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Trump administration undercuts multimodal funding

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

By Sean Doyle, April 25, 2019

org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Mode_GIF.gif" alt=" />Under President Trump, the USDOT has effectively turned the formerly innovative BUILD program—created to advance complex, hard-to-fund, multimodal projects—into little more than a rural roads program, dramatically undercutting both its intent and utility.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced the latest round of funding for the BUILD program (formerly known as TIGER). This federal, multimodal transportation funding program has been perennially popular since 2009 when the program was conceived. Now that the program is entering its 11th year, Transportation for America has a new analysis of the program over the past decade that uncovered some worrying findings.

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What their research found

By comparing the projects selected for funding over the last 10 years and their levels of funding, Transportation for America shown that under the Trump administration, the focus of BUILD has shifted to:

- More roads, less multimodal. Funding for transit projects has reached new lows while road projects have received record levels of funding. The small amount of funding for multimodal projects is inconsistent with the law.
- More new capacity, less repair. The Trump administration has focused more heavily on capacity expansion (i.e. new roads and road widenings) versus repair and bridge replacement. The Trump administration has prioritized doing the exact opposite of “repairing our crumbling roads and bridges” with the BUILD program. Tweet the findings
  
  The analysis was published as a series of blog posts and as a single document that is available to download.