The primary body behind much of US transportation research is restructuring to avoid scrutiny from the Trump administration — raising the alarm among advocates for biking, walking and public transportation who fear their priorities will get lost in the shuffle.
The Transportation Research Board — or the TRB, as its colloquially known — is the transportation division of the National Academy of Sciences, and it plays a key role in soliciting, reviewing and funding studies into how Americans get around. Last month, though, TRB informed its thousands of volunteers that it planned to dissolve committees devoted to climate, sustainability, equity and cities to align with Trump administration priorities.
“In a changing environment, staying effective means staying aligned — with our mission, and our responsibilities as a federally-funded organization,” TRB’s Executive Director Victoria Sheehan and Technical Activities Division Director Ann Brach informed committee members in a June 4 email. “In recent months, additional direction from the federal government has further impacted how TRB administers its work. We are streamlining and strengthening our committee structure to better reflect national priorities.”
The abruptly-announced structure dissolved committees created over a multi-year process during the first Trump administration, disrupting the work of countless academics. TRB’s website now lists 35 standing committees, compared to more than double that under the previous structure.
“It’s [an] unprecedented overreach into science — especially on the transportation front, which usually goes largely unnoticed,” said Kevin Shen of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “We are especially worried when there’s a lot of political influence over scientists … Restructuring the committees in this way kind of feels like it’s going against the tides of where the research community is going, and clearly for a political reason.”
“A fundamental tension”
TRB formed in the early days of the automobile, when it helped develop the technology that became today’s asphalt highways. Today, it serves as a coordinating body for states and municipalities to come together to fund shared research interests, which range from topics as obscure as moose crashes to ones as high-profile as the safety benefits of new automobile technology.
It also runs a massive and well-attended annual conference where up-and-coming researchers present their work. Now, though, experts fear that TRB’s seeming embrace of Trump administration priorities could have a chilling effect on the type of research the organization platforms — at the conference and in the field more generally.
“If TRB no longer provides space for a given topic to be showcased — like, for example, gender-based research or bike lanes or climate — that’s a massive disincentive for a 27-year-old PhD student to consider investigating that issue in their dissertation or in their research,” said David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative.
“A fundamental tension in TRB is [that] it holds itself up as the dispassionate, scientific pursuer of knowledge and transportation,” Zipper continued. “But at the end of the day, they’re also, in part, a government contractor. The image verses the reality are really coming into tension now with what’s happening under Trump.”
Some critics argue that the changes at TRB are part and parcel with a broader assault on scientific research and institutions underway in medicine and other fields where government and research intertwine.
“They’ve decided that safety for people not in cars is a culture issue rather than a safety issue, but I don’t think that’s a primary driver of why they’re doing it,” said Barbara McCann, a longtime road safety advocate who served at U.S. DOT from 2014 until the end of the Biden administration. “It’s just this broad-brush approach of taking control and trying to suppress civil society that is counter to the way they’d like to operate.”
Will cities get left out?
TRB was by no means perfect before the Trump-inspired reorg. Because much federal transportation funding flows through states — not cities — some critics say the organization’s work has ignored the needs of urban areas where most people live and work.
“Cities basically have no formal role in research,” said Stefanie Seskin, director of policy and practice at the National Association of City Transportation Officials.
Seskin says the new changes appear to have doubled down on the marginalization of cities by doing away with TRB’s “city transportation issues coordinating council” – even though TRB did retain committees focused on seniors, people with disabilities, pedestrians and bicyclists.
“Folks who really do want to think about, ‘What does transportation in an urban context mean?’ and ‘How do we do meaningful research in an urban context?’ They’re scattered,” Seskin said. “There isn’t a place to have unified agenda and strategy.”
Still, transportation researchers across the country fear for the future of their field.
“The work that TRB supports has resulted in transportation systems that are more resilient, more equitable in the sense they help direct benefits to people who have unmet travel needs,” said Alex Karner, a professor and research at the University of Texas at Austin. “TRB has historically supported work that makes the transportation system work better. We don’t have a counterfactual. We don’t now what would happen without TRB.”
The Transportation Review Board did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
