The Trump administration may pull the plug on some federal transportation grants the city aims to use to build bike lanes and other climate-friendly street infrastructure.
The Department of Transportation in a Tuesday memo ordered officials to stop disbursing discretionary grants awarded during the Biden administration to build bike lanes, electric vehicle charging stations and other green infrastructure.
Those discretionary grants are awarded based on the quality of a municipality’s grant proposal instead of through a fixed formula, like other federal transportation grants. As a result, the Trump administration has greater control over which agencies have access to such grants. The new memo requires officials to review grants where the federal government has not yet entered into a binding commitment to the cash, to possibly revise a project or cancel the grant entirely.
“The focus of this review,” the memo states, “is to identify project scope and activities that are allocating funding to advance climate, equity and other priorities counter to the Administration’s executive orders.”
The city’s DOT told Crain’s that it has not received formal notice from federal transit officials about the memo or its potential impact on federal grants the city aims to spend on street infrastructure. Generally, city DOT says it relies on city dollars, not federal ones, to finance bike projects.
That said, there are still a handful of discretionary transportation grants the Biden administration awarded New York City to build bike lanes and street upgrades. Among them is a $7.3 million Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity grant to expand the city’s greenway network allocated in August 2023, federal records show. The federal government has only disbursed $19,500 of those grant dollars to the city’s DOT, according to federal records.
That grant has been formally committed to the city, which in theory means that it is not subject to the new memo. But some transportation experts and advocates say they’re concerned that could change, especially after the Trump administration seized $80 million from a city bank account in February. The Adams administration sued the Trump administration over the move.
“We’re certainly very concerned, because it would be problematic for New York City to lose this funding,” said Kenneth Podziba, president and CEO of Bike New York, a nonprofit that advocates for safe cycling infrastructure and provides free gear and neighborhood bike events. “The federal government can’t dictate street design to the city; New York City would sue the Trump administration and, I think in this case, New York will prevail.”
