Link to the full January-April 2025 issue here.
by Mariia V. Zimmerman
When I started writing this article in early February 2025, the assaults on the equity work of the Biden administration were fresh. I had served as part of the senior executive leadership team at the US Department of Transportation (USDOT), and my job included guiding much of this work. I have been deeply frustrated to watch the rapid dismantling of all that we had worked to achieve on behalf of millions of Americans who were not benefitting from traditional federal transportation policies and investment decisions.
The attacks on equity come as a reaction against the progress made to create a transportation system that works better for all. It is important not to lose sight of the work by the last administration. On his first day in office, President Biden elevated equity through Executive Order 13985, Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government. For the next four years of we positioned equity as a north star for our policy and programmatic work.
Over the past four years, the Biden USDOT infused equity outcomes for people and communities into federal transportation policy and funding. The goal was to correct for decades of disinvestment within underserved communities and to improve the performance of the transportation system for all. The administration elevated equity as one of USDOT’s core strategic outcomes within the Department’s FY2022-FY2026 Strategic Plan, articulating a goal to “Reduce inequities across our transportation systems and communities they affect. …” with four strategic objectives addressing expanding access; wealth creation; power of community; and proactive intervention, planning, and capacity building. USDOT created a set of accompanying key performance indicators it annually tracked, and committed to specific actions that were further detailed in its annual Equity Action Plans required by the White House to help implement EO 13985 and E.O. 14091. (Note: these action plans are no longer available on the USDOT website, but are archived at the Repository and Open Source Access Portal (ROSA P)).
This focus on identifying and addressing transportation inequities at the federal level had not happened previously. Certainly, the larger national discourse on racial equity in 2020 and 2021 motivated some federal efforts. But they also reflected the realities of evolving transportation practice in states and regions where equity issues were elevated within planning and decision making. These efforts also responded to a growing body of research, including by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, which documented transportation disparities on specific populations and geographies.
In framing equity as a strategic national transportation objective, USDOT Secretary Buttigieg elevated smart and inclusive transportation investments as integral components of delivering the world’s leading transportation system, while acknowledging that the current transportation system distributes benefits and burdens unevenly across communities because of historic and persistent patterns of segregation and inequity.
Perhaps most importantly, USDOT not only had policy commitments to advance equity it had the money to implement these actions and make investments to address disparities in the transportation system. The passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA, also referred to as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law by the Biden-Harris Administration) in November 2021 provided USDOT over $660 billion in funding to allocate via grants and formula funds across the country on nearly every form of transportation from historic investments in transit and passenger rail to equally historic investments in highways, bridges, airports, pipelines and goods movement. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act the following August, enabled infrastructure investments to specifically address climate change and help to reconnect communities. Through these federal dollars, USDOT worked to ensure that projects selected for funding supported community wealth building goals. This included USDOT directly awarding over $2 billion in direct procurement to small, disadvantaged businesses in Fiscal Year 2023 and state DOTs developing project labor agreements for 319 Federal Highway Administration projects totaling $9.9 billion, including $3.2 billion with local hire preferences (See “Delivering Progress for America: 2021-2023”.)
The following pages synthesize a few of the notable transportation equity actions taken by the Biden Administration that are now under attack. These focus on three main areas: funding transportation projects to reduce disparities, addressing transportation harms imposed on communities, and greater transparency regarding transportation potential benefits and burdens.
Funding transportation projects to advance equity outcomes and reduce disparities.
Through President Biden’s Justice 40 Initiative led by the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), USDOT aligned its discretionary funding to advance equity and climate outcomes and identified forty Justice 40 (J40) Covered Programs, in the areas of clean energy and energy efficiency, clean transportation, training and workforce development, and the remediation and reduction of legacy pollution. Policy guidance was issued to all parts of USDOT that provided suggested language for inclusion, where appropriate, into Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) across all USDOT discretionary grant programs. Executive Order 14008 directed CEQ to develop a new tool called the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, otherwise known as CEJST, that federal agencies including USDOT used to identify disadvantaged” communities as determined by the extent they were experiencing burdens in eight categories: climate change, energy, health, housing, legacy pollution, transportation, water and wastewater, and workforce development.
