The new U.S. transportation secretary says two family-focused measures will help determine what federal transportation projects receive billions of dollars in competitive grants, potentially upending what types of projects in Georgia and elsewhere receive money.
Secretary Sean Duffy said his department will prioritize grants to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average, the first time such calculations have been in the mix. It’s unclear how they’ll be used or how it would affect Georgia. The state’s birth rate is tied with the national average, while its marriage rate is slightly below.
“It’s highly unusual,” said Adie Tomer, a researcher at the center-leaning Brookings Institution who is focused on transportation and infrastructure policy. “There is no academic literature justifying using these two conditions to consider where a national government should invest transportation dollars.”
Most federal transportation dollars are distributed based on formulas approved by Congress, but every administration has a pot of money to give out at its own discretion and it’s these grants that would be affected by Duffy’s directive. President Joe Biden’s administration prioritized transportation grants to historically disadvantaged communities, for instance.
Projects like the Stitch, which will cap the Downtown Connector, the Flint River Trail and a pedestrian and bicycle bridge over Lenox Road in Buckhead have all earned competitive grants in recent years. Similar grants are also helping MARTA build the Stonecrest Transit Hub and improve accessibility for people with disabilities at various stations.
The transportation department said the new policy is designed to undo “woke policies.”
“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are focused on eliminating excessive regulations that have hindered economic growth, increased costs for American families and prioritized far-left agendas over practical solutions,” Duffy said in a statement.
Officials at the Georgia Department of Transportation did not respond to a request for comment about how the new change might affect projects here. A spokesperson for MARTA said the transit agency is uncertain of the impact.
“There have not been sufficient details provided by the administration for MARTA to perform a detailed impact assessment,” spokesperson Stephany Fisher said.
Jannine Miller, who wears a number of hats overseeing transportation policy in Georgia, including serving as the State Road and Tollway Authority’s executive director, told board members of the Atlanta-Region Transit Link Authority last week that everything is operating “business as usual” at the moment.
“We’re carrying on and we’ll keep a very close eye on what happens,” Miller said.
The directive marks a different approach than what was taken during the first Trump administration, Tomer said. Under Secretary Elaine Chao, roadway projects in rural areas and those addressing freight concerns were emphasized. Atlanta has three of the top 10 freight bottlenecks in the country, according to the American Transportation Research Institute.
Duffy’s memo does not explain why birth and marriage rates were chosen, but birth rates have been a focus of pro-natalist conservatives like Vice President JD Vance, who used his first public address since taking office to advocate for increasing birth rates.
“I want more babies in the United States of America,” Vance said at a National March for Life rally in January. “I want more happy children in our country, and I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.”
Republican states tend to have higher fertility rates but marriage rates don’t fall along partisan lines. State marriage rates are also prone to outliers, like Nevada, which has a rate four times the national average thanks to Las Vegas, the so-called wedding capital of the world.
Duffy’s memo doesn’t clarify how the rates would be calculated — at a state, county, municipality level or actually down to the neighborhoods where projects would go. That’s contributed to confusion among transportation officials who were left scrambling last month after the Trump administration ordered a now-rescinded freeze on federal loans and grants.
That could make a difference: While Georgia’s fertility rate is on par with the national average, the rate in the Atlanta metro region is lower.
In 2022, the fertility rate for the 11 counties represented by the Atlanta Regional Commission was 51.9 babies per 1,000 women, below the state rate of 56 per 1,000, according to data from the Georgia Department of Public Health.
Tomer said he suspects the effect on Georgia will be more limited because it’s a red state with a Republican governor. Big projects that have received funding here have the backing of the business community, which has a strong influence. But agencies applying for grants will need to frame their projects differently than they did during the last four years, he said.
“To state the obvious, how you positioned projects for the Biden team cannot be how you position projects now,” Tomer said.
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