Critics of this legislation claim that it is not a “clean CR” (with “clean” defined as “free from changes to last year’s policy and funding), and while that may be true of the legislation as a whole, the Transportation-HUD section actually is pretty clean.

Let’s start with what’s not in it. For starters: no report language, and thus no “PPAs” (program, project, and activity funding levels delineated within an account) unless prescribed in the text of the law itself. While program line-items written in law within an account are legion for the Highway Trust Fund programs (written into authorization statutes, like the IIJA), they are rare these days for appropriated programs. At USDOT, the PPAs that were designated in the FY 2024 law, and thus carry over into FY 2025 in the CR, are:

• The individual office budget levels within the Office of the Secretary;
• The ARPA-I level and the $8 million research quasi-earmark in the OST-R account;
• The Interagency Infrastructure Permitting Improvement Center budget within the OST Transportation Planning, Research, and Development account;
• The seven major activities in FAA Operations (except that the CR increases the Air Traffic Organization and Aviation Safety activity levels) and the contract tower amount;
• The payroll amount of the FAA Facilities & Equipment appropriation and the terminal facilities amount (changed by section 11303(3) of the CR);
• The admin, research, SCAS, and TFAS set-aside levels in the Airport Improvement Program;
• A bunch of specific activities in the Highway Infrastructure Programs and Transit Infrastructure Grants accounts that we will delineate below;
• The breakdown of the FMCSA and NHTSA grant accounts by program, as authorized in the IIJA;
• The National Driver Register funding level;
• The levels of the Northeast Corridor Commission and State-Supported Route Commission within the Amtrak appropriations;
• The $40 million quasi-earmark for Chicago Union Station within Amtrak’s National Network appropriation;
• The set-aside for the expedited delivery pilot in the FTA Capital Investment Grants account;
• A set-aside for the seaway infrastructure program at the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway; and
• The usual PPA levels at the Maritime Administration’s operational accounts.

That’s it. The remainder of the report language from the usual House and Senate committee reports, and the all-important conference report (or the joint explanatory statement when there was no formal House-Senate conference) does not apply to the CR. Instead, agencies are instructed to produce a PPA-level spending plan and submit the plans to the Appropriations Committees within 45 days of the bill’s enactment (sec. 1113).

This caused some heartburn amongst Democrats who are already upset at the leeway that President Trump and Elon Musk are already taking to reduce spending in violation of the PPA levels and instructions from the FY 2024 appropriations acts. Now that those (somewhat extralegal) line items don’t apply at all, who knows how much FY 2025’s eventual priorities will differ from FY 2024. This is why people such as Senate Appropriations ranking member Patty Murray (D-WA) were calling the legislation a “slush fund CR” this morning – because it leaves the programming of each individual appropriation up to the executive branch. In addition, another thing that Democrats wanted is not in the CR – any kind of legal language restricting the President’s ability to impound funds, beyond any laws currently on the books. (Murray and other Senate Democrats, back in 2007, voted for a year-long CR that gave the same “slush fund” authority to George W. Bush.)

Another thing that’s not in the CR: earmarks. Section 1111 of the CR is clear: “Any language specifying an earmark in an appropriations Act for fiscal year 2024, or in a committee report or joint explanatory statement accompanying such an Act, shall have no legal effect with respect to funds appropriated by this division. For purposes
of this section, the term ‘‘earmark’’ means a congressional earmark, community project funding, or congressionally directed spending item, as defined in clause 9(e) of rule XXI of the Rules of the House of Representatives and paragraph 5(a) of rule XLIV of the Standing Rules of the Senate.”

Just within the Transportation-HUD bill, the “Congressionally Designated Projects” totaled $6.05 billion in 2024, $3.3 billion at HUD and $2.76 billion at DOT. Section 11301 of the CR reduces the FY25 appropriations for those earmarked accounts by the amounts of the FY24 earmarks.

And one final thing that’s not in the CR: rescissions. Section 1101(a)(12) is the part of the CR that actually makes the appropriations, reiterating every item in the FY 2024 THUD law, by reference, except for “sections 108, 109B, 119G, 125, 154, 165, 171, and 236” which were rescissions of prior-year funding, most of which is no longer there to rescind again. And section 11304 eliminates three other rescissions at the Maritime Administration that were not in numbered general provisions.

What is in the bill?

(Click here to download our account-level summary tables and some other helpful tabular data for the bill.)

Globally, a total of about $1.63 trillion in new appropriations, excluding emergencies are in  the bill. This is about $12.9 billion more than enacted in 2024 once all of the account-level “anomaly” changes and other changes are accounted for.

At the Transportation-HUD Subcommittee, this looks like a $3.1 billion reduction from 2024, but that is because they get rid of $6.05 billion in earmarks and $367 million in rescissions, part of which is canceled out by $546 billion in funding increases for certain programs.

In addition, the obligation limitations on trust fund contract authority programs have been increased to their proper 2025 level instead of being frozen, which will allow an additional $2.16 billion in new federal spending obligations to take place during 2025.

Breaking those changes down at DOT at the account level, the only two discretionary anomalies were for Essential Air Service subsides and FAA Operations:

Overall at DOT, the full-year CR provides a total of $25.4 billion of gross new discretionary appropriations, which is $1.9 billion less than in 2024 and $237 million less than President Biden’s budget request. The only significant upwards appropriations change at DOT is FAA Operations, an especially sensitive account since the deadly crash at Reagan National Airport almost two months ago, where

Congress is giving the FAA the budget increases for air traffic control and safety that the Biden Administration asked for one year ago. Unhelpfully, the FY 2025 budget request for the FAA was released before the FY 2024 appropriations bill was finished, so it bases its increases over the FY 2023 totals. FY 2025, they asked for a $1.69 billion increase in the Operations account over 2023, with $1.55 billion being non-policy. Most of the latter was the massive 5.2 percent inflation-based pay increase from 2024, which was also annualized into 2025. But $39 million in 2024 and $43 million in 2025 was for the air traffic controller hiring “surge,” and the Secretary is committed to meeting or exceeding that level.

The CR appropriations $340.5 million for miscellaneous highway programs and $45.6 million for miscellaneous mass transit programs, out of the General Fund, all of which are repeats from last year, as follows:

The $50 million for the formula bridge program at FHWA will once again be matched by $200 million transferred from the TIFIA contract authority program to the same bridge program, as happened in 2024. But between then and now, the 2024 WRDA bill transferred an additional $1.8 billion in TIFIA contract authority to the regular federal-aid highway formulas. That adds up to $2.2 billion transferred out of the TIFIA program in just over a year.

No one outside DOT is quite sure exactly how much TIFIA funding is left. This new $200 million transfer will almost completely eliminate the new funding provided for TIFIA by the IIJA for 2025 ($250 million gross, lopped off by the annual obligation limitation to around $200 million. The list of projects expecting TIFIA loans in 2025 is now long and getting longer.