Edgewise Network presented a webinar for transit industry professionals on February 24, 2025. Crissy Ditmore and Jason Pavluchuk explained what to expect in the grants and legislative space with the Trump administration. Following is part two is an abbreviated transcript. (Read part one here.) To watch the entire webinar, visit Edgewise’s YouTube page.
Jason: The most important aspect of writing a successful grant is to know your audience. This administration is very focused on efficiency and effectiveness. Also keep in mind that the current Secretary of Transportation has nine children — family is very important to him personally and is he is weaving his viewpoint into guidance. One of the metrics that the DOT will be using to identify winning projects is high marriage and birth rates. So, talk about how a project will help a family. Focus on cost effectiveness. Focus on safety.
Avoid discussion of climate change benefits. That doesn’t mean a project will not or should not have have climate change benefits, but the focus of the project on your grant submission should be how the project will make transportation safer, more efficient, and more effective.
Using fare collection as an example: The faster we get people on and off buses, the less a bus idles, which has significant environmental benefits. But instead of talking about climate change, discuss the project in terms of efficiency and cost effectiveness. Now that busses aren’t sitting there waiting for people to find loose change, they can quickly load passengers and stay on schedule. Any environmental benefits take a back seat to making the whole system more efficient and effective by reducing wait time.
Similarly, don’t just ask for funds to buy 50 buses. Talk about how included in the procurement will be revamping your wayfinding. Focus on the advanced technology on board these buses. Those are things that this administration is going to go after.
Some of the other priorities I think we’ll see come from the new administration are intersection improvements, transit vehicle priority, and emergency vehicle priority — those types of projects.
ROI, efficiency, and effectiveness will be what this administration is looking after. They will be more focused on how to provide more advanced service rather than simply more service. It’s similar but said a different way. They’re going to want to see bus and other transit services be connected. They’ll want the latest fare collection and safety features. They’re going to want to use as much AI as possible in transit.
The things that bring transit to the next level from a technology standpoint are what this administration will be looking at, not necessarily more equity and community-focused design.
Ornaments on a tree
Jason: I use this concept in a lot of my conversations with my clients: hanging ornaments on the tree. There are only so many ways you can look at certain transportation projects and make them sexy. A bus is a bus, right?
But the difference between “I’m buying a bus” versus “I want to buy a bus and equip it with security features, the latest IoT and wayfinding, the latest in fare collection, and the latest in safety features” is very different. Find ways to hang ornaments on the tree and choose the ornaments that match the administration’s priorities. A project that has those elements will absolutely score better in this administration.
It’s all in the words you use
Jason: This administration is using AI in many ways. It’s important to know which keywords to avoid and which ones to use so your application doesn’t get filtered out of the pile before anyone reads it.
It’s very clear that the focus on DEI, climate change, and electrification of the transportation system are now no longer priorities. In fact, the administration is very clear that they do not intend to fund these activities. During the Biden administration, entities that did not focus on these concepts were often left out during funding decisions. The opposite is now true. Applications that focus on equity and the environment will be filtered out and discarded when it comes time to decide who receives funding.
As mentioned previously, this administration is focusing on those projects that help families move through the community. This administration is focused on how to move people and freight efficiently and effectively. How the project you are proposing can accomplish those goals is what any grant request should focus on. Again, this is not to say that a project can’t have multiple benefits, but when submitting a grant, focus on what the administration is looking to accomplish.
Winning themes
Crissy: How important is it to adjust the wording to reflect the new priorities? It’s common sense: If you know that something is contrary to the administration’s priorities, but it’s still something that is a major goal in your agency, there are ways to frame it. The federal government is clearly embracing public-private partnerships and there are plenty of private partners that have been working with transit agencies for decades, like Genfare.
For example, Genfare has always had a cash policy. They want to keep cash but have invested in all of the tech to enable rider choice. That promotes equity, but you can leave out the word “equity.” Framing is so important here.
Focus and find those things. They’re there, and we can help you find them.
The upcoming grant landscape
Crissy: While it’s too soon to be sure what the grant landscape will look like in the coming year, other than the continuing availability of formula funding, we can make some pretty educated guesses. Can you give us a breakdown of what to expect this year?
Jason: We are coming to the close of a generational investment in infrastructure. Last year, the Biden administration spent a lot of time trying to get money out the door as quickly as possible. A lot of the 2025 grants have already been awarded and the dollars already spent. But don’t worry, there’s plenty of money left over, especially for innovation, for safety, and for transit.
Before I get into those details, I would urge all of you to check out Genfare’s grant guide.
Congressional earmarks
Jason: We’d be remiss if we didn’t discuss that Congressional earmarks remain a thing. Earmarks were very popular in the 2000s, then went away in 2008. They were brought back after COVID, and it appears they will remain.
