This week, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy made the Secretary’s annual pilgrimage to the Congressional Appropriations Committees to defend the annual budget request made by the President on behalf of his Department. Unfortunately, the only budget request made by President Trump so far is a 44-page “skinny budget” that included only a handful of numbers relating to the Transportation Department.

With that and some reporting, here is all that we know about the Budget for USDOT so far:

With such a measly list of specifics to defend, Duffy’s May 14 hearing before the House Transportation-HUD Appropriations Subcommittee and his May 15 hearing before the Senate counterpart subcommittee fell out in predictable ways.

For example, every legislator knew better than to ask where the $1.2 billion in DOT cuts to be named later will come from, because no White House ever lets Cabinet Secretaries talk about that kind of thing. But the basic math indicates that the cuts will probably come from mass transit and rail programs. So both Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) and Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), a former chairman of the Senate subcommittee, asked Secretary Duffy about the Federal Transit Administration’s Capital Investment Grant program, the biggest single account from where those cuts could come.

However, neither questioner got it quite right, at least not for a relative novice like Duffy. Rep. Espaillat did not specify the FTA’s “CIG” program, and since all federal DOT grants that are not for operating subsidies or planning activities are for some kind of “capital investment.” Duffy answered the same question he always gets, which is that he intends to fulfill all the existing obligations that his Administration inherited.

But the FTA CIG program is unique in that its grant agreements are not legally binding obligations. Instead, they are extra-legal promises that DOT will try to get Congress to make future appropriations to pay off future installments of a planned grant. Except that DOT has no power to make Congress do that. No one has yet put Secretary Duffy properly on the spot to commit to getting OMB to request and apportion future appropriations to fulfill projects that have signed “full funding grant agreements” even though those agreements are not legally binding on Secretary Duffy or the Department.

Sen. Reed actually listed the CIG projects that currently have signed grant agreements and will be expecting more new appropriations in FY 2026 and future years – the Hudson River Tunnel, Phase 2 of the Second Avenue Subway, what’s left of Phase 3 of the Los Angeles Red Line, the Lynnwood Link in Seattle, and the Chicago Red Line extension grant agreement signed days before President Trump retook office. Again, Duffy expressed support for fulfilling obligations, but CIG projects are a lot more than that.

And no one has yet phrased the more forward-looking question for Sec. Duffy properly. As of this month’s CIG Scorecard shows, there are at least another dozen large CIG projects in line that will want new grant agreements promising over $21 billion in new federal appropriations over the next few years. Will OMB and Duffy allow these projects to move forward, sign agreements, and then promise and request that money, most of which will have to be paid after the Trump Administration leaves office?

CIG, as noted above, was swept up in the larger issue of grant reviews. Duffy again pegged the number of orphan grant applications he had inherited (where the Biden Administration had selected a grantee and put out a press release, but the time-consuming legal contract work of negotiating a project agreement remained undone as of January 20) at 3,200 and said that they are finally making good progress in removing the extralegal requirements in earlier Notices of Funding Opportunity under the previous Administration. (“Extralegal” does not mean illegal, it means a requirement or criteria in addition to those specifically required by the law.)

To get an idea of how the judging of grant applications has changed abruptly, see this article elsewhere in today’s ETW on how FTA has taken the annual bus NOFO from 12,350 words to 5,500 words, largely by getting rid of verbiage and requirements not specifically required by law.

Duffy told both panels that he hoped that these reviews would eventually lead to shorter applications, fewer person-hours spent by local government to fill out applications, thus more money for actual construction and less going to the “consultant class” that thrives on overcomplexity.

The subject of air traffic control was on the minds of many members. Duffy had to reiterate several times that the Trump Administration has not laid off or fired any air traffic controllers (though at some point, the safety benefits of x system repairmen equal the safety benefits of one controller, it’s just a question of where x is). And he pointed out that the specific problems of the design of DC-area airspace, and the personnel and equipment woes of Newark, predated this iteration of the Trump Administration by months or years.

He drew praise from both panels for the Administrations’ air traffic controller recruitment/retention initiative and for the willingness to think outside the box and request a massive, transformational amount of money up front for ATC equipment and facility upgrades. But again, Duffy is handicapped by OMB, which so far has refused to identify a specific amount of money or a structure for the initiative, or even to endorse the specifics of the partial funding levels in the House budget reconciliation bill. (The number of $30 billion in total was mentioned by committee members but Duffy said he could not vouch for that.)

