A nearly $13 billion effort to extend BART into San Jose and Santa Clara secured the promise of billions of dollars from the federal government earlier this year, but as the next administration begins to take shape, it is unclear how Donald Trump’s second term could impact funding for transportation megaprojects nationwide.
The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority broke ground earlier this year on the six-mile, four-station BART extension that will eventually run through downtown San Jose and up to Santa Clara, helping create a ring of rail around the Bay Area. It’s been decades in the making, and August’s announcement that VTA would receive $5.1 billion — 40% of the project’s cost — marked a major milestone in bringing the rail line to fruition.
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President Joe Biden made historic investments in infrastructure during his administration, signing the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in November 2021 that was slated to fund repairs for one in five miles of roadways, and more than 45,000 bridges across the county. It also invested $91.2 billion to repair and modernize transit.
But no one knows what the Department of Transportation will look like when Trump takes office on Jan. 20, said Kevin DeGood, director of infrastructure policy at the Center for American Progress.
Massive spending cuts could occur at the federal level as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who Trump has tasked to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency, have pledged to “delete” entire agencies.
But the $5.1 billion that VTA is expected to get comes from the Federal Transit Administration’s Capital Investment Grants program, which DeGood said is allocated by Congress.
“CIG funding has historically been very stable,” he said. “And the feds have followed through and been able to make appropriations commitments that they put in those agreements.”
Under the last Trump administration, DeGood said, the president wanted to reward public-private partnerships, as well as states and local governments that had raised their own money for transportation infrastructure — something VTA has done.
The transit agency said in a statement that it’s “confident” the project will move forward as it “entered the engineering phase of the program this summer, which locks in the federal cost share.”
“Congress has consistently funded the Capital Investment Grant program throughout the previous Trump Administration,” VTA said. “Transportation is an area of bipartisanship. There are CIG projects across the county in red and blue states that have received the pledge of federal funding.”
Campbell Vice Mayor Sergio Lopez, who serves as the chair of VTA’s board of directors, said the “strategy has always been to be aggressive with our timeline both to make sure we’re delivering a project on time, but also because of a potential change in administration.”
Lopez, who took the helm of the board this month after Cindy Chavez left for a new job in New Mexico, said they’ve worked hard to make sure they have “strong working relationships” with the FTA and both Democrat and Republican congressional committee staff on Capitol Hill.
“We had some really productive conversations,” Lopez said, referring to a recent trip VTA staff took to D.C. “My sense is that they were impressed and had appreciation of where we are with the project and being one of the projects in the United States that’s asked at this scale, I think it’s something that’s drawn a lot of interest and excitement.”
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who serves as the board’s vice chair, said he’s also “confident that the federal government will continue to invest in and enable growth in Silicon Valley.”
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“Our incoming president has been a builder throughout his career and understands that good infrastructure underpins economic vitality,” he said in a statement.
While Trump has yet to reveal his plans for the Department of Transportation, Project 2025 — a more than 900-page transition playbook from the Heritage Foundation — paints a bleak picture. Trump has distanced himself from the document, but some of its authors are being considered for roles in his upcoming administration. Many of the authors also previously worked for Trump during his first term.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who penned the section on the DOT, was the deputy assistant secretary for research and technology in Trump’s first administration. In her section, Furchtgott-Roth called the Capital Investment Grants program “another example of Washington’s tendency to fund transit expansion rather than maintaining or improving current facilities.”
The first Trump administration, she said, urged Congress to cut the program completely, but the program “has strong support on Capitol Hill.”
“At a minimum, a new conservative administration should ensure that each CIG project meets sound economic standards and a rigorous cost-benefit analysis,” Furchtgott-Roth wrote.
Given the uncertainty of what a second Trump presidency could entail, DeGood believes there could be some threat to transportation dollars.
“I do think there’s some risk with the incoming administration that they will try to go after transit funding,” he said. “And if they do, it could harm the delivery of megaprojects like this rail line.”