By David Shepardson
(Reuters) -The U.S. government will make available $5.4 billion in grant funding for building, replacing or repairing bridges across the country under a 2021 infrastructure law, but is striking diversity requirements, the U.S. Department of Transportation said on Monday.
USDOT said it was removing climate change, environmental justice and diversity, equity and inclusion from grant application requirements for bridges from the funding approved in 2021 under a $1-trillion infrastructure law signed by former President Joe Biden.
Last week, USDOT said separately it would end consideration of race or gender when awarding billions of dollars in federal highway and transit project funding set aside for disadvantaged small businesses.
In April, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said states could lose transportation funding over a failure to cooperate on federal immigration enforcement efforts or for maintaining DEI programs. Trump issued an executive order seeking to ban DEI programs in January.
Under Biden, bridge grant applicants had to address climate change impacts and detail how proposed projects reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector and lifecycle emissions from the project materials, USDOT said on Monday.
Another requirement called for addressing how projects would create good-paying jobs with the free choice to join a union and how projects would promote local inclusive economic development and entrepreneurship such as Disadvantaged Business Enterprises, minority-owned business or women-owned business programs.
A Kentucky judge ruled in September that a federal program enacted in 1983 – the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program – violated the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection guarantees. The program treats businesses owned by racial minorities and women as presumptively disadvantaged, making them eligible for funding.
The program was reauthorized in 2021 through the infrastructure law that set aside more than $37 billion for that purpose.
(Reporting by Katharine Jackson and Ryan Patrick Jones, Editing by Franklin Paul and Rod Nickel)
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