total funding from IIJA: $270 billion
Total obligated funds: $183 billion
Trump obligations per month: $4.0 billion
Biden obligations per month: $4.4 billion
The Trump administration is obligating funds for these highway formula programs at 90 percent the speed of the Biden administration.
NOTE: This analysis comes with caveats from imperfect data. USASpending data has to be manually uploaded by staff, who are in short supply in federal agencies these days. Under normal circumstances, reporting delays between a federal action and public data lasted about a week, but now that timeline is unclear. Further, there is no easy way to determine which awarded projects now have a signed and completed grant agreement, so the actual obligation of money can begin—we can only infer which projects have signed agreements if obligations are being incurred for a given project in this data. Altogether, this means that we expect President Trump’s rate of obligations to get better as time progresses and prior project obligations reported (minus the cancelled Neighborhood Access and Equity Program). All data is as of the date of retrieval, July 8, 2025.