Transportation
US DOT Clears Third of Grant Award Backlog, Worth Nearly $10B
The largest construction grant in the latest batch of finalized awards is $127 million for Cincinnati to replace its Western Hills Viaduct.
Rendering courtesy city of Cincinnati
U.S. Dept. of Transportation staff finalized another 529 grant agreements from the “backlog” of 3,200 awards that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said had not been signed by the start of the Trump administration. Since the start of the push to review the grants, DOT staff have now cleared 1,065 agreements, about a third of the total, together worth nearly $10 billion, the agency announced June 10.
The department has cleared the grant awards “by refocusing the department on core infrastructure,” Duffy said in a statement. DOT staff have been removing requirements from the unfinalized grant agreements revolving around items such as environmental justice and diversity, equity and inclusion, which had previously been included as Biden administration policy, but not included by Congress as requirements when it funded the programs.
“With a third of the last administration’s unprecedented backlog cleared, we will continue to rip out red-tape roadblocks to get dirt moving,” Duffy said.
The awards come from a variety of grant programs administered by DOT’s different agencies, including the Federal Highway Administration, Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and others. The largest grant agreement from this latest batch to be finalized is $200 million to the Chicago Transit Authority for replacing railcars, records show.
The largest involving construction is a $127.1-million Nationally Significant Multimodal Freight & Highway Projects program award to the city of Cincinnati for its Western Hills Viaduct replacement project. The grant, which DOT officials awarded in 2022, will help the city replace an aging bridge that crosses a large railroad yard to connect the city’s downtown and west side with an extradosed bridge immediately south of the existing structure. City officials already selected T.Y. Lin International as the designer and Walsh Kokosing Joint Venture as construction manager at-risk. Work on the new bridge is expected to start next year for completion in 2030.
The majority of the newly finalized awards—337 out of the 529—are valued under $1 million.
Duffy previously spoke to lawmakers about the challenges of reviewing all the grant awards during a congressional hearing last month. He said that DOT uses 14 systems for tracking different grants, but that officials were working to consolidate them into one dashboard to improve ease and transparency.
DOT has also moved to cancel some grants. In April, Duffy announced that FRA terminated a $63.9-million grant to Amtrak for exploring the viability of a proposed Texas high-speed rail line. And earlier this month, FRA also proposed terminating $4 billion in grants for California high-speed rail.
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