DOGE and the Department of Transportation

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is an entity established within the Executive Office of the President and publicly associated with entrepreneur Elon Musk, which is focused on (among other things) government spending and waste. That is a laudable objective. One area in which the federal government spends a tremendous amount of money is grants to nonprofits. An analysis of these grants from USASpending.gov provides examples of some of the things that DOGE may wish to examine.

While government efficiency should hopefully be a bipartisan aim, DOGE is specifically associated with the second Trump Administration. Accordingly—and for both recentness and simplicity—this analysis focuses on grants with performance periods that began during the Biden Administration. It pays particular attention to grants that conservative Americans might find ideologically objectionable, as well as grants with questionable usefulness or effectiveness. The amounts given refer to the total “obligated amount” according to USASpending.gov, which does not necessarily correspond to the total “outlayed amount” at any given time.

The following are some examples of federal grants made to nonprofits by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Climate Change and the Environment

In keeping with the Biden Administration’s emphasis on climate change, the Department of Transportation has made multiple grants to environmental groups over the past several years.

In 2023, the department awarded $5.1 million to the Rocky Mountain Institute through a program to provide “technical assistance (TA), planning, and capacity building to improve and foster thriving communities through transportation improvements.” Believing that we face a “planetary emergency,” the Rocky Mountain Institute’s mission is to “cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.” It aims to do this through “a rapid phase out of fossil fuels,” while also opposing the use of carbon-free nuclear power. That aligns the group against nearly 79 percent of all American electricity generation sources, yet it insists that the United States must nevertheless somehow “electrify all the ways in which people and goods move.” This does not sound particularly efficient.

In 2023, the Rocky Mountain Institute reported over $139 million in total revenues, which have more than doubled since 2020. It has been awarded approximately $26.3 million in federal grants since FY 2011, mostly from the Department of Energy. Just over half of this total has been awarded since late 2021.

In 2024, the department awarded nearly $9 million to the Center for Transportation and the Environment to “conduct research related to zero emission transit bus development and commercialization for the purpose of advancing the zero emission bus industry.” The center’s mission is to develop and implement “zero-emission vehicles and supporting infrastructure.” It applies diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles to all of its activities, and it asserts that its work is driven by what it calls “climate justice”—which includes “prioritizing zero-emission transit options for Black and other minority communities” so that there can be a “healing process from a history of pollution-related inequalities imposed on fellow American citizens.” In 2023, over 99 percent of all contributions and grants the center received—and over 86 percent of its total revenue—came from government sources.

From 2022 to 2024 the department awarded $10.9 million to a nonprofit called CALSTART, nearly all of which was for a project to “research and assess the barriers to adoption for zero-emission transit buses.” On its face, this sounds like a dubious use of transportation tax dollars. CALSTART believes in “accelerating the transition to clean transportation” through new state and federal regulations, as well as through incentives such as tax credits. It also operates an international program called Drive to Zero, which aims to “accelerate the decarbonization of commercial vehicles” to achieve “100% new zero-emission medium- and heavy-duty vehicle sales by the year 2040.” In 2023, a full 95 percent of CALSTART’s $169.3 million total revenue came from government grants.

In 2023, the department awarded over $4.6 million to the San Jose State University Research Foundation for “a multi-university consortium (C-STTAR) to establish a climate change and extreme events training and research (CCEETR) program.” The program’s objective is “to improve the rail network’s safety and resilience against extreme events, including climate change.” The suspect assertion that climate change is meaningfully relevant to improving the safety and resilience of American rail operations in the face of extreme weather events suggests that DOGE may wish to examine whether this grant represents the best way of furthering what would otherwise appear to be a reasonable and important use of federal transportation funding.

Diversity and Racial Justice

Other Transportation Department grants to nonprofits were made to further diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles or appeared related to considerations of race or ethnicity.

In 2021, the department awarded a $12.5 million cooperative agreement to the International Transportation Learning Center, in part to address “social inequities that exist in public transit and creating diversity within the transit industry workforce,” as well as identifying “areas to further diversity, equity, and inclusion.” In 2024, the department awarded $4.25 million to the Conference of Minority Transportation Officials (COMTO). Previously, COMTO described itself as “the voice of equity in transportation” and “the leading national advocate for employment diversity, inclusion and contracting opportunities” in the transportation industry. This language on its website was recently changed—a phenomenon that has been observed at other federal grantees, presumably motivated by the Trump Administration’s executive order on DEI.