This focus on directing funding to disadvantaged communities was a recognition that transportation mobility is an essential ingredient for economic security. Individuals that lack transportation access to reliable, affordable, and convenient transportation options have been shown to have reduced earnings, higher unemployment rates, and a myriad of negative socio-economic and health impacts. Prior to IIJA, there was extremely limited federal funding directly available to communities to meet their local transportation needs. As a result, these communities were not able to fully participate and contribute to the national economy. IIJA not only provided significant amounts of federal transportation funding, but the majority of new USDOT discretionary grant programs it created were available to eligible local and tribal governments to apply for federal funding, alongside state departments of transportation, transit agencies, and other transportation entities.
As part of its Equity Action Plan, USDOT established a key performance indicator (KPI) to increase by 5% the number of U.S. DOT discretionary grant applicants from disadvantaged communities who had not previously applied for USDOT funding. This goal was met in FY2023 with 30% of unique grant applicants coming from disadvantaged communities. An increase in the number of new projects happening in disadvantaged communities using formula funds from J40 covered programs also increased, with almost 2,500 such projects funded in FY2023.
USDOT exceeded its FY2022 and FY2023 Justice40 goals. Departmental analysis of its forty J40-covered programs found that 55% of benefits were identified for disadvantaged communities, totaling $27.2 billion and 3,439 projects.
Addressing transportation harms imposed on communities
Among the J40 covered programs that garnered the most attention from equity advocates and critics is the new Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program (RCP) established in IIJA, and expanded through the Neighborhood Access and Equity Program funded through IRA. In total, over $4 billion in federal funding was provided by Congress to improve mobility and access through these programs designed to help repair and reconnect communities that had been negatively impacted by past transportation investments. The demand for these funds continually outpaced available funding each year that it was available.
On January 10, 2025, USDOT announced the final round of program recipients with $544.6 million in grant awards for 81 projects in 31 states. In total across all three years, 257 communities were selected to receive Reconnecting funding, covering 47 states, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico. Nearly 96% of funding went to disadvantaged communities, with 15% of awards to projects in rural communities and 5% to Tribal communities.
Beyond the program’s focus on transportation reconnection and accessibility, RCP also included a focus on aligned equitable development strategies. Initial analysis of these grants (noting that many of the planning and capital projects have not yet started) validates its potential to create substantial equity benefits, while noting that interventions funded often focused more on mitigation of harms than on addressing systemic inequities built into transportation planning and design.
The decimation and separation of communities of color by highway construction during the Interstate era is perhaps the most frequently identified example of why this pilot program was necessary. Examples such as the Chinatown Stitch project in Philadelphia and the “Highway to Nowhere” in West Baltimore highlight the destructive legacy some highway projects have had on the cultural, economic and social community fabric across decades; and also the power of community organizing and persistence. USDOT created story maps for each of its three years of grant announcements to help capture the history and hopes of several communities that were selected for funding.
In addition to funding Reconnecting projects, USDOT also funded technical assistance through the Reconnecting Communities Institute to help communities develop strategies to reduce residential and business displacement, to develop robust and inclusive community engagement strategies, and to deploy innovative design solutions to help reconnect communities.
Greater transparency regarding transportation potential benefits and burdens
During the Biden Administration, USDOT leadership committed resources and staff and established new partnerships to improve analytics and access to data that identified the variety of socio-economic, environmental, and transportation burdens faced by communities. These new tools promote transparency by giving stakeholders, decision makers, and transportation professionals access to federal data. This open access, particularly for historically overburdened and underserved communities in urban and rural areas, helps to ensure that project designs and transportation plans benefit these communities and maximize the impact of the nation’s infrastructure.
For example, for decades, housing insecurity and food insecurity have been concepts that help to inform federal policy making including at the US Department of Housing and US Department of Agriculture. However, there was no equivalency to discuss transportation insecurity, which is somewhat astonishing given that transportation is the second largest household expenditure behind housing for most American families. In 2022, transportation accounted for 15% of average household spending, with rural and lower income households spending significantly higher percentages.
