Transportation For America Taming the TIGER: Trump’s USDOT turns innovative grant program into another roads program

The Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development (BUILD) program has been one of the most popular and impactful transportation programs in the federal arsenal. Conceived during the first few months of the Obama administration at the height of the financial crisis in 2009, the program originally bore the name TIGER: Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery. Following the announcement in April 2019 of an 11^th round in BUILD competitive grants ($900 million) available to almost any public entity for transportation projects, Transportation for America released a comparative and constructive critique of USDOT’s BUILD program (formerly known as TIGER). The full report can be downloaded on this page as a PDF, but it was first published in three parts on the T4America blog as a series. The links to each part can be found below.

Trump’s USDOT turns innovative grant program into another roads program

Under President Trump, the U.S. Department of Transportation has effectively turned the formerly innovative BUILD program, created to advance complex, hard-to-fund projects, into little more than a rural roads program, dramatically undercutting both its intent and utility.

Read the first post

BUILDing a better competitive grant program

Under President Trump, USDOT has hijacked the TIGER/BUILD competitive grant program, taking it far from its intended function. After a decade of experience with the program there are a number of simple steps that lawmakers could take to get it back on track and even improve it.

Read the second post

How BUILD can help improve the federal transportation program

Analyzing 10 years of awarding transportation funds competitively through the TIGER/BUILD program illuminates three simple principles that should help guide reform of the federal transportation system.

Read the third post