However, when Senate Appropriations chairman Susan Collins (R-ME) asked Duffy to work with the committee on getting emergency funding for the ATC problem (and remember, the emergency designation was used to pay for all of those five-year advance appropriations in the IIJA), Duffy said that he could not commit to a specific vehicle but that he did want some kind of advance appropriations, perhaps with quarterly updates to the committees on how the funding is being implemented.

(Ed. Note: Whether he knows it or now, Duffy is on the right track here. The emergency designation that Collins was referring to is a bad fit for something like this, because the law says that a bona fide emergency has to be “unanticipated,” which means “sudden, which means quickly coming into being or not building up over time,” and “unforeseen, which means not predicted or anticipated as an emerging need.” None of that applies to the ATC problem, which we have all seen coming for the last couple of decades. Some other kind of structure outside the regular, annual budget process is needed to allow ATC revitalization funding to happen all at once, generally speaking, without abusing the emergency designation, or the English language, further.)

Regarding ATC, Duffy also told the committees that he:

• hoped to meet this year’s target of 2,000 new controllers, and then get to 2,200 or 2,300 next year, use up-front retention bonuses to keep controllers from retiring after 25 years, and potentially get Congress to offer monetary grants to colleges and universities to buy the expensive simulation equipment necessary to train controllers;
• thought that speeding up medical checks and other entry issues would shorten the 18 month time gap from acceptance to start date at the Academy;
• thought it was a good idea to use tutoring to try and lower the “washout rate” at the Academy down from its current 35 percent down to around 25 percent and get an extra couple of hundred controllers a year that way; and
• responded favorably to Sen. Jerry Moran’s (R-KS) suggestion that Congress adopt his bill forcing Army helicopters to keep ADS-B “on” during all training flights and only be able to turn it off during genuine emergencies. Duffy did add that in order to do that, the ADS-B broadcast activation needs to be a simple one-switch on/off operation and said it may not be that easy on Army helicopters at present.

Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) asked a question about the specifics of the demographics of Census tracts that have higher-than-average marriage or childbirth rates. The Administration has issued an order that, where possible, areas with higher than average marriage and childbirth rates are to be given favorable treatment in grant selection. Quigley cited recent studies indicating that those areas tend to be more car-dependent and have a slightly higher income, all things considered, than areas with lower rates. Quigley thought that this would encourage too much highway development at the expense of mass transit development.

Duffy said the he thought of it as being predictive, and going where the children are would be addressing future transportation needs before they happened. But he said he would talk with Quigley about it, and a more complete public airing of this topic might be useful.

Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), ranking minority member of the committee, spent most of his time defending the practice of what he called “DEI” programs over the last 75 years, going back to the Tuskegee Airmen and other responses to Jim Crow-era de jure discrimination. He then raised an interesting point, even if he did not phrase it ideally – logically, if one follows the Trump Administration’s line of reasoning against all things “DEI” to their logical conclusion, it would bode poorly for the related “DBE” (disadvantaged business enterprise) contracting set-aside in federal transportation law.

The DBE rule for highway and transit projects has never been codified in title 23  of the U.S. Code – instead, Congress reauthorizes it on a bill-by-bill basis, right up front in the very first section of each bill where the authorization levels are. The IIJA’s DBE language is right up there in section 11101(e) of the law and says that 10 percent of all highway and transit contracting money has to be spent through small businesses (under $26.3 million in gross receipts per year) “owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals” (racial minorities, women, veterans, and others defined in section 8(d) of the Small Business Act.

But that 10 percent DBE set-aside is “Except to the extent that the Secretary determines otherwise…” And no one has yet gotten a good public answer from Duffy on how the Trump Administration DEI attitude affects its DBE intentions. (Clyburn did cite the Supreme Court’s Adarand v Pena decision, which proves he was thinking about DOT’s DBE programs, but Adarand was one of those ureadable messes where Sandra Day O’Connor and Tony Kennedy wrote an opinion, three conservatives joined in part and four liberals dissented in part, and you have to dig through to find three sentences scattered across the opinion that are actually controlling.)

Most of the rest of the hearing involved legislators trying to make Duffy aware of the specific pet projects and needs of their states or districts.