Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

19. Department of Transportation · Minor

Refocus the FHWA on maintaining and improving the highway system

Partially done

629 19. Department of Transportation

“Seek to refocus the FHWA on maintaining and improving the highway system.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    FHWA terminated its rulemaking to update the statewide, non-metropolitan and metropolitan transportation planning regulations, and finalized the second half of the performance-management retrenchment. Together with the rescissions of the first-performance-period targets and of the State highway agency Equal Employment Opportunity program plans (both 2025-05-30), and with the removal of the management and monitoring systems regulations, the agency has stripped out several bodies of regulation that pointed it at objectives other than the condition of the highway system. It is a piece of the ask, not the whole: no directive or mission statement restating FHWA's remit was found, and the agency continues to run non-highway programs and a Beautifying Transportation Infrastructure Council.

  2. Attempted

    FHWA repealed the greenhouse gas performance measure, the requirement that State DOTs and metropolitan planning organizations set declining CO2 targets for the National Highway System and report progress against them. The preamble calls it a deregulatory action removing regulations "not authorized by statute" from the CFR; effective 2025-05-19. It is the first step of a narrowing program, but on its own it takes one non-highway-condition measure off the books rather than refocusing the agency.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • partial under §3’s open-ended-ask rule: a directive plus at least one documented implementing action is partial, and here there are many implementing actions but no single directive restating FHWA’s mission. done would need an allowlisted statement that the refocusing is complete; nothing of the kind exists.
  • The Strategic Plan was found and read in full on 2026-09-03, and it does not carry the directive. transportation.gov is not a wall — the plan opens on the full-headers rung of scripts/fetch-page.mjs at transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2026-03/DOT-Strategic-Plan-FY2026-2030.pdf, from a page last updated 2026-04-03. It exists, it carries a Secretary’s letter signed SEAN DUFFY, and it cites its own 2025-08-08 request for information (90 FR 38591). It does not name FHWA in its operative text at all: “FHWA” appears four times in the whole document — once in the operating-administration org chart and three times in footnote citations to FHWA data products. There is no goal, objective or strategy addressed to the Federal Highway Administration and so no narrowing of its remit. What the plan says on the subject matter is department-wide: objective 2.3, “Improve System Condition and Reliability”, opens “Maintaining and improving the condition and reliability of the Nation’s transportation infrastructure is critical …” and its strategies are “Addressing freight and passenger bottlenecks”, “Focusing on state-of-good-repair investments, including passenger facilities” and “Supporting on-time arrivals through the deployment of time-based flow management”. It sits alongside objective 2.2, “Construct projects to expand system capacity” — maintenance is paired with expansion, not preferred to it. Under §3b’s strategic-plan rule (“attempted only where it names the object of the ask; a general goal in the ask’s subject area is not started with the plan in the note”) the plan cannot lift this item, and it is the document that would have carried the directive. The read-queue row is answered and the answer is negative.
  • The Secretary’s January 2025 memoranda were not found as memoranda. What exists, and what the Federal Register citations to a January 2025 economic-analysis instrument point at, is DOT Order 2100.7 of 2025-01-29 (see #1746 and #1724). The DOT Orders index at transportation.gov/mission/dot-orders, which carries a ?combine= keyword filter and a year filter, is the route for anyone sweeping for a rescission memorandum; it was not swept by year here.
  • Read with #1723 and #1724, the other two p. 629 FHWA asks. All three ride the same rescission program and are leveled together; each cites the instruments that bear on its own words.
Action
restrict
Object
Federal Highway Administration mission
ID
1722