15 Mar 2025

DOT Instructed to Prioritize Areas with High Birth and Marriage Rates

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Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued a memo instructing the Department of Transportation to prioritize its funding and contracts toward communities with higher than average rates of birth and marriage.

The memo orders, “To the maximum extent permitted by law, DOT-supported or -assisted programs and activities, including without limitation, all DOT grants, loans, contracts, and DOT-supported or -assisted State contracts, shall prioritize projects and goals that … mitigate the unique impacts of DOT programs, policies, and activities on families and family-specific difficulties, such as the accessibility of transportation to families with young children, and give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.”

The memo applies to existing projects, not only to future projects. This is expected to affect public transportation of all types such as commuter rail, light rail and bus systems as well as other transportation initiatives.

The same memo also constrains recipients of DOT funding:

  • It blocks recipients from issuing “mask mandates” such as the requirements to wear face masks on public transportation systems to reduce the spread of a pandemic.
  • It requires recipients to cooperate with federal immigration agents such as when Immigration and Customs Enforcement targets undocumented immigrants, performs mass arrests, and carries out mass deportations. In other words, it denies DOT funds to cities or states that have declared themselves as sanctuaries.

Click here for more details.

Click here for an analysis of how Trump-era DOT policies may be used to make blanket denials and blanket approvals based not on the merit of projects, but on whether they are linked with Trump’s favored companies and biases.