The numbers are in: Trump boosted roads. Biden backs biking and walkers.

Federal transportation grants can give local governments a big boost in getting needed projects off the drawing board. But the kinds of projects that the federal government picks for that extra money can vary significantly from one presidential administration to the next, according to new research.

“The Obama administration focused much more on transit; the Trump administration on road expansion; and the Biden administration on pedestrian and cycling infrastructure,” wrote researchers at the Urban Institute in the new report. The report also found that Democratic administrations were more likely to fund projects in communities with higher shares of people of color, even after controlling for other factors including income.

In terms of the kinds of infrastructure that got approved, the shifts were sometimes dramatic. Under the Obama administration, 40% of winning applications for what are now known as RAISE grants included some component for public transportation. That dropped to 15% during the Trump years.

Under President Donald Trump, more than half of the grant program’s money went to building or expanding highways—far higher than what it was under his Democratic predecessor. When President Joe Biden took office, the share of RAISE funds going to road projects never went higher than 20%.

By comparison, between 65% and 75% of money doled out under Biden went to projects that included at least some pedestrian or bike components, a markedly higher percentage than even under President Barack Obama.

“It’s clear that transportation priorities—as shown through funded RAISE projects—do change with administrations, whether that’s coming top-down from the presidents themselves, or if it’s the folks they’re putting in at the DOT,” said Amanda Hermans, one of the report’s authors and a research analyst at the Urban Institute. “As we look forward to the election in November, it’s clear those priorities change when administrations change, so we can likely expect that again.”

With Biden bowing out of the race, either Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris, who have vastly different philosophies on transportation, will have an opportunity to recalibrate the federal government’s priorities. One of the clearest ways that is likely to show up is in the kinds of projects their administrations would fund.

The RAISE grants—called TIGER grants under Obama and BUILD grants under Trump—offer a unique way to determine the priorities of different administrations. It’s a relatively large grant program, with the Transportation Department doling out $16 billion for 1,200 projects around the country since Congress created it in 2009. Unlike many other programs, it can be used for a wide variety of projects, including roads, ports, transit, bike trails and pedestrian improvements. Plus, the Urban researchers were able to examine data not just of the winning projects, but all of the state and local governments that have ever applied for the grants.

Still, RAISE and other grant programs are tiny compared to “formula” programs that automatically send federal transportation money to the states—mostly for road projects—based on criteria Congress has specified in law.

And discretionary programs are still contentious on Capitol Hill.

Congress started creating more discretionary programs as earmarks lost favor with the public, because of uproars over a “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska and scandals that sent lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former U.S. Rep. Duke Cunningham, a California Republican, to prison. The 2021 federal infrastructure law created or expanded dozens of discretionary grant programs, designed to do everything from installing electric vehicle chargers to facilitating wildlife crossings.

While the ultimate decision of who gets those grants rests with the administration, members of Congress—including many who voted against the legislation that funded those programs—often prod executive agencies to pick projects in their districts.

Recently, though, Republicans have chafed at President Joe Biden’s priorities for discretionary grants, particularly as his administration promotes electric vehicles to address climate change and projects that encourage walking or biking. In 2023, for example, House Republicans proposed completely eliminating RAISE grants and big-ticket Mega grants and significantly curtailing discretionary grant programs that fund transit projects. That measure, though, ultimately failed to pass the House.

There are more than 3,000 counties (or county equivalents) in the country, but only 842 counties are home to at least one successful RAISE grant application, according to the Urban report. Many of the counties without successful grants are rural with small populations, but Nassau County in New York and Santa Clara County in California—both with populations well above 1 million people—also have not received any.

Since the RAISE program began, the federal government has received applications from projects in two-thirds of the counties in the country, the Urban researchers found.

Interest in the program has waxed and waned, along with funding for the program.

“RAISE has attracted attention as the most open-ended federal multimodal transportation grant program; virtually any locality can apply for a project meeting its needs,” the Urban researchers wrote. “But in no year since 2009 have more than 26% of U.S. counties had an application submitted for a project within their territory. That figure has ebbed and flowed, peaking in 2010 before declining to 13% of counties in 2017. It has since rebounded, sitting at 24% in 2024.”

Counties with 15% to 25% higher shares of people of color than in the country as a whole were more likely to apply for grants. The authors suggested that one reason for that trend is that denser counties often also have a higher proportion of non-white residents.

The federal government does not consider race and ethnicity as a criteria when selecting RAISE grants, but the Urban researchers found that Democratic administrations were more likely to fund projects in communities with higher shares of people of color, even after controlling for other factors including income.

“While 33% of RAISE funds during both Democratic administrations were distributed to projects in counties with a high share of people of color, only 20% were distributed as such during the Trump administration,” the Urban researchers noted. “The Trump administration, meanwhile, was more likely to prioritize projects in rural areas, and, as a consequence, was more likely to fund projects in counties with lower incomes and with a higher white population share.”

Nationally, most of the RAISE grant applications came from a small number of counties, the analysts found. More populous and more dense counties tend to apply more often. Counties with at least 200,000 people, for example, applied for grants 11 years of the 16 the program has been running.

A few localities have been especially persistent. The Cedar Port Navigation and Improvement District in Chambers County, Texas, for example, tried nine times in 10 years to get a grant to expand a dock and undertake related improvements. It never secured a RAISE grant, but it did get money from a separate federal program for port improvements. Gila County, Arizona, the Urban researchers noted, applied 11 of the 12 years from 2009 to 2020 for a grant to build a bridge, and finally won in 2020.

“These data indicate that higher levels of local capacity—which we proxy through higher levels of population density and population overall—are likely closely correlated with a project sponsor’s ability to submit an application for competitive funding from the federal government,” the Urban researchers wrote.

Transportation experts, local officials and even the Biden administration itself have long worried about the capacity of small governments to apply for and oversee federal grants, which can be cumbersome to manage.  

Just looking at project applications, the researchers found that counties that submitted projects have roughly 5% higher household incomes than the national average, pointed out Tomi Rajninger, another of the report’s authors and a research assistant at the Urban Institute.

“We’re seeing many more applications coming out of counties with higher median household incomes, and that connects, of course, to tax revenues and local staffing capacity and budget and things that are funded through taxes,” she said. “Our data literally show that counties with higher incomes are able to apply to more of these RAISE grants.”