Since President Trump first began issuing executive orders against “diversity, equity and inclusion,” governments across the country have feared for the future of their most vulnerable communities. Many federal transportation laws, though, actually require the DEI-despising administration to put “underserved” areas first in grant-making decisions — leaving many to wonder how they’ll define that term, and who will get left out.
When Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, both bills directed U.S. DOT to favor “underserved” communities and populations for awards in certain grant programs — so much so that the adjective appears a whopping 59 times throughout the two pieces of legislation. “Equity,” meanwhile, appears 80 times, while “sustainability” and “sustainable” appear a collective total of 119 times.
But Congress didn’t clearly define any of those words — even in programs like the Neighborhood Access and Equity Grant Program, which includes one of the Trump administration’s trigger words right in the name. And as that hostile administration takes the reins, communities have more questions than answers about what the future of these discretionary programs will look like.
”How is this administration going to prioritize projects?” asks Caron Whitaker of the League of American Bicyclists. “Are they going to go based on the safety need? Are they going to go based on what type of community is it? Are they going to award implementation projects based on what kind of community it is? We still don’t know.”
Safe Streets and Roads for Whom?
That ambiguity is proving to be particularly problematic in the Safe Streets and Roads for All program, for which the Trump administration just began accepting its first applications. And that largely comes down to the grant’s unusual structure.
With $5 billion devoted to road safety efforts across five years, Safe Streets and Roads for All is really two grant programs in one: a planning grant program, which pays for communities across America to develop “safety action plans” and test out key projects from those plans on a temporary basis, as well as an implementation grant program, in which previous recipients of those planning grants can win cash to make projects permanent. And on both sides of that coin, “underserved communities” are supposed to be the first in line for funding.
In what some advocates considered to be a tactical error, though, Congress required a whopping 40 percent of the Safe Streets and Roads for All pot to be devoted to planning grants every single year — and because planning work is a lot cheaper than actually building things, virtually every community that applies for planning money tends to get it, whether it is underserved or not.
The Biden Administration smoothed the path for applicants by offering technical assistance to underserved areas, making it possible for hundreds of communities that had never received a federal grant before to win under the new program.
“Basically, if a community could write two pages about why a safety plan was important to them, the U.S. DOT was reaching out and helping them with all the rest,” said Whitaker. “And so that gave those communities confidence to be able to do it — even low-capacity communities that don’t have transportation departments.”
Today, the majority of U.S. residents live in regions that have safety action plans in place, and those regions are acutely aware of where they have work to do to save lives — and they’re also newly eligible for Safe Streets and Roads for All implementation grants, which get 60 percent of the money but which is typically divided between less than 70 projects a year. That means more than one-thousand local applicants are now waiting in the wings to build, especially if their state DOT isn’t eager or able to fund the safety projects that they now know they badly need.
“This program is really the only place right now they can go for implementation,” said Whitaker. “What are we going to do now with these 1,600 or so communities that have plans for safety projects? How are they going to get it funded? Some of them will be able to work with their state DOT, but a lot of [those DOTs] are going to be overwhelmed by the number of plans and projects that are getting into that queue. It’s gonna be difficult.”
Advocates and applicants expect the “underserved community” requirement to play a major role in how Trump administration officials sort out that logjam of implementation grant applications in the final years of Safe Streets and Roads for All — though their definition of the term is already proving to be much different than their predecessors.
Under the Biden administration, grantmakers took a methodical and scientific approach to finding “underserved communities,” systematically analyzing which areas not only had the lowest income levels, but also dozens of other variables, including levels of particulate matter exposure, transportation barriers, public health outcomes, damaging climate change impacts, and much more. And contrary to Trump’s racist anti-DEI rhetoric, race was not a major variable in many of the administration’s screening tools, even if many objective symptoms of “disadvantage” as the feds define it are disturbingly prevalent in communities of color.
Under the Trump administration, though, grantmakers are now defining the term “underserved” based on a single factor alone: whether or not that census tract or community has had a poverty rate of 20 percent or more for 30-plus years.
