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

19. Department of Transportation · Minor

Require every CIG project to pass a rigorous cost-benefit analysis

Partially done

635 19. Department of Transportation

“At a minimum, a new conservative Administration should ensure that each CIG project meets sound economic standards and a rigorous cost-benefit analysis.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    FTA issued the final CIG policy guidance, effective immediately and, in FTA's own words, containing binding obligations under 49 U.S.C. 5334(k), with no exemption for projects already in the pipeline. Economic analysis at DOT is now governed by DOT Order 2100.7, which requires DOT activities to rest on sound economic principles supported by rigorous cost-benefit analysis, and the CIG guidance is written to it. But FTA declined to add any new project-level benefit-cost test, answering commenters that the cost-benefit of a CIG project is already captured in the six statutory Project Justification criteria, one of which is cost-effectiveness; the statutory rating framework in 49 U.S.C. 5309 is untouched and the change actually made was to simplify the environmental benefits measure.

  2. Attempted

    FTA proposed revised Capital Investment Grants policy guidance, explicitly to give effect to DOT Order 2100.7, Ensuring Reliance Upon Sound Economic Analysis in Department of Transportation Policies, Programs, and Activities, and to EO 14154. The proposal would drop the social-cost-of-carbon and vehicle-miles-traveled basis for the environmental benefits rating. A proposal with a two-week comment period and nothing yet in force.

  3. Attempted

    The upstream directive, previously unknown to this item because its date could not be established. DOT Order 2100.7, *Ensuring Reliance Upon Sound Economic Analysis in Department of Transportation Policies, Programs, and Activities*, was signed by the Secretary and is "effective upon its date of execution", 2025-01-29. It is not a rulemaking-only instrument. §5.a applies rigorous cost-benefit requirements to "[t]he Department's grantmaking, lending, policymaking, and rulemaking activities" and disapplies the OIRA significance threshold; §5.b states that "[t]o engage in grantmaking, lending, policymaking, or rulemaking, the benefits must be estimated to outweigh the costs"; and §5.f.iii names this ask's program in terms, directing that DOT support "give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average (**including in administering the Federal Transit Administration's Capital Investment Grant program**)". §6.c orders operating administrations to "[u]pdate and revise all Notices of Funding Opportunity, grant agreements, loan agreements, and other program documents" and to review and unilaterally amend existing ones, and §6.d sets a six-monthly compliance report. On the day it was signed nothing at FTA had changed, and §7 is a standard disclaimer making it internally binding and externally unenforceable — a directive without effect yet.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • Boundary call, settled 2026-09-03 on both operative documents. partial stands, and the not started alternative can be dropped. It rested on the reading that all FTA did was simplify a rating measure and refuse a project-level benefit-cost test. The refusal is real — see the next bullet — but the record now shows the mechanism above it: DOT Order 2100.7 requires by its own terms that grantmaking rest on rigorous cost-benefit analysis where benefits are estimated to outweigh costs, names the CIG program, and orders FTA to rewrite its program documents. That is a mechanism in place reaching CIG selection, which is §3’s partial. It is not the project-level test the Quote’s “each CIG project” wording asks for, so it is not done. The spot-check row for this item can be cleared.

  • The November 2025 CIG Policy Guidance was read in full (5,000 lines) on 2026-09-03 and it confirms the refusal exactly. It recites its own origin — “In August 2025, FTA published for public comment proposed CIG policy guidance updates to address certain Executive Orders signed by the President in early 2025 and DOT Order 2100.7 … This document is the final version” — and its binding character under 49 U.S.C. § 5334(k). It then leaves the framework alone: “The project justification criteria outlined in law for New Starts projects include: mobility improvements, environmental benefits, congestion relief, economic development effects, land use, and cost-effectiveness”, with cost-effectiveness measured as cost per trip against published breakpoints. Across the whole document the strings “benefit cost”, “BCA”, “social cost of carbon” and “monetiz” appear zero times. The one change made is a simplification: environmental benefits are now rated purely off EPA NAAQS designations — “Projects in nonattainment or ‘maintenance’ areas … will receive a High rating; projects in ‘attainment’ areas … will receive a Medium rating” — because “returning to a NAAQS-based approach eliminates unnecessary burden and complexity from the evaluation process”. That replaces the 2013 methodology built on monetized emissions changes.

  • Corrected 2026-09-03: neither host is a wall. DOT Order 2100.7 and the guidance PDF both open on the full-headers rung of scripts/fetch-page.mjs. The Order’s date, previously unknown and the reason the events started at 2025-08-19, is 2025-01-29 — confirmed both by the DOT Orders index (transportation.gov/mission/dot-orders?combine=2100.7, which gives an Order Effective Date of 01/29/2025 in a <time datetime="2025-01-29T12:00:00Z"> element) and by the PDF’s own CreationDate of 2025-01-29. Both read-queue rows are answered, and the regulations.gov/docket/FTA-2025-0068 row can be closed as unnecessary: the docket is still a JavaScript shell, but the guidance it was reaching for is now read from FTA’s own host.

  • A trap for anyone re-reading DOT Order 2100.7. The PDF is a scan. Page 1 has an OCR text layer; pages 2, 3 and 4 have none, and pdftotext returns one byte for each of them. Every provision quoted in the first event was read by rendering those pages with pdftoppm -png -r 150. A future agent grepping this PDF will get a false negative on §5.b, §5.e, §5.f, §6 and §7.

  • Proposed comprehensive CIG policy guidance, 2026-10-01 (scan triage, eleventh run; resolved in review 2026-10-04). Nearby, no event. FTA’s Notice of Availability of Proposed Policy Guidance for the Capital Investment Grants Program (FR 2026-20179, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/10/01/2026-20179/notice-of-availability-of-proposed-policy-guidance-for-the-capital-investment-grants-program) was read in full at federalregister.gov. Comments are due 2026-11-16, and the final is to apply at once with no grandfathering. It is the comprehensive update FTA put off in November 2025. It leans harder on cost-effectiveness inside the statutory framework. It would weight cost-effectiveness at 25% of the Project Justification rating (now 16.66%), and use one cost-per-trip measure and one set of breakpoints for New Starts, Small Starts and Core Capacity. It would also tie a project’s CIG share to its ratings: a 40% base, +10 points for a High cost-effectiveness rating and −25 for a Low one. The notice cites DOT Order 2100.7 only for the environmental-benefits change and for a new birth- and marriage-rate share boost. It adds no project-level benefit-cost test: “benefit-cost”, “cost-benefit”, “BCA” and “monetiz” appear zero times. That is the limb FTA declined in November 2025, so partial stands. When the final guidance is published, level it again: if the cost-effectiveness weighting and the share adjustments are adopted, the record is a heavier cost screen, but still not a benefit-cost analysis of each project.

  • EO 14332 grant-process sweep (2026-09-29). Executive Order 14332 (2025-08-07) puts every agency’s funding announcements and discretionary awards under senior-appointee review and a test of the President’s priorities. Under the playbook §3b rule settled on 2026-09-29, it counts only where an ask’s object is review, clearance or priority-alignment of an agency’s awards. This Quote’s object is a cost-benefit standard for one program’s project selection. DOT Order 2100.7 (2025-01-29), the item’s first event, is DOT’s own grantmaking instrument and predates the order. Status unchanged.

Action
restrict
Object
Capital Investment Grants project selection standards
ID
1746