On August 29, the Trump Administration announced that they were canceling twelve Biden-era transportation grants for projects relating to offshore wind farms, freeing up $679 million for possible reassignment to other grants.

The grants were made by the Federal Highway Administration’s INFRA highway freight transportation program and the Maritime Administration’s Port Infrastructure Development Program.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said, “we are prioritizing real infrastructure improvements over fantasy wind projects that cost much and offer little.”

The projects in question are:

The difference between projects that are being “withdrawn” versus projects that are being “terminated” appears to be how far along they are in the grant agreement execution process. Prior to obligation, a grant offer may be withdrawn and the federal government keeps 100 percent of the money. After obligation, a grant can be terminated, and the federal government can keep whatever was not already spent.

Duffy’s announcement says that “Where possible, funding from these projects will be recompeted to address critical port upgrades and other core infrastructure needs of the United States.”

This is especially important for the big outlier on the grant list, the $427 million for the Humbolt, California port project. This was the second-biggest INFRA grant in the history of the program, and one of the ones farthest afield from the “getting rid of highway freight bottlenecks” focus that was the original justification for the INFRA program. If added to a future round of INFRA funding, it would increase the total amount of annual grants by one-third or more.

Here’s what ETW first said about the Humboldt Bay INFRA grant when it was announced, back in January 2024:

Humboldt County currently has no seaport, and for the economy that this county of 136,463 residents has today, they don’t really need one. (The county’s economic mainstay, the (fantastic) locally grown marijuana, is illegal to export.) But a real, developed seaport is necessary if this experimental $5 billion windfarm is going to be built, with hundreds of 800-foot-tall turbines floating, 20 miles offshore, loosely anchored to the ocean floor and pumping clean power back to shore via undersea cables. If the windfarm is to be built and maintained, the new port will be necessary, but if the windfarm dies the NIMBY/NEPA/CEQA lawsuit death that has claimed so many other proposed energy megaprojects, then the new seaport won’t be much use. (But the grant is a whopping $3,127 in federal funding per Humboldt County resident, so the construction money would definitely be felt in the local economy.)

The other projects, once formally canceled, can have their money added to future rounds of PIDP grants. (We checked, and the annual appropriations for PIDP for fiscal years 2021 through 2023 are available until expended, and the advance appropriations from the IIJA are available for ten years after the year they are first available, so there is no lapse problem.)

Descriptions of the canceled PIDP projects can be found, by fiscal year of award, here.

Speaking of the Port Infrastructure Development Program, next week the House is scheduled to consider the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) (bill text here), which also reauthorizes the Maritime Administration and makes changes to the PIDP.

Those changes are:

• Sec. 3511 of the bill would allow PIDP funds to be used to “upgrade or replace port cranes or parts of port cranes (including hardware and software)” that were installed, provided, maintained, or controlled by the People’s Republic of China or any of its government instrumentalities.
• Sec. 3512 of the bill clarifies that DOT is the lead agency for NEPA compliance under the Deepwater Ports Act and specifically allows DOT to write NEPA regulations under that law (since a federal court overturned the Council on Environmental Quality’s government-wide NEPA regs, every agency has to write regulations for themselves, if they have the legal authority).
• Sec. 3513 of the bill provides that, for fiscal 2026 grants only, projects to provide shore power at ports that serve both passenger and cargo vessels shall be eligible for PIDP grants.