Highway to Hell: Fed Infrastructure Funding, Even Under Biden, Has Been Terrible for the Environment

This story first appeared at Streetsblog USA.

A new analysis by Transportation for America shows that 70 percent of the money from the Biden administration’s signature infrastructure bill, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), funded car infrastructure projects, thanks largely (and perhaps obviously) to state Departments of Transportation. Transit and passenger rail projects represent about 20 percent of funding:

States poured so much money into roads, in large part, because of the way the Biden administration and Congress conceived of the law: About $200 billion of the $643 billion went into competitive grant programs that U.S. Department of Transportation can steer towards projects that lower emissions or advance other climate goals. But the rest is simply “formula” funding that flows directly to states without any strings attached.

“It absolutely is an indictment of how state DOTs spend money,” said Corrigan Salerno, a policy manager at Transportation for America. “In first two years of the IIJA, when the spigot of money was turned on, it was focused on shovel-ready projects — huge highway projects states were waiting on for years.

“Even in California, their priorities are pretty much aligned with the rest of the country: building more roads to attempt to accommodate more cars, to reduce congestion, and then, of course, failing decade after decade,” Salerno added.

Formula funds make up nearly 85% of IIJA award funding reported to USAspending.gov at time of analysis

Transportation for America’s analysis of IIJA projects evaluates a database of projects logged to USAspending.gov. This dataset includes information on the type of program projects were funded by. Formula fund awards represent 84% of analyzed funding in this report’s federal dataset, with discretionary grants (and other projects reported as funded by non-formula fund sources) making up only 16% of evaluated funding.

In one of the biggest tranches of funding analyzed for this report — roughly $54 billion in National Highway Performance Program funds — 42 percent of the funding helped expand road capacity, while just 36 percent went to highway resurfacing projects.

Even the $35.6-billion Surface Transportation Block Grant program — which is considered the most flexible formula funding because it allows states to fund almost any type of transportation project — put too much emphasis on cars, with 23 percent of funds spent on expanding roadways and only 7 percent on projects to make walking and biking safer or more viable options.

“States are not meeting the moment,” the report said. “The largest portions of federal transportation investments are undermining climate ambitions by prioritizing highway projects that will increase emissions and entrench the inherent inequities of car-dependent infrastructure.”

The report authors noted that the infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will expire in fall 2026 — potentially giving a new, transit-hostile administration an opening to pass an even worse bill.

In his first term, even President Trump’s discretionary grant program decisions largely favored rural road projects over urban transit, while the bulk of formula funding was spent by states in much the same way as it was under Biden: on autocentric projects. Meanwhile, the next House and Senate will likely be held by Republicans, whose track record on emissions and highway expansions is well documented and awful.

“We can expect very little to change unless Congress decides to take an entirely different approach to climate mitigation and resilience in the next transportation reauthorization when replacing the IIJA in 2026,” the report added.

Taken as a whole, the IIJA funding for new highways and wider roads could end up inducing the equivalent of more than 77 million metric tons of CO2e emissions above pre-IIJA baseline by 2040 — the equivalent of running 20 coal-fired power plants for a year.

On the plus side, the law provided states with additional flexibility to rein in transportation emissions if they so chose. The Georgetown Climate Center found that IIJA-funded projects could reduce or increase carbon-dioxide emissions by millions of metric tons through 2040, depending on decisions made by the state transportation agencies.

For now, the states that made the wrong choice included blue communities like California and Virginia, and red ones, like Texas and Florida. Though some states did the right thing — including those that vote GOP, like Montana and Wyoming.

Is your state spending the IIJA to reduce or increase GHG emissions?

The IIJA provided states flexibility to spend federal dollars in ways that could either reduce emission* (with investments in electrification, transit, walking, and biking) or produce emissions* (investments like highway widening that increase car usage and dependency)

For the most part, though, most states prioritized exactly what Congress allowed them to keep prioritizing: emission-intensive projects that enable more driving, like highway expansions and road widening.

“It’s useful to think of every new highway or new lane like a new fossil fuel power plant, guaranteeing emissions for years to come from the additional miles of driving each will induce,” the report said.

“These spending choices, even by states that tend to say the right things about the climate, are directly undoing the emissions reduction impact of other climate focused investments and initiatives,” the report concluded.

And the relatively small investments in transit and active transportation made as a result of the infrastructure law won’t offset nearly enough carbon: just 35.3 million cumulative tons of CO2e emissions. In other words, we are adding net greenhouse gases when the Biden administration says it wants to reduce them.

The report aims to encourage states to change their spending patterns, given that about half of the IIJA’s funding is still remaining.

“If states continue spending these infrastructure dollars in ways that prioritize expansion over maintenance, safety, improving access to opportunity, or providing other options for travel, there will be dire consequences for the climate,” the report said. “Unless these patterns change, we extrapolate that states’ federal formula-funded investments made over the course of the IIJA could cumulatively increase emissions by nearly 190 million metric tons of emissions over baseline levels through 2040 from added driving. This is the emission equivalent of nearly 50 coal-fired power plants running for a year.”

Changing that status quo might be a challenge, though, considering that even within discretionary grant programs, the Biden administration still granted money to unsustainable transportation — and the Trump administration will have the reins next.

Corrigan says no one should be optimistic that the next infrastructure law will do any better than the current one.

“Considering the composition of the House and Senate, I think we would definitely get a worse bill in terms of the impact on the climate,” said Salerno. “There will likely be cuts in transit and passenger rail, as well as electric vehicles. And, as we saw in the first Trump administration, many of the same multimodal grant programs were dedicated to road widenings and highway expansions and those sort of projects that center only mobility for cars. I think we’ll see the discretionary grants be made in a very different way under President Trump than under President Biden.”

So it’s up to the states.

“The law gives states the opportunity to lead here,” Salerno said. “I’m cautiously optimistic. We’ve seen some positive things out of Illinois and Maryland recently. The IIJA can be used for good. It’s up to us as advocates to keep saying it.”