In one of the more bizarre turns in American infrastructure policy, the federal government wants to know whether your neighbors are having babies before deciding how much to fund your morning commute.
A proposal by President Trump’s Transportation Department would overhaul how billions of dollars are allocated for infrastructure, drawing sharp criticism from urban planners, demographers and Bay Area transit leaders.
Under the draft changes to federal guidance published Oct. 1, competitive grant decisions would pivot away from standard planning criteria — such as land use, environmental benefits and economic development — to heavily favor cost efficiency. The framework layers on unprecedented bonus payments for projects in areas with high birth and marriage rates.
The proposal threatens to devalue high-cost urban infrastructure projects nationwide, placing key California megaprojects, including BART’s Silicon Valley extension and San Francisco’s Downtown Rail Extension, which planners are calling the Portal, at a structural disadvantage.
Reactions have been swift and scathing. One local transportation policy expert called it “ridiculous,” a demographer who studies family planning policy termed it “divisive by intent,” and a Bay Area transit leader described it as “the most significant change in 15 years.”
This initiative fulfills a pledge by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to “make travel family-friendly again.” Last year, Trump declared himself the “fertilization president,” and across his administration, leaders have rhetorically prioritized family-growth initiatives.
The Federal Transit Administration is accepting public comment on the draft guidance through Nov. 16, after which it will issue a final policy.
Backlash over methodology
The dispute centers on the Capital Investment Grants program. Created in 1964 as the first major federal funding stream for local transit, it provides multibillion-dollar awards for rail, bus rapid transit and commuter projects through the states.
The proposal would cover up to 10 percentage points more of the costs of transit projects in “high-fertility” areas, as measured by the number of births and marriages per 1,000 residents within a one-mile radius of a proposed transit corridor.
Transportation researchers and social scientists expressed skepticism over the rationale linking demographics to transit funding. Andrea Broaddus, a transportation planning researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, called the connection an unprecedented “ideological leap” from objective criteria.
“Imagine playing soccer for a decade, and in the second half, federal regulators decide you’re actually playing basketball,” Broaddus said. “You don’t know if you’re competitive anymore because it’s not even the same sport. It is trying to impose some kind of social goal or ideology onto transportation infrastructure, which has always been very technical.”
Other experts questioned whether the policy would achieve its stated goals.
Philip N. Cohen, a demographer and sociologist at the University of Maryland, said the guidance amounted to conservative ideology leaking into unrelated government functions. The belief that encouraging family size is a vital societal objective has a name: pronatalism.
“It’s not a serious policy to increase birth rates, but it does signal that nothing is off limits for politics,” Cohen said. “We should all be alarmed when these functions of government are sacrificed on the altar of political polarization.”
While many countries have attempted to reverse falling birth rates, Cohen said policies that encourage marriage represent a distinctly American phenomenon rooted in the politics of race and welfare benefits.
Conservatives, he added, “have never been able to enact broad, affirmative, pro-family policies because of a resistance to anything seen as disproportionately helping non-white families. Because you can’t write race into the regulatory code, pairing marriage with childbearing serves as a proxy to narrow who benefits.”
Bay Area leaders say they fear that the proposed scoring criteria would tilt funding away from urban transit corridors that move high volumes of commuters.
High stakes for downtown rail
The federal changes put two of Northern California’s largest rail expansion efforts, totaling more than $8 billion in combined grant requests, in the crosshairs.
While low birth rates would not subtract award money from grant requests as submitted, said Adam Van de Water, executive director of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, the funding effects are “vague” and elicit worries among public officials.
“They are changing the guidance, which is not uncommon,” Van de Water told the San Francisco Public Press at a Thursday board meeting at City Hall. “But this is probably the most significant change in the guidance in 15 years.”
He said that by scrambling the usual grant criteria, the Federal Transit Administration could upend critical investments decades in the making. For example, because the downtown San Francisco transit hub linking Caltrain to BART and bus lines is inherently capital intensive, a low cost-efficiency score could devalue land use, environmental, employment and other benefits, lowering the project’s overall rating.
The project’s final bid paperwork for a $3.38 billion federal grant to fund 41% of heavy-construction costs is due next June. Environmental review is complete, but rail construction has not commenced.
Van de Water said he worried that previously submitted grants would be subject to reevaluation in Washington or other unpredictable delays.
BART extension threatened
BART’s Silicon Valley extension to downtown San Jose is underway. The six-mile tunnel will connect four new stations beneath the city to the rail network. Next year, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, which oversees the buildout, will seek a federal grant of up to $5.1 billion toward the $12.6 billion total cost.
In an emailed statement, the agency expressed confidence the BART extension and other projects would maintain the existing federal cost-share ratio, regardless of new scoring methodologies. But until the project’s full funding grant agreement is signed, nothing is guaranteed, and delays could balloon costs due to inefficiencies and inflation.
Rebecca Long, director of legislation and public affairs at the nine-county Metropolitan Transportation Commission, noted that Bay Area transit agencies are “accustomed to having to be creative and find ways to keep momentum while you have interim periods of delay.”
She noted that significantly delaying the BART extension could cost almost half a billion dollars each year. But transit agencies have some “wiggle room” with existing resources available, she said, thanks to previously approved local and state taxes.
From the Project 2025 playbook
Transit researchers caution that forcing megaprojects to undergo retroactive reevaluation creates systemic crises by paralyzing long-term capital planning.
Trump’s second administration has approved no major capital improvement grants. Policy experts say this mirrors the roadmap laid out in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation document laying out rapid conservative policy change before the 2024 election, which recommended eliminating or drastically reducing the program through cost-benefit reviews, higher local funding match requirements and grant clawbacks.
Yonah Freemark, a researcher at the Urban Institute, a liberal think tank, said these administrative changes were designed so that “no project gets funded whatsoever.” The delayed funding has stalled more than $7 billion across 46 projects across the country, while $1.9 billion in capital-improvement grants sits unallocated.
“Fundamentally, the challenge that every transit agency is facing right now is that they can’t do long-term planning,” Freemark said. “They’re stuck in a situation where they can’t rely on the federal government to support them. Transit will not get better under this administration.”
