“The Reauthorization of Federal Transportation Programs Offers Policymakers an Opportunity to Improve Effectiveness, Environmental Sustainability, and Access,” released in November by the Urban Institute, serves as an analysis of the landmark 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which dedicated just more than $1 trillion toward the daunting task of modernizing American infrastructure.
It laid the groundwork for a transportation future that’s more electric and multimodal, and deployed broadband underpinnings across much of rural America while shoring up more traditional forms of infrastructure like roads and bridges.
“Unfortunately, I think that there are a lot of missed opportunities with the current law, and the reality is that the law has not necessarily resulted in all of the benefits that we wanted out of it,” Yonah Freemark, a principal research associate with the Urban Institute, and one of the authors of the report, said.
Four years later, as Congress prepares to consider reauthorizing transportation and other funding next year, policy watchers like the Urban Institute urge lawmakers to prioritize areas like public transit, reducing emissions and improving the overall quality of the projects by developing and planning work “to expand access to destinations, rather than those that simply move cars through more car lanes,” in the words of the report.
“I think my primary interest is to ensure federal stakeholders have a clear sense of how to orient the next transportation reauthorization law. I think they’re obviously already having discussions about how they want to rewrite that law,” Freemark said. “And so, I’m hopeful that people in Congress, and other stakeholders, can be thinking seriously about how to make changes that will address that.”
The IIJA included key initiatives like the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program, with some $7.5 billion in funding to build out public EV charging. Around $5 billion of this was allocated toward placing roughly 500,000 high-speed charging ports along major corridors, with each state submitting plans. Meanwhile the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program allocated some $42 billion toward developing high-speed broadband in some of the hardest to reach locations.
However, actual on-the-ground projects funded by each of these programs have been slow to gain traction, in some cases, slowed by government itself in the form of permitting and other obstacles.
To speed that up, and get work moving more quickly, Freemark said, perhaps projects like bus and bike lane improvement projects should not be subject to federal environmental review.
“Especially when they are being built within the right of way of the existing transportation corridors that are there,” he said. “Easy asks like that should not be subject to years of planning.”
Labor costs have also factored into some of the struggles around getting impactful projects with the funding available.
“There is a trade-off between trying to get projects going and the high cost of labor,” he said.
However, what cannot be understated is the single event of changing presidential administrations, and with this comes a shift in political and other priorities. The second Trump administration halted programs like BEAD and NEVI while it drafted new rules and other guidelines, often with the aim of eradicating certain pieces of the programs such as equity provisions.
“When different administrations come in with different priorities, and have the possibility of actually canceling projects, you have a situation where investment doesn’t actually go forward as quickly as you would like,” Freemark said.
Perhaps no other project illustrates this point better than the California High-Speed Rail project, with its on-again, off-again federal support. The Obama administration was largely supportive of the 500-mile project, awarding it $929 million in 2010, which the Trump administration canceled in 2019. The Biden administration awarded the project nearly $3.1 billion in 2023, and the second Trump administration clawed back $2.4 billion of that in September.
“When you have situations like that, agencies like the California High-Speed Rail Authority have to slow down,” Freemark said. “They’re not able to keep up their level of investment that they had planned, and they have uncertainty from private investors, who aren’t sure whether these projects are going to actually come to fruition.”
“We’re going to continue to work to find ways to come up with innovative funding solutions, to keep this project — pardon the pun — on track,” California Secretary of Transportation Toks Omishakin said in January during the California High-Speed Rail Industry Forum in Sacramento.
BEAD has also been slow to bring connectivity to underserved and unserved areas, as states have had to resubmit broadband plans to include new types of providers like low-Earth orbit satellites.
“I am unabashedly dissatisfied with BEAD 2.0, as a rural advocate, as a rural resident,” Catherine Krantz, area director for broadband at Communities Unlimited, a nonprofit community development organization serving seven Southern states, said during a panel at the Broadband Nation Expo conference in Orlando, Fla., in November. The BEAD program, reworked by the Trump administration, is often referred to as BEAD 2.0.
“I want, not just connectivity for individuals, but I want economic development, telehealth, precision agriculture, and I want a foundation that allows our communities to reap their full potential,” she said.
BEAD originally allocated some $3 billion for equity and inclusion, to grow the necessary skills to fully access the Internet in areas like telehealth, workforce development and education. The Trump administration pared back these initiatives.