If you look at the House Appropriations website, you’ll find the guidance from last year. You can see their capital project funding has to go to a public agency. I expect similar guidance this year. I also expect a similar timeline because we still haven’t finished the FY25 appropriations bill.
The FY26 process will likely be delayed, so if you have a project or program that just needs funding and the cost is somewhere between half a million dollars and three million dollars, I’d start to talk to your congressman about it today. The portal will likely be made available end of March or early April. Congressionally designated spending, or earmarks, should be on the radar of any agency looking to secure funding for projects.
BUILD grants
Jason: The BUILD/RAISE program dates back to 2008. (Its name has changed a couple times and is now back to being called BUILD.) The money for FY25 is $1.5 billion for large capital projects with grant amounts between $5 million and $25 million. The Biden administration opened the competition up right around Christmas with a due date right around the inauguration. Two days before the portal was set to close, Secretary Duffy came out with his set of proposals including an amendment to the BUILD grants, and at that point they closed the grant portal.
We’re still waiting to see when and if if it will be reopened. It is possible they will do a combined FY25 and FY26 BUILD grant competition at some point later this year.
PROTECT grants
Jason: I believe PROTECT grants will be made available in Q4 2025 or Q1 2026, but there’s going to be a significant amount of administrative input. PROTECT grants are something this administration will be interested in, but first they have to grasp it and reframe it as resiliency rather than climate change. And those are two very different things. However, the primary focus of the program as established by Congress is resiliency.
Thriving Communities program
Jason: I think they’re wrapping up a lot of the Thriving Communities projects. They’re not canceling any of the grants yet. If they do another round of Thriving Communities, it will have a very different look to it. My guess is rural communities and how those communities can get access to health care, education, et cetera will be the focus.
Technology and innovation programs
There is a good deal of money left for SMART ($100m), ATTAIN ($60m), and the Congestion Relief program ($50m). Each of these programs can be used by highway departments, local governments, or transit agencies to fund innovation and modernization. I expect these programs will be made available later this summer.
Bus/Bus Facility and Lo or No Emission grants
Jason: Lo/No is an interesting one because it’s authorized and there are very narrow uses of the money. I’ll be very curious to see how they handle that. Lo/No has been around for 15 years. It’s just always been smaller dollar amounts than what we saw recently. Will they repurpose some of it? Will they look to expand the definition of what a low emission vehicle is? I don’t know, but they’re going to have to make it available.
Bus/Bus Facility will likely be made available later this spring as usual.
Some of these questions will be answered when the new FTA administrator has his nomination hearing. The nominee is a former congressman by the name of Mark Molinaro who’s from upstate New York and was a transit guy. He is widely supported by transit advocates, which gives me hope that he will come in and answer some of these questions.
The next chapter
Jason: The next chapter will be written in the next one to two years, including the reauthorization of IIJA. The committees are in the process of holding hearings and bringing ideas in. It is truly a critical time for transportation. IIJA brought in so much money, and we’re at a “now what” moment. The reality is that the amount of money gas taxes bring in doesn’t come close to paying for IIJA.
IIJA was more than just surface transportation. There were ports, airports, a lot of rail, a lot of non-transportation infrastructure included. The next bill will probably be more of a surface transportation bill. For the most part we can expect the next bill simply to be very much like it has been for the 20-25 years before the IIJA, where it’s mainly highways and transit.
Competitive programs
Jason: One of the hallmarks of IIJA was the significant increase in the number of competitive grant programs. Prior to IIJA, there were probably three, maybe four competitive grant programs a year. With the Infrastructure Bill, there were upwards of 50 in 2024.
It’s still too soon to tell, but I expect we likely won’t see that many of them continue. Even those of us who advocated for many of these programs saw that it was too much for vendors, individual agencies, and the DOT to manage. At the very least, I think we’re going to see a lot of those programs either be combined, become formula programs, or fold into other formula programs.
The what, where, why, and how is still to be determined. I still think there will be a large competitive grant program like BUILD because it’s been very successful. I also think there will be some individual grant programs like Bus/Bus Facility and SMART. It’s just a matter of which ones, and how much will they be.
In conclusion: Be ready
Crissy: Keep your projects going; keep your grant applications at the ready, because there could a strategy of having a very short window to submit. Focus on the areas where you need to do something different. Let’s say you have already purchased a lot of electric buses and you need a infrastructure for charging. There may be an opportunity to partner with the private sector to help fund that for you
There are different ways that we can approach some of these problem sets — new ways of doing business. It’s okay for us to do that.
Help is here
Keep an eye out for the second part of this series, which will focus on creating winning grant applications and what we expect for specific funding programs. Also check our ongoing Washington Watch column for news and download Genfare’s Grant Guide for guidance on the Infrastructure Bill’s public transit programs.
Plus, your Genfare Business Development Director is always willing to work with your agency and Genfare’s government relations consultants to help you craft fare collection solutions and grant applications that lead to winning funding.
