On May 8, two full months after the fiscal 2024 DOT Appropriations Act was signed into law, the Federal Transit Administration finally revealed how much money the Act provided for each Capital Investment Grant project.

The Appropriations Committees used to list the funding allocations for each project in bill language or committee report language, but stopped doing so six years ago.

The project-by-project allocation of $3.3 billion in fiscal 2024 funding was released in an Excel spreadsheet by FTA on May 8. When compared with the Biden Administration’s FY 2024 budget request, there are a few discrepancies (though some can be explained).

The big difference is that the Honolulu rapid transit project has risen from the dead. After funding collapsed and construction was largely suspended seven years ago, partway through a $1.55 billion full funding grant agreement (FFGA) signed in 2012, local officials signed an amended FFGA three months ago to get funding flowing again.

This required some juggling of past and present funding. The Honolulu project had received $243.7 million back in fiscal 2017, but that funding had lapsed, so FTA decided to replace it with $243.7 in fiscal 2023 and 2024 funding. The space freed up in the old FY 2017 allocation was then given to Los Angeles Westside, with $165 million completely paying off the Phase 2 FFGA and the other $78.7 million newly supplementing the $75.3 billion in FY 2024 money given to Phase 3 of the project so far.

That still leaves the FY 2024 allocations well below the requested levels for Westside Phase 3, Minneapolis Southwest LRT, and Seattle Lynnwood Link. But there is still $509 million of the IIJA advance appropriation for 2024 remaining, unallocated, which could be used to get those projects very close to their requested amount.

(Also, let’s be clear – the way that FTA publishes funding allocations for CIG projects is very confusing. Each year’s appropriation is a separate Excel spreadsheet, which gets amended a few times over the life of the money, at which point the previous spreadsheet is no longer available so you can’t see what the changes were. But the only place where FTA publishes cumulative totals of how much money has already been provided for each CIG project, and how much the project will need in the future, is in the annual CIG report, and that was incomplete this year because it was submitted before the prior year appropriations were finalized. FTA may have reallocated past money for some projects, but the only way to find out is to download each year’s spreadsheet again, and this is the 8^th version of the FY 2017 allocation table that I have downloaded onto  my hard drive. Periodic public updates to the information given in Table 1 of the annual CIG report would be welcome.)

Looking beyond the projects that already have funding agreements, 2024 was the year that Congress started allocating significant money for some big ticket future projects that don’t have grant agreements yet – a whopping $700 million for the Hudson River Tunnel for New Jersey Transit (by way of Amtrak), $500 million for the BART extension into downtown San Jose, $350 million for the Chicago Red Line extension, and $317 million for the Salt Lake City Frontrunner core capacity enhancement.

Altogether, the proposed New Start and Core Capacity FFGAs funded in 2024 have a total federal cost share of $16.0 billion, with only $0.4 billion provided in prior years and $2.1 billion allocated so far in fiscal 2024. This leaves future Congresses to pick up the tab for $13.5 billion in costs for the commitments being made this cycle.