DOT Secretary Prioritizes Funding to Communities With High Birth and Marriage Rates
On Jan. 29, 2025, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued an Order announcing that the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) is to prioritize issuing grants, loans and contracts to communities with “marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.”
Taking effect immediately, the order applies to all current and future DOT-supported and assisted state and local contracts, grants and loans. DOT will implement its preferential plan for high marriage and birth rate communities under the new order “to the extent practicable, relevant, appropriate, and consistent with law,” although not expressly stating how much weight DOT would give to those preferences when making future federal transportation funding decisions.
According to Wiley, The Order mandates that all of DOT’s grantmaking, lending, policymaking, and rulemaking are supported by a rigorous cost-benefit analysis regardless of whether the activities are beneath the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs’ (OIRA) economic threshold for review. The Order further prohibits the calculation of the “social cost of carbon” in DOT’s cost-benefit analyses, pending supplemental guidance to be issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
In addition to the marriage and birth rate prioritization, the Order announced several additional DOT policy directives. The Order prohibits recipients of DOT funding from imposing vaccine or mask requirements. Similar to Orders and Memoranda from other agencies, such as the February 5 “Sanctuary Cities” memo from the U.S. Department of Justice, the Order also requires that recipients cooperate with federal immigration enforcement efforts and “other goals and objectives” of the President or the Secretary as a condition of funding. Lastly, the Order directs DOT to prioritize transportation projects that utilize user-pay models.
