While President-elect Donald Trump rarely spoke about infrastructure projects during the 2024 campaign, especially compared to the grand promises of his earlier campaigns, Trump's allies plan to revive infrastructure planning from his first administration. But this doesn't meant taking on big new projects. Instead, it's likely to mean reduced funding for public transit, increased investment in autonomous or "self-driving" vehicles and contracting out major infrastructure projects to private investors.
During Trump’s first presidential campaign, he often spoke of ambitious plans to rebuild America's infrastructure, including highways, bridges, ports and airports. During his first term, Republicans made efforts to enact a conservative vision for infrastructure and transportation policy. Trump asked Congress at one point to defund Amtrak, and proposed increasing the role that private capital plays in major infrastructure projects like highway building.
In 2020 and 2024, however, Trump effectively dropped the issue. This year's GOP platform barely mentions infrastructure, and its policy proposals mostly involve protecting computer systems from cyber attacks, rather than any large-scale infrastructure investment.
More detailed policy prescriptions can be found, however, in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which appears to serve as an unofficial agenda for the incoming administration, or perhaps a manifesto for the American conservative agenda in the age of Trump.
In that document, economist Dianna Furchtgott-Roth, who served as an undersecretary at the Department of Transportation in the first Trump administration, lays out what may well be the incoming administration's vision for infrastructure investment, focused on private contractors and investment deals and dramatically scaled-down federal funding for capital improvements. It feels much closer to old-school, small-government Republican politics than to the more ambitious vision Trump has occasionally championed.
Project 2025 specifically mentions the push to eliminate capital investment grants under the first Trump administration. These large grants of federal dollars are used both to build new infrastructure projects and fund maintenance of existing highways, bridges and other crucial infrastructure components in major metropolitan areas. As the spectacular collapse of Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge last March made clear, infrastructure maintenance can become a critical issue. (Given the current budget standoff in Washington, it's unclear whether Congress will fund rebuilding the bridge.) Eliminating these grants could slow down transportation infrastructure projects currently contemplated or underway, or kill them off completely.
In smaller cities (with a population of 200,000 or less), capital investment grants can also be used to cover operating expenses for public transit services. Since many such cities cannot afford to subsidize bus lines or paratransit services for people with disabilities, losing these grants could shut down services entirely in some areas.
Furchtgott-Roth also recommends contracting out infrastructure projects to private investors, who would fund the projects in exchange for the right to operate the infrastructure asset in question, either by collecting "fees from the users of the asset" or by receiving "periodic payment from the government" In other words, this envisions for-profit, privately operated highways and bridges, which were common in 19th-century America but virtually disappeared during the last century.
There are discernible hints of MAGA-style ideology in Furchtgott-Roth's technocratic prose, as when she advocates a “tech-neutral approach to addressing any emerging transportation technology,” which seems to mean steering policy back toward private cars and fossil-fuel consumption. The Biden administration, she writes, used “the department’s tools to get people to take transit and drive electric vehicles instead of helping people to choose the transportation options that suit them best.”
Indeed, Furchtgott-Roth tries to blur the definition of "public transit" to mean something entirely different, which sounds more like the pay-as-you-go private-sector options that already exist. “New micromobility solutions, ridesharing, and a possible future that includes autonomous vehicles," she writes, "mean that mobility options —particularly in urban areas — can alter the nature of public transit, making it more affordable and flexible for Americans."
She concludes: "Unfortunately, [the Department of Transportation] now defines public transit only as transit provided by municipal governments.”
In its totality, this document imagines a future in which private companies collect tolls from drivers of private cars on privately-owned highways — with many of those cars, perhaps, self-driving vehicles hired through apps like Uber and Lyft. This new system, which does not appear to be "public" in any conventional sense of the word, could potentially replace fixed-route mass transit like buses or trains, which Furchott-Roth appears to believe are no longer economically viable.
Kevin DeGood, director for infrastructure at the Center for American Progress, told Salon that even if the technology to create such a system existed (which it does not), "The vision put forward of ditching public transit and pushing for mass ride-hailing is fundamentally flawed.”
Trips in cars hired through ride-hailing apps, whether a human driver is involved are not, are “more expensive" than any conceivable form of public transit, DeGood said, and "also massively inefficient."
"The issue is deadheading," he continued, which means "moving around between fares without a passenger. These empty miles add up very quickly, causing big spikes in congestion and delay. Public transit provided more than 7 billion trips in 2023. It's a vital part of our economy and the federal-local funding partnership should be strengthened, not cut."
DeGood added he expects the second Trump administration to follow the example of the first one in moving “away from projects such as public transportation and active or non-motorized transportation, including biking and walking, and toward more highway projects — especially for rural highway repair and expansion.”
Adie Tomer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that the plans spelled out in Project 2025 were “easy to write” but will be difficult to sell to Congress or enact into law. "When you say it out loud it’s like a fantasy novel,” Tomer said.
Tomer noted that because of the bipartisan infrastructure law passed under the Biden administration, large chunks of infrastructure spending are locked in through at least 2026, meaning that the Trump administration’s ability to pursue these policies will likely be limited before the next midterm elections, when Trump's lame-duck status will be more apparent. But “the volume of this debate will increase” over the next two years, Tomer added.
When it comes to slashing funding for public transit while investing in speculative public-private partnerships for new infrastructure projects, Tomer suggested that the first Trump administration could serve as a lesson.
Even with Republicans in control of both the House and Senate, Tomer said, “Congress has fundamentally a different approach. These members of Congress have to go back to communities and regions" to seek re-election, and in many parts of the country, "transit does extremely well at the ballot box. So what we’ve seen is support for transit investments.”
Possible private funding for infrastructure, Tomer added, is not a new talking point in the GOP lexicon, but it opens the door to all sorts of potential problems, including conflicts of interest, cost overruns and concerns around quality control.
One major issue is that private investors will clearly seek a return on their investment, which is likely to mean making the resulting infrastructure asset more expensive for users, through increased bridge and highway tolls, for example.
Another key issue, Tomer said, is that investors will only be interested in "the most profitable routes and corridors and portions of the network. Why do we have a rural broadband gap? It’s because those are the least profitable portions of our telecommunications networks. That's also why they skipped over some of our densest lower-income neighborhoods.”