Both approaches are likely to privilege rural areas — about half of the Biden-era grants went to them — but analysts at the Daily Yonder found that defining “disadvantage” based on persistent poverty alone could mean that “poor urban neighborhoods get overlooked when their economic performance is averaged with more prosperous parts of an urban county.”
And because Biden-era technical assistance programs seeded many planning applications with the type of sustainability- and equity-focused language that was functionally required of grantees back then, the Trump administration now has basically all the justification it needs to deny implementation grants in communities whose Safe Streets and Roads for All plans it deems too “woke” — or whose “underserved” populations it doesn’t regard as deserving of the name.
Layer all of that together with U.S. Secretary Sean Duffy’s promises to favor communities with “high marriage and birth rates” and those that comply with federal immigration and anti-masking policies, and some fear that even objectively struggling city neighborhoods could be left out in the cold.
“It’s a much more narrow definition,” added Whitaker. “It means that there’s going to be a lot fewer communities that are going to be able to confidently say, ‘This program is available to me … I think there are communities that may just say, ‘It’s not worth it,’ or, ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to get that grant anyway, so I won’t apply.'”
‘A change of how you talk about it’
Of course, Trump administration officials aren’t just redefining the future of the term “underserved communities” — they’re also attempting to retroactively cancel Biden-era grants that don’t meet their new definition, likely in violation of federal law. And that’s true not just in the Safe Streets and Roads for All program, but across all grants under their direct discretion, including RAISE, INFRA, SMART, and others.
U.S. DOT hasn’t detailed exactly how many grants they’ll attempt to claw back simply because they include trigger words like “bicycle lane,” which they said that would do in an internal memo leaked last month. Whitaker believes, though, that some grantees will have the opportunity to rework the narrative sections of their applications to avoid words that the current administration doesn’t like — and she argues they should do it, even if erasing that language feels uncomfortable.
“ If the reason you picked the project [was because it] is going to help low-income and communities of color, and you just change the narrative, you haven’t changed substantially who it’s actually helping, right?” Whitaker argued. “And there are usually multiple benefits to a project. So maybe, if it’s helping a community get to a grocery store, you might, under the Biden administration, have talked about the percent of the population that doesn’t have cars who are low income. Under a Trump administration, [though], you might talk about the fact that it’s economic development, and it’s gonna help out these grocery stores and whatever’s in the strip mall with the grocery store. So that’s not a change of the project; that’s a change of how you talk about it.”
But if the Trump administration requires communities to change their actual designs to downplay sustainability and equity – which DOT’s open distaste for road diets suggests they might — Whitaker says that communities should be prepared to adapt.
“[For instance,] are you going to be asked to build that bridge without any shoulders, so it’s going to be 60 years before there’s an opportunity to create safe biking and walking infrastructure [in that extra space?]” Whitaker said. “Our advice right now is, don’t preemptively take anything out. But if you are asked to take [a bike lane] out, maybe think about leaving a wide shoulder — and then, if the local government has their own money, they can come back and put a bike lane in.”
Since local governments generally have to supply a 20 percent match to federally funded projects anyway, Whitaker hopes that communities can build the “big, beautiful infrastructure” Trump loves to brag about with federal safety money — and use local money to build multimodal facilities alongside them after the press conference is over. (She also says that off-road trail projects that don’t reclaim space from drivers have by and large been left untouched by the feds, though trail advocates aren’t taking that for granted yet .)
If local communities can jump through all those hoops, Whitaker is optimistic that cities will continue to apply for federal discretionary grants — and send a message that they deserve a greater say in the country’s transportation future.
Because if they don’t, some advocates fear it could send a message that programs like Safe Streets and Roads for All just aren’t popular, and should be eliminated when the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law expires in 2026 — or that they should be folded into state DOT-controlled formula grants where locals have far less of a say in how money is spent. And while Whitaker argues that programs like SS4A should evolve to provide more money for implementation rather than planning, leaving local communities out of that evolution would be a shame.
“I think that’s where most stakeholders are gonna come together going into the next reauthorization — how do we get more money to build these projects?” she adds. “That’s what I think is really at risk.”
