The U.S. Department of Transportation has ordered state officials to scrutinize all projects that received federal grant spending over the past four years on bike lanes, electric vehicle charging stations and other “green infrastructure,” with an eye toward potentially canceling any project that doesn’t align with the Trump administration’s goals.
The order, which came in a memo to state transportation agencies last week, is the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration to revoke Biden-era spending and policies on climate-related projects.
“The focus of this review is to identify project scope and activities that are allocating funding to advance climate, equity and other priorities counter to the Administration’s Executive Orders,” reads the memo, which was first shared by Yonah Freemark, a researcher with the Urban Institute.
The memo, which seeks to review projects funded beginning in fiscal year 2022, further defines activities considered contrary to President Donald Trump’s executive orders that could lead to projects being “canceled entirely.” They include bikeways such as recreational trails and shared-use paths, electric vehicles and charging networks, and climate change, environmental justice, equity and gender-specific activities.
Last week, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy rescinded Biden-era memos that he said compelled state agencies to figure a “social justice and environmental agenda” into infrastructure project decisions, which he said was “an attempt to push a radical social and environmental agenda on the American people.”
Local officials weren’t sure if the memo was even legal.
U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Everett, the ranking Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said he understands that new administrations get to spend federal dollars in a way that aligns with their policies and priorities. What he doesn’t understand is how Duffy — whom he knows from their shared time in Congress, and has talked to extensively in recent weeks about what they jointly call “the green stuff” — expects to claw back “dollars that (are) already obligated and being spent.”
“New administrations get to do things. I get that. For the dollars that aren’t obligated, and haven’t been spent, I fully expected the Department of Transportation to change conditions of new projects,” Larsen said, noting that Duffy instructed his department to give preference in awarding grants to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average. “But to focus on bike and pedestrian infrastructure as some sort of dog whistle for fighting climate change (policies) is totally off the mark.”
Larsen said he’s sent Duffy’s memo to the Congressional Research Service “to get some eyes on it from an objective legal analysis perspective, to see if it’s legal” to rescind federal funding that’s “signed, sealed, delivered.”
Regardless, Larsen said the action to revoke years of grant spending could accelerate the trend of increasing deaths and serious injuries on the nation’s roadways, which he called a “national epidemic.”
Statewide, 810 people were killed in crashes involving a motor vehicle in 2023, a 33-year high, and 40,990 people died on U.S. roads.
“There’s a strict federal interest in preventing these deaths,” Larsen said.
