A sweeping shift in federal transportation spending is sending billions of taxpayer dollars toward highways, bridges, and shipping ports instead of bicycle infrastructure and diversity-focused initiatives.
The Department of Transportation confirmed this week that $1.73 billion will be distributed through the Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development program, known by its acronym, BUILD.
The bulk of that money is headed toward projects that serve drivers, truckers, and commuters across the country rather than niche transportation categories.
Department officials pointed to years of what they characterized as neglect and misdirection of the grant program under the prior administration as the reason for the overhaul.
Roads and bridges along key transportation corridors will absorb roughly 77% of the total pot, translating to approximately $1.3 billion in repair funding.
Ports and maritime facilities will see a smaller but still significant boost, receiving about 7% of the overall funding package.
Those numbers look dramatically different from grant distributions under the previous administration, when pedestrian and bicycle projects claimed roughly one-fifth of comparable funding.
Maritime infrastructure, by contrast, had received a mere 2% of grant dollars during that same earlier stretch.
This year’s BUILD grant cycle will not fund a single bicycle lane project anywhere in the country, department officials confirmed.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy characterized the funding changes as restoring the program to its intended purpose rather than creating something new.
“America is fortunate to have a builder in the White House who knows America is only as great as our infrastructure,” Duffy said to the The Daily Wire.
Duffy suggested the effects of the new spending priorities would be long-lasting for towns and cities across the nation. “The impact of these dollars will be felt in communities nationwide for years to come,” he said.
The funding realignment effectively dismantles a set of policies established by former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg during his tenure leading the department.
Buttigieg had rebranded the BUILD program as Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity, or RAISE, steering it toward climate and racial equity goals.
Back in 2021, Buttigieg publicly stated that the program’s mission would revolve around promoting equity alongside efforts to fight climate change.
By 2023, official grant guidance required applicants to explain how their projects would tackle climate change, advance racial equity, and eliminate barriers to opportunity.
That same year also saw Buttigieg bring back the Advisory Committee on Transportation Equity, a panel meant to weave equity considerations into the department’s rules, regulations, and programming.
Once he assumed control of the department, Duffy instructed staff to scrap transportation policies rooted in diversity, equity, and inclusion goals, along with climate-driven mandates.
This action synced the Transportation Department with executive orders signed by President Trump that aim to wipe out diversity, equity, and inclusion programs throughout the federal government.
The funding shift stands as one of the clearer examples of the administration’s larger effort to remove DEI-related spending from federal agencies in favor of traditional government functions.
Highways, bridges, and ports reach a considerably wider swath of the traveling and freight-hauling public than bicycle lanes, especially in rural and suburban regions dependent on vehicle transportation.
This overhaul fits into a broader trend of the administration undoing transportation policies from the Biden years that had faced pushback from conservative voices in Congress and the media.
It remains unclear whether the department intends to apply similar funding changes to other federal transportation grant initiatives in the future.
The BUILD program has operated under different names and priorities across several presidential administrations as a discretionary funding tool for major infrastructure work.
Buttigieg’s renaming and restructuring of the program had marked one of the biggest changes to its grant criteria in recent memory.
This week’s announcement effectively resets those criteria, sending the program back toward the traditional infrastructure focus it once had.
Specific details about which projects and states will receive BUILD funding under the revised criteria were not included in this week’s announcement.
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