With the 2024 election in the books, the country is rapidly preparing for what a second Donald Trump presidency means for a lengthy list of high-profile policy issues. Headlines have focused on areas with clear differences between President Joe Biden and President-elect Trump, including tariffs, immigration, and Ukraine—but all the prognostication about areas of disagreement can obscure just how many issues demand continuity across administrations.
That’s shaping up to be the case with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), or the so-called “bipartisan infrastructure law.” President Biden regularly boasted that it was his administration and lawmakers in the 117th Congress who initiated America’s “infrastructure decade,” often needling former President Trump for failing to deliver on his many “infrastructure week” promises. Somewhat ironically, it’s now President-elect Trump who must execute the law’s programming over its final two years.
Still, the Trump administration and the new Congress will have opportunities to put their stamp on the historic law. Agency officials will award tens of billions of dollars in remaining competitive grants—including under congressional priorities where the Trump administration may outright oppose action, such as climate mitigation and resilience. Meanwhile, agency officials and Republicans on Capitol Hill could investigate the use of funds and even try to claw back funding to pursue other legislative priorities. Both developments could have huge implications for state and local officials.
It may not have been an issue on the stump, but the IIJA will be a major governing item for the next two years. To help prepare stakeholders inside the Beltway and across the country, this piece summarizes the state of play: how much money is left to be spent, political takeaways from the Biden administration’s awards, and what the future of the IIJA is inside and outside Washington, D.C.
Note: Award data and the law’s structure can be researched in more detail via our Federal Infrastructure Hub.
The Trump administration will have plenty of competitive IIJA funding to award
The IIJA included multiple provisions that separated it from Congress’ typical infrastructure bill. First, the bill’s authors were willing to bundle multiple infrastructure sectors under one piece of authorizing legislation. Second, lawmakers made sure almost all of the bill’s funding would get spent by using a mix of advance appropriations and contract authority. Combined, these two features meant stakeholders knew exactly how much spending the IIJA should deliver over the law’s five years, with a relatively simple process to track spending across all sectors at once.
The Biden White House has made tracking that process easier than ever by steadily releasing project-specific downloads of all IIJA awards. That data confirm what we expected a year ago: As the Biden administration passes the baton to the Trump administration, the federal government is on pace to award all funds within the law’s five authorized years. Through the law’s first three years, the Biden administration awarded $570 billion in federal funding—equal to 66% of the original total.
Now, awards aren’t the same as actual spending (or what’s known as “outlays”), which helps explain why people may still not see all this spending in action. For example, the $42.5 billion program to build-out broadband infrastructure (known as BEAD) has been fully awarded, but yet to initiate construction. It’s a similar story for many competitive transportation programs that require recipients to secure permitting and funding before construction can commence. It will take years following the IIJA’s expiration for all of its projects to be completed.
Yet even after all these awards, the Biden administration still leaves the Trump administration with $294 billion to award, including $87.2 billion in competitive grantmaking, where Trump’s agency staff will personally determine the winners. That’s a significant number of mega-transportation projects, energy grid enhancements, and other investments worthy of White House press releases. While the first Trump administration never had major infrastructure legislation to tout, it’ll be fascinating to see how the new Marketer-in-Chief sells all these projects—even those initially awarded under his predecessor and rival.
Will the Trump administration politicize IIJA awards?
The way Congress wrote the IIJA left tremendous latitude for each presidential administration to decide where and how to award competitive grants. Some programs include specifications around locations (such as Western water programs) or environmental need (such as brownfields), and Congress could always threaten to rewrite specific program rules. But generally, lawmakers gave the executive branch carte blanche to choose projects as it sees fit.
Considering those latitudes and the money at stake, it’s important to judge whether a presidential administration is playing political favorites. To test politicization of IIJA’s competitive awards, we categorized each state by how residents voted in the 2020 presidential election. We then used national population shares to help frame the award count and total funding against a state’s electoral categorization.
At first glance, it could appear the Biden administration favored states who voted for him in 2020 (Table 1). Those states received 64% of all funding over the IIJA’s first three years, surpassing their 56% share of the total U.S. population. But those funding shares don’t tell the whole story. If one is simply counting the total awards, Republican-leaning states received more than their population shares would warrant.
And even within funding, the shares are distorted by one specific program: Federal-State Partnership for Intercity Passenger Rail Grants. Even after significant reforms, Congress still designed this program to invest heavily in the Northeast Corridor running from Washington, D.C. to Boston, which is comprised of Democratic-leaning states. If we remove all those passenger rail grants, it turns out the Biden administration’s awarded funding actually favored Republican-leaning states.
Zooming into specific states, it’s telling that the Biden administration didn’t seem to politicize awards for the 2024 election. Even though the battleground states were well known, the per capita funding levels in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin all fell well below national averages. Instead, Republican-heavy Mountain West states such as Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas landed some of the highest award dollars per capita.
There’s no guarantee the Trump administration’s awards will follow a similar political geography. The Biden administration often referenced the Justice40 executive order when making award decisions; that won’t be the case for their successors. The quantity and quality of submissions will likely shift as local stakeholders attempt to guess what the Trump administration may favor. Of course, the biggest wildcard will be what criteria President Trump’s political appointees privately use to evaluate submissions. If past is precedent, no one should be surprised with some level of politicization.
What comes next for the new administration and national stakeholders
President Biden’s political appointees and their career colleagues bore the administrative burden to get the IIJA machine up and running. They needed to develop rules for evaluating competitive programs, establish practices to efficiently judge the surplus of applications, and develop technical assistance programs to support eligible applicants and grant winners.
It’ll now be the job of the Trump administration to keep the machine humming. That won’t be a light lift. First, the administration will need to nominate staff, the Senate will need to confirm them, and then they will have to quickly learn their new jobs. Next, if they want to keep the same general schedule as the Biden administration, agencies will likely need to issue more than 10 notices of funding opportunities (NOFOs) just in the administration’s first three months. If they fail to do so, a backlog could start building and local stakeholders—plus the media—will start asking questions. And if those new appointees want to change evaluation criteria? Rulemaking and adopting new internal systems will take even more bandwidth.
Additionally, there are different risk factors for the local, regional, nonprofit, and other stakeholders submitting applications. While there is a record of what kinds of projects the prior Trump administration selected—such as the Urban Institute’s analysis of the RAISE program—those awards were made under different legal conditions and executive leadership. The truth is no one will know what the new staff may look for until they start publishing guidance and hosting calls with potential applicants (assuming they’ll do them the same courtesy as the Biden administration). Will a Trump administration that outright questions climate science still honor Congress’ intent within programs intended to boost resilience and reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Will rural applicants gain advantages, particularly for programs that prioritize distressed neighborhoods? Will local voting behaviors or personal connections to political staff matter?
Simply put, predicting what Trump appointees want won’t be easy. Since preparing application materials comes with real opportunity costs, every community should prioritize finding answers to those kinds of questions before they start applying.
There is one risk that we would downplay: money coming off the table. Some federal lawmakers and commentators will argue Congress should claw back IIJA funds. Those kinds of debates make for great political theater, but that’s all that talk will likely amount to. Every IIJA program has a supportive constituency around the country and on Capitol Hill, and most of them are bipartisan. And with lawmakers already committing to two years of spending, what elected official will ask to build less? That’s never been winning politics.
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