It is worth taking a look at some grants made through the department’s Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program, which has the primary goal of “reconnect[ing] communities harmed by past transportation infrastructure decisions, through community-supported planning activities and capital construction projects that are championed by those communities.” The program was created through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. While there are certainly circumstances under which such projects might be worthwhile, some of the program’s seven-figure nonprofit grantees appear to be motivated largely by ideological considerations. This leads to questions about whether the specific projects envisioned reflect an efficient use of federal transportation dollars.

For example, a nonprofit called Our Streets Minneapolis was awarded $1.6 million by the department in 2024 to study how a local highway corridor could be modified using “safety, environmental justice, [and] racial equity” considerations to achieve “equitable benefits for all…residents.” Our Streets Minneapolis is “driven by a passion for transportation as it intersects with reparative and environmental justice.” The group believes that transportation infrastructure should “not [be] centered around cars” but instead “prioritize public health and climate, racial, and economic justice.”

In neighboring Saint Paul, a nonprofit called ReConnect Rondo was awarded $2 million the same year to plan and develop a “land bridge” that world turn several blocks of Interstate 94 into a tunnel, claiming that doing so will “reverse systemic oppression once and for all.” Arguing that “a progressive purpose needs a progressive path,” ReConnect Rondo aims to construct what it calls “an African American cultural enterprise district” on top of the interstate.

In San Diego, a nonprofit called Mundo Gardens was awarded $2 million in 2024 to develop a plan to remove an off-ramp currently serving Interstate 805, replacing it with “a community land trust, affordable housing, and active transportation infrastructure that connects communities who have been divided from one another.” Mundo Gardens is a “social justice organization” led by a local activist described as having been “raised on occupied Kumeyaay Territory”—a reference to the people who inhabited parts of Southern California prior to European contact—who views her work as “challenging a system which is still governed by white supremacy.” This is not a worldview that would be expected to produce sound decisions on highway infrastructure, which is paid for by (and designed to serve) all Americans equally.

Even outside of any ideological context, spending federal transportation dollars to study the deconstruction of vital transportation infrastructure simply does not sound like an efficient use of taxpayer resources. Consider the $1.6 million awarded to a local church in 2024 to study the removal of a section of Interstate 244 in the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma—site of the infamous 1921 race riot and massacre that destroyed a prosperous black commercial district. I-244 was later constructed through the neighborhood, and the grant description argues that it now “acts as a physical and social barrier between the predominantly black community in North Tulsa, historic Greenwood Avenue, and downtown to the south.” A statement from the Oklahoma Department of Transportation acknowledged Greenwood’s importance and noted that millions had already been spent improving the aesthetics and connectivity of the neighborhood, but explained that up to 80,000 vehicles use Interstate 244 every day as a “critical part” of the region’s highway system. The reality is that spending public dollars requires weighing often competing public interests.

Final Thoughts

These are some examples of Department of Transportation grants to nonprofits that DOGE may wish to investigate, but this short list is far from exhaustive. In fact, how certain grants are perceived could vary considerably, even among conservatives. For example, a five-year $39 million cooperative agreement with the Automotive Coalition for Traffic Safety funded the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety (DADSS) program, which aims to develop and test technologies that can passively detect a driver’s blood alcohol concentration and prevent the vehicle from being operated if it exceeds the legal limit. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 directed the department to initiate rulemaking on potentially requiring such technology for vehicles.

On the one hand, drunk driving is a serious problem that rightly carries significant civil and criminal consequences. Technology to prevent an intoxicated driver from operating a vehicle would seem certain to reduce traffic injuries and fatalities in the aggregate. On the other hand, experience counsels that in practice all technology will occasionally fail, and there are some disconcerting privacy implications associated with that degree of personal monitoring.

The bottom line is that every single American drives on roads, flies in airplanes, rides in trains, takes public transit, or benefits from goods or services that do. DOGE’s objective should be to ensure that all the Department of Transportation’s grantmaking is directly tied to this, not to ancillary ideological or special interest objectives. Compare the mission statement on the department’s website during the first Trump Administration:

To ensure America has the safest, most efficient and modern transportation system in the world, which boosts our economic productivity and global competitiveness and enhances the quality of life in communities both rural and urban.

with its mission statement during the Biden Administration:

To deliver the world’s leading transportation system, serving the American people and economy through the safe, efficient, sustainable, and equitable movement of people and goods.

Mission creep aimed at furthering “sustainable” or “equitable” transportation—whatever that is interpreted to mean in practice—would seem to be a prime DOGE target at the Department of Transportation.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/doge-and-the-department-of-transportation/