Today is April 25, meaning it has been 40 days since President Trump signed the full-year appropriations bill for fiscal year 2025 into law (Public Law 119-4). But the U.S. Department of Transportation has not yet released the full-year amounts of formula funding for highway and transit funding provided by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 (IIJA), even as warm-weather construction season gets underway in many states.

Because of the significant delay in getting a full-year appropriations bill enacted, the Department was forced to give out partial-year funding authority earlier in the fiscal year – a Federal Highway Administration notice distributing 45.2 percent of the formula highway funding, and Federal Transit Administration partial-year apportionments distributing 45.2 percent of the mass transit formula funding. In both instances, the expiration date of the money was March 14.

This means states and localities are still waiting for 54.8 percent of their highway and transit formula money for FY 2025, which totals about $38.5 billion.

In previous years, FHWA and FTA were able to get the money out more quickly than 40 days, sometimes much more quickly.

Rumors abound that some of the delay this time may be due to the large volume of USDOT employees who took the second “Fork in the Road” delayed retirement opportunity, particularly at the Federal Transit Administration. POLITICO had a good article on this two days ago, headlined “DOT invited more people to resign. Now it’s scrambling to keep some of them.”