As part of its equity action metrics, USDOT set a transportation cost burden performance goal to see a 5% reduction in this metric by 2030, as this will be an indication that transportation costs are becoming less of a strain on households. Transportation cost burden is a measure of the percentage of income a household spends on transportation. The cost of transportation, as well as the modes of transportation available and used, impacts the total dollars that households spend on transportation. Transportation cost is a measure of transportation affordability. Transportation cost burden falls the hardest on lowest income families. According to a 2023 analysis by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics lower income households spent 30% of their after-tax income on transportation in 2022.
To help track this goal and enable communities to more easily do their own analysis on transportation and other types of burden, USDOT created the Equitable Transportation Community (ETC) Explorer. This included a newly established Transportation Disadvantaged Index to reflect how a community is experiencing disadvantage relative to transportation investments. Transportation disadvantage was determined based upon federal data that considered these specific factors: Transportation Insecurity, Health Vulnerability, Environmental Burden, Social Vulnerability and Disaster Risk Burden. The Biden USDOT encouraged applicants to its discretionary funding programs to use the ETC Explorer to increase understanding of transportation disadvantage at the community level and prioritize projects that mitigate or reverse the causes of transportation disadvantage.
The road ahead
Transportation equity is at a crossroads. State departments of transportation, metropolitan planning organizations, local governments and the transportation industry itself have made substantial progress over the last decade to acknowledge the inequities of past transportation decisions, mitigate against environmental and transportation access burdens on communities, deploy more inclusive community engagement practices, and prioritize new investments in transit, road safety, accessible transportation, complete streets and reconnecting communities.
Yet in devastatingly stark contrast to the progress of the past four years under President Biden, the demonization and decimation of diversity, equity, and inclusion actions are a banner for President Trump. Since he took office on January 20, 2025, we’ve seen unprecedented attacks on the people, policies, programs and institutions designed to generate equitable outcomes and upon the social safety net itself.
In the transportation space, this has included the elimination of programs and decimation of information focused on equity outcomes and also of the firing of staff, the rescission of funding and the claw back of contracts, and targeting policies and programs that benefit local communities and metropolitan areas.
For example, the Equitable Transportation Community Explorer and other equity related data sets have now all been removed from USDOT’s website. While the Trump USDOT takes the posture that it’s not against funding projects benefitting Black and Brown communities but that funded projects need to be merit based, it is hard to understand how that is possible when it simultaneously removes any data or analytic tools that can help to quantify these impacts and potential benefits.
Additionally chilling are the accompanying attacks by the Trump Administration on future transportation equity research. Contracts previously announced for research on transportation equity, safety and climate have been rescinded, USDOT research staff have been furloughed, and the Trump administration instructed researchers to halt on-going projects and redrafted language to align with their new Executive Orders attacking any form of diversity, equity and inclusion considerations. This encroachment into what historically has been non-partisan research is intentionally designed to limit the ability of researchers and practitioners to understand and address the complexities of the nation’s transportation system and future mobility needs. In practical terms, this is another blow to universities and private companies that relied on federal funding and signals to public agencies that equity in any form is not to be tolerated by this administration.
USDOT Secretary Duffy issued a January 29, 2025 memorandum that laid out these policy shifts. Included within the new Secretary’s “woke recission” directive is a requirement for all of USDOT, “to identify and eliminate all orders, directives, rules, regulations, notices, guidance documents, funding agreements, programs, and policy statements, or portions thereof, which were authorized, adopted, or approved between noon on January 20, 2021 and noon on January 20, 2025, and which reference or relate in any way to climate change, “greenhouse gas” emissions, racial equity, gender identity, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” goals, environmental justice, or the Justice 40 Initiative.”
As a result, many of the J40 program funds have been rescinded or frozen by Trump Administration, including dismantling resources and programs to support local road safety. This is particularly chilling given that low-income, elderly and people with disabilities are disproportionately killed or injured in traffic accidents, with rural and Tribal communities experiencing some of the highest fatality rates.
