Kicking off the 119th Congress & Trump 2.0
President Donald Trump and his colleagues in House and Senate leadership have wasted little time implementing the president’s ambitious agenda.
In the first 24 hours, Trump signed 26 executive orders, 12 memorandums, 78 executive action withdrawals and 4 proclamations. These executive actions ranged from renaming the Gulf of Mexico – to the Gulf of America – to deploying troops to the southern border and withholding “green new deal” dollars that were included in IIJA and IRA.
Trump’s executive order that withholding funding from IIJA and IRA was met with stiff opposition from Democrats on Capitol Hill – many of whom used their time during T&I Highways and Transit Subcommittee Hearing in the House to call out the Administration.
The Democrats accused Trump of jeopardizing highway and transit projects across the country and called on their Republican colleagues to challenge the Trump Administration. While the Republicans did not lean on the Trump Administration about the executive order, at least publicly, the Administration did clarify the intent of the order was not to impact highway and transit formula funding.
“We’re seeing an urgency to get campaign promises delivered and messages out to the federal public, without a full consideration of implementation and impacts – in short, we may experience some confusion in the initial weeks before a better grasp of Executive Order impact, or legality, can be fully understood,” said NAPA Vice President for Government Affairs Nile Elam. “Despite the rush of activities, NAPA continues to work with Hill and Administration stakeholders alike to ensure we are not seeing key programs disrupted, like State DOT formula funding, and other critical programs throughout the network of federal agencies.”
The Senate has been hastily working to get Trump appointees confirmed – an important step for the President as he works to implement his agenda. Some of the appointees have been controversial, while others like Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy of Wisconsin, have received praise from Democrats and Republicans alike.
Secretary Duffy had his hearing last week, and early this week cleared the Senate Commerce Committee vote with rare unanimous support.
On Jan. 29, Duffy was confirmed to lead the Department as Secretary by a 77-22 margin.
“We are thrilled to see the Seante confirm Nominee Duffy with overwhelming support to lead the Department of Transportation. NAPA has already met and shared collateral with his transition team at the agency and we look forward to working with the Secretary as hit a pivotal time for highway funding and future program authorization,” Elam said.
The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee kicked off its first hearings on the country’s surface transportation network. The series of hearings leading up to the highway reauthorization will be titled “America Moves.”
NAPA member company Vulcan Materials was selected as one of the witnesses and the NAPA Government Affairs team provided talking points on work zone safety and Highway Trust Fund (HTF) solvency.
“Raising questions and flagging issues that are critical to our industries viability during these hearings are a great way to bring awareness to issues – especially issues that are nuanced to our industry like work zone safety. These items aren’t always top of mind for members of Congress, so it is important that we use these opportunities to remind them of our priorities,” said NAPA Government Affairs Director Mitch Baldwin.
Thus far, there have been a lot of discussions on what worked in IIJA and what could be done to improve projects in the next highway bill. Two key areas that NAPA has been involved in and planted questions with members of the committee for are formula funding and HTF solvency.
Chairman Graves has recently spoken with the media, as well as others in House Leadership about the need to raise revenues for the trust fund via an EV fee – currently EV owners do not pay a user fee. Several members of the Committee also discussed the need to rein in discretionary grants and provide states more funding via the formula funding programs. Republicans say the programs are too difficult to manage and slow to roll out, while Democrats like Ranking Member Rick Larsen (D-WA) stressed the importance of discretionary grants. Larsen argued that without these grants, several projects in his district would never have been funded.
“We’ve seen positive things out of some of the discretionary grant programs – but states really rely on the formula dollars to advance the highest priority projects,” Baldwin said. “And for rural, small or sparsely populated states, grants are more difficult to come by and manage – I know this firsthand from my time at Maryland DOT. Grant funding always has a lot of strings attached!”