When President Trump submitted his 2026 budget request last spring, the Transportation Department was spared much of the budget cutting that faced other agencies. But there were some significant departures from the norm requested for DOT in the 2026 appropriations process. This article looks at how the Trump Administration’s biggest proposals in the 2026 DOT budget process fared once Congress completed the process and the President signed the bill into law.

As the old saying goes: the President proposes, but then Congress disposes.

Congressional earmarks – This was the most predictable outcome of all. Because FY 2025 was funded under a year-long stopgap continuing resolution, there were no earmarked projects for legislators in the 2025 cycle. The Trump budget for 2026 requested zero money for earmarks, but the Administration knew full well that Congress would disregard this request and earmark as much as they felt comfortable with. Fighting it would only come back to bite the Administration in areas of policy that they cared about much more than they cared about earmarks. The final 2026 law earmarks almost $2.4 billion in USDOT appropriations for projects designated by legislators.

IIJA advance appropriations – The 2026 budget request proposed to rescind or cancel nearly $4.1 billion of appropriations already provided by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, the IIJA, for the NEVI electric vehicle charging infrastructure grant program. The savings would be used to lower the overall cost of the 2026 bill.

Even amongst Republican legislators who shared the Trump Administration’s anti-EV sentiment, this was a non-starter because budget law prohibits the use of rescissions of emergency appropriations (like the IIJA advances) from being used to offset new regular, non-emergency appropriations (like the 2026 bill). Result: the final bill contains no rescissions of IIJA advances at all.

However, the final bill does repurpose over $2.3 billion of IIJA advance appropriations for other purposes, including $879 million from the NEVI program. As a result, the final bill was able to reduce new General Fund discretionary appropriations in various places and replace that money with repurposed IIJA advances.

So the final result was that the overall Administration idea of using IIJA money to lower net cost of the 2026 appropriations bill was kept, but the extent, and the mechanism, were both significantly different than the Administration proposed.

Rescission of contract authority – This was another procedural non-starter. The Administration had proposed to rescind mandatory contract authority provided by the IIJA out of the Highway Trust Fund (nearly $1.6 billion) for electric charging and alternative fuel corridors and use that savings to lower the net discretionary cost of the appropriations bill.

This would be a violation of House and Senate rules because it is substantive legislation (amending an authorization law) on an appropriations bill – but Congress has gotten much less strict about enforcing that no-no in recent years. More importantly, the Administration proposal would have upset the balance of power within Congress by strengthening the Appropriations Committees and weakening the authorizing committees, and neither side in Congress had any stomach for reopening that.

(From the mid-1980s to mid-2000s, House Appropriations and House Transportation and Infrastructure fought each other like cats and even grumpier cats over this kind of thing, until a truce was reached about 15 years ago, since which time Appropriations stopped making significant contract authority rescissions without the permission of the authorizing committee.)

More importantly, because this rescission would be happening in the last year of the authorization law (2026), it would force the downwards adjustment of the budget baseline for the federal-aid highway program by $15.7 billion ($1.567 billion per year times ten years, FY 2027-2036), which would have created a whole host of problems for the reauthorization bill. The final 2026 law did not rescind any contract authority.

OST RAISE grants –  This program used to get between $500 million and a billion dollars per year in new appropriations from Congress. Since the IIJA provided an additional $1.5 billion per year over 2022-2026 on top of Congress’s annual appropriations, the annual amount has dwindled down to $345 million in 2025.

The Administration requested to zero out the annual portion of the program’s funding; Congress responded by lowering the new appropriation down to $145 million, meeting the Trump Administration about halfway, which can be considered a normal outcome.

OST Essential Air Service – The discretionary portion of this program to pay airlines to serve uneconomical routes to small rural airports got $450 million last year. The Administration requested to cut that down to $142 million in exchange for the enactment of future reforms which (a) would probably not be in Appropriations Committee jurisdiction and (b) were never fleshed out by the Administration.

At the end of the day, the amount of appropriation needed to serve the eligible cities in 2026 was $514 million, and that’s what the appropriators gave EAS in the final bill.

(Ed. Note: The House Appropriations staffer who had this account around 20 years ago told me that if Republicans really wanted deficit reduction, he could find accounts in the THUD bill where you can cut ten times as much money than you would save by killing EAS, with a fraction of the vote-getting difficulty in Congress.)

FAA Operations – This account is, by far, the biggest discretionary budget account at DOT. Last year it represented 53 percent of gross total discretionary appropriations provided by the bill for DOT. More than half. And Congress always adheres very closely to the budget request on this one, because that account mostly represents the salaries and benefits of air traffic controllers and safety inspectors.

This year, the Administration requested $13.842 million, and Congress provided 99 percent of that requested amount, or $13.710 billion.

FAA Facilities and Equipment – For this one, the Administration requested a significant increase, to an even $4.0 billion. The House version of the 2026 bill actually tried to exceed this by $1 billion, but while Congress was developing the appropriations bill, they also passed the budget reconciliation bill, and that bill provided an additional $12.6 billion for this cause outside the annual appropriations process.

The final bill provides a $4 billion discretionary appropriation, precisely the amount requested by the Administration in this bill.

FHWA Highway Infrastructure Programs – The Administration requested $770 million in General Fund appropriations for this account, which supplements the bulk of FHWA spending that is carried out through the Highway Trust Fund. Congress appropriated $881 million in non-earmarked funding, which looks on its face like a victory for the Administration. However, the Administration wanted all $770 million to go towards beefing up the existing INFRA grant program, but Congress only dedicated $200 million of the $881 million to INFRA (and all of that $200 million was specifically to make INFRA grants for truck parking facilities). Instead, the rest of the $881 million goes for a version of the old Jack Reed bridge program ($350 million), federal lands and Indian roads ($200 million), and a bunch of odds and ends.

FRA Amtrak accounts – The FY 2026 budget was unusual because, as ETW noted, over the last few decades, the amount of money that the Federal Railroad Administration requests as part of the federal budget on Amtrak’s behalf has almost always been very different from the amount of money that Amtrak requests for itself through its separate budget transmission. For example, just one year ago, FRA requested $2.5 billion on Amtrak’s behalf but Amtrak went ahead and requested $4.0 billion.

This year, however, the FRA and Amtrak budget requests were completely synchronized – a total of $2.427 billion, which is basically a freeze at the overall 2025 enacted level, except that the Northeast Corridor money is reduced to $850 million and the National Network money is increased to $1.577 million. The final appropriations bill meets this request to the dollar, in large part because of the unanimity between Amtrak and FRA and what it means for Amtrak supporters in Congress.

FTA Capital Investment Grants – Like RAISE grants, this account also gets a significant amount of money directly from the IIJA ($1.6 billion per year). In 2025, the program was on autopilot and the CR gave them the same $2.2 billion in new money the program recived the year before. However, 2025 turned out to be a slow year for new project applications, while the IIJA advances were being spent to pay off multi-year grant agreements ahead of schedule.

The result was that $373 million of unused FY 2005 appropriations is still available, so the final bill programs that money and the $1.6 billion in FY 2026 IIJA advances and a new appropriation of just $1.7 billion for a program total of almost $3.7 billion, which is just $132 million below the program total requested by the Trump Administration. In terms of actual program size, Congress gave the Administration 96.5 percent of what it wanted.