This week, the Federal Highway Administration started the New Year by giving $61 billion in highway formula funding to the 50 state DOTs and the District of Columbia. The formal apportionment notices were signed on October 2.

Five different funding apportionment notices were issued on October 2:

• N4510.880 which apportioned $54.6 billion in Highway Trust Fund contract authority to states and D.C. for nine separate formula programs.
• N4510.881 which then took back and canceled $36.4 million of the National Highway Performance Program funding provided in the previous notice because of budget sequestration.
• N4510.882 which apportioned $5.3 billion in general fund advance appropriations for the formula bridge program.
• N4510.883 which apportioned $885 million in general fund advance appropriations for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure formula program.
• N4510.884 which apportioned $246 million in general fund advance appropriations for the Appalachian Development Highway System formula program.

(The general fund Formula Bridge and NEVI notices also apportioned funding to Puerto Rico, whereas on the Trust Fund side, Puerto Rico gets allocated funding, not formula funding.)

Once upon a time, the Trust Fund highway formulae were based on real-world factors that changed each year, like VMT, population estimates, road lane-miles in service, updated bridge repair costs, air quality measurements, etc. But now that the formulae are simply political, it is not surprising that every the amount given to every state, and every subdivision of program funding within that state, is precisely the way that FHWA predicted it in the estimate they gave to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on May 21, 2021.

The only thing that could possibly have changed the outcome was if any state triggered the 95 percent rate-of-return trigger on the cash amount of its tax contributions to the Highway Account of the Highway Trust Fund. But the bipartisan infrastructure law (the IIJA) increased spending from the Trust Fund so much that there are no more donor states, so for the third year in a row, not even Texas can trigger the 95 percent rule, and the apportionments are unchanged from their original predictions.

States are still not free to utilize all of that money. The Trust Fund contract authority is subject to the obligation limitation pro-rated in the continuing appropriations law signed by President Biden on September 30, which is 13.11 percent of a full-year amount at fiscal 2023 levels. We should see a formal notice from FHWA distributing that obligation limitation to states within a week.

The total amounts from all the notices given to states and D.C. are below.