USDOT also issued a policy order that, while proposing to remove political ideology from transportation funding, requires that preference be given to communities with “marriage and birth rates higher than the national average, including in administering the Federal Transit Administration’s Capital Investment Grant program, among other things. An early analysis of this directive by the Urban Institute shows, not surprisingly, that those communities most in need of transportation investment will be left behind. Beyond USDOT, we also see even more concerning rollbacks of long standing regulatory policies and enforcement of Title VI and the Americans with Disabilities Act by the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice and Executive Orders framing these well-established rights to fair treatment and accommodation as “woke” DEI policies.
Policies that target poor people have historically focused on individuals. Now, these efforts are expanding to target the institutions that support the poor, including the legal system designed to protect them. So much is being broken, so fast, that by the time this article is published the federal landscape may look even more desolate for over-burdened populations and the communities in which they live.
Perhaps most concerning is the very real risk that the real goal by federal policy makers is to roll the federal transportation program back even further by removing long-standing environmental, safety, and accessibility regulations and standard planning practices designed to ensure that communities have a voice and legal standing to push against bad transportation projects. Reauthorization of federal transportation legislation will likely begin later this year, with IIJA funding and authorizations expiring at the end of FY2026. Republicans in Congress and the Trump Administration have signaled a desire to return to a considerably limited federal transportation program threatening the future of federal funding for transit, bicycle and pedestrian projects that provide vital mobility and accessibility options for underserved populations, and creating a framework likely hostile to equity and climate outcomes that will guide the next five years, at least, of federal transportation policy and programs.
While federal transportation policy may not be a natural area of focus for those working on issues such as housing justice, poverty reduction, and community development, the ability of people and communities to access affordable, reliable and safe transportation has a direct impact on their health and wealth. Transportation investment decisions made in the 1950s (and earlier) are still having impacts on communities today, as seen through the Reconnecting Communities program. The decisions being made today and in the next federal transportation reauthorization bill will impact current and future generations, either by reinforcing disparities and concentrating poverty; or by providing a pathway to greater opportunity and inclusion. This requires all of us to step up and consider the role we must play to defend equity and equality as essential American values.
Key Citations Referenced in Article
Transportation for America blog “Unflooding the zone: What do the Trump administration’s latest actions signal for transportation?” Corrigan Salerno, Transportation for America, February 5, 2025 (https://t4america.org/2025/02/05/unflooding-the-zone-what-do-the-trump-administrations-latest-actions-signal-for-transportation/)
US DOT FY2022-FY2026 Strategic Plan (https://www.transportation.gov/dot-strategic-plan)
US DOT Delivering Progress for America: 2021-2023 Report (http://tiny.cc/nk3d001)
US DOT Equity Action Plan, January 2022 (http://tiny.cc/dk3d001)
USDOT Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Equity Fact Sheet, 2024
(https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2024-11/Discretionary Grant KPI Public Summary Review 9.24.2024.pdf)
USDOT Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program (and Neighborhood Access and Equity Program) (https://www.transportation.gov/grants/reconnecting/about-rcp)
Household Transportation Costs 2022, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, USDOT (https://www.bts.gov/data-spotlight/household-cost-transportation-it-affordable)
USDOT Equitable Transportation Community (ETC) Explorer (https://sustainability-spatial-lens-tccd.hub.arcgis.com/pages/equitable-transportation-community-explorer)
USDOT Order, January 29, 2025 (https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-01/Signed DOT Order re_Ensuring Reliance Upon Sound Economic Analysis in Department of Transportation Policies Programs and Activities.pdf)
USDOT Policy Memorandum, January 29, 2025 (https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-01/Signed Secretarial Memo_ Implementation of Executive Orders Addressing Energy Climate Change Diversity and Gender.pdf)
Urban Institute: “DOT’s Plan to Distribute Funding by Birth and Marriage Rates Would Leave Communities Most In Need Behind,” Yonah Freemark and Lindiwe Rennert, UrbanWire, February 7, 2025 (https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/dots-plan-distribute-funding-birth-and-marriage-rates-would-leave-communities-most-need)
Mariia Zimmerman is Principal, MZ Strategies, LLC (formerly Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Policy, US Department of Transportation during the Biden Administration) Mariia@MZStrategies.com
