New U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy faced Congress for the first time as Secretary this week, before a hearing held by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

The nominal title of the hearing was “Constructing the Surface Transportation Reauthorization Bill,” but the hearing rarely delved into any specifics. New chairman Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) did outline her three principles for a reauthorization bill:

1. Improve safety and reliability of America’s surface transportation network with impactful investments.
2. Reforming and modernizing federal programs and policies to increase efficiency.
3. Addressing the variety of surface transportation needs across all states.

All politics being local, many of the questions posed to Duffy by the Senators involved not the upcoming reauthorization bill but the fate of projects funded by the last authorization law (the 2021 IIJA) and selected by the last Administration.

Duffy told the panel that when he took office, he inherited over 3,200 projects from various competitive grant programs that had been selected and announced by the Biden Administration but which did not yet have project agreements negotiated and signed. This means that the money for those projects is not legally obligated and, technically speaking, the Trump Administration is free to cancel any and all of them.

Duffy assured Senators that canceling or delaying those projects was not his intention, but refused to take much of the blame for delays in project agreement executing since 1/20/2025 when those projects had been languishing, in some cases, since 2022.

“It’s easy to blow the kazoo and send up the balloons when you announce a project. The hard work is actually doing the grant agreement,” Duffy said.

Around 30 percent of those unobligated projects were what Duffy called “midnight awards” – projects announced by the Biden Administration after the November 2024 elections but before 1/20/2025. Duffy pointed out that these awards, totaling almost $9 billion, were significantly more than the 103 awards made between the 2020 elections and President Biden’s inaugural.

(Ed. Note: Sec. Duffy missed an opportunity here. Whenever a Senator complained about x number of awarded-but-unobligated projects in their state, Duffy could have asked the Senator to send him a list of the projects, prioritized in the order that the Senator wanted DOT to vet and approve them. Given that some of these projects have been delayed for years already, this would have put the requesting Senators on the spot as much as DOT.)

In response to questions about the memo sent from the Secretary’s office to other DOT offices on March 11 requiring that unobligated projects be vetted for compliance with “current Administration priorities and Executive Orders” in order to pull out certain environmental and DEI associations, Duffy told Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) was to make sure that project costs were not inflated, nor construction timelines delayed, by extralegal DEI/green requirements that were in Biden Administration NOFOs but were not directly supported by the text of the law itself.

Shortly before the hearing, Duffy announced the first Trump II-era obligation of new project agreement – $221million to replace the Washington Bridge in Whitehouse’s home state of Rhode Island. (Duffy told the hearing that was actually chairman Capito who had called him about the Ocean State project.) Duffy also told Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) that two Golden State project agreements, in Madera and Otay Mesa, are ready to go, for a total of three Democratic projects and no Republican projects (yet).

Duffy also said that personnel cutbacks have not impacted how DOT processes grant agreements, and noted that DOT has more personnel on-hand today than they did when Joe Biden took office. (However, Duffy did not explicitly say that the RIF cuts to come would not slow grant processing.)

Other Senators who primarily wanted to talk about their local projects included Jeff Merkley (D-OR, Hood River Bridge and Pacific Coast Intermodal Port), Alex Padilla (D-CA, L.A. Olympics), John Curtis (R-UT, Frontrunner), Mark Kelly (D-AZ, 22^nd Street Bridge in Tucson), and Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE, Wilmington RAISE grant).

Policy-related statements of note made by Sec. Duffy at the hearing included:

Air traffic control – Duffy told Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) that a package of new spending for air traffic control upgrades was in progress – he said he has shared the proposal with the President and was trying to “pressure test the cost” before sending it to the Hill.

Bicycles – In a dialogue with Merkley about SSR4A projects that increase bike capacity (a no-no for some traditional highway-oriented Republicans), Duffy said that Congress was clear when writing the law and if the law is oriented towards bicycle projects, he will abide by the will of Congress. He added that bikes are healthy and, in some instances, can move people faster than cars.

Mass transit CIG projects – Sen. Padilla tried to ask Duffy about how he will administer the Capital Investment Grants program, except that Padilla and Duffy had talked on the phone the day before about the California high-speed rail project (different mode, different project), and Duffy mostly answered as if that was the topic, and Padilla didn’t follow up properly.

EV charging – Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) criticized the NEVI program, which Duffy has halted, pending the issuance of new guidance to states. Duffy said that the Biden-era guidance clearly was not working, and that he was going to issue new guidance that would work, whether he agreed with the program or not.

Truck parking – This is one of the most-mentioned items at Congressional hearings so far this year, and Duffy committed to supporting more funding for truck parking spaces in the next reauthorization bill.

Project delivery – Everyone mentioned the need to shorten the amount of time taken by federal permitting, but there was no consensus about who should do what, when.