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Special Briefing: The Future of Mass Transportation under Trump and the GOP
March 18, 2025
11:00 am — 12:00 pm
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Event Recap
Key Takeaways
Among the sweeping disruptions to federal agencies and services announced in the first months of President Donald J. Trump’s second term, changes to U.S. mass transportation policy and funding present particularly prominent and pertinent challenges with wide-reaching implications for cities, states, and their residents nationwide.
On March 18, 2025, the Penn Institute for Urban Research and the Volcker Alliance convened a Special Briefing on “The Future of Mass Transportation under Trump and the GOP,” featuring a panel discussion on the future of mass transit in the United States under the current administration.
Expert Panel on Mass Transit Challenges and Policy Shifts
William Glasgall, Penn IUR Fellow and Public Finance Adviser at the Volcker Alliance, and Eugénie Birch, Co-Director, Penn IUR and Planning Professor at Penn's Weitzman School of Design, hosted the convening. The panel included a range of experts, including:
Kurt Forsgren, Managing Director–Sector Lead at S&P Global;
David Greising, President and CEO at Chicago’s Better Government Association;
Randy Iwasaki, President and CEO at Iwasaki Consulting Services Inc.;
Leslie Richards, Professor of Practice at Penn’s Weitzman School of Design and former CEO of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA); and
Polly Trottenberg, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Transportation and ex-New York City Transportation Commissioner (2021–2025).
This Special Briefing was the latest in a series of 60-minute online conversations featuring distinguished guests from the Volcker Alliances national research networks, along with other leading academics, economists, and federal, state, and local leaders. Funding from The Travelers Institute, members of the Penn IUR Advisory Board, and the Volcker Alliance support these convenings.
What’s at Stake for U.S. Public Transit?
Tottenberg framed the discussion around Trump’s “dramatically different political orientation, policy priorities, and budgetary and organizational goals” compared to his predecessor, President Joe Biden. Under the Biden administration, transportation policy was a top priority during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. As Trottenberg noted, Biden “believed that our nation’s transit systems were economic drivers, crucial for workers and employers, for our national manufacturing base and for local and regional economies.”
Among other initiatives, key legislation, including the American Rescue Plan and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, allocated billions of dollars to improve transit outcomes nationwide “in every major city and most smaller communities,” said Trottenberg. However, the Trump administration has swiftly moved to reverse key policies, including:
- Slashing staff at the Federal Transit Administration (FTA)
- Freezing or canceling previously approved funding for transit projects
- Shifting policy priorities away from public transit investment.
These changes have sparked widespread concern among state and local transit agencies, with experts warning of rising budget deficits, fare increases, and service reductions.
Financial and Operational Impacts on Transit Agencies
Forsgren noted the substantial improvement in S&P’s public transportation outlook under the Biden administration, from a negative outlook at the onset of the pandemic in 2020 to a stable outlook in 2024 in recognition of “recovery in passenger ridership levels across the nation,” effective measures by operators “to narrow operating fund deficits,” and most significantly “the growth of dedicated tax revenues, oftentimes sales taxes.”
Today, however, Trump’s attitude and actions toward public transportation present a “new level of uncertainty” for stakeholders to navigate, noted Richards. Exemplifying this uncertainty is SEPTA, the sixth-largest U.S. transit agency, which this year “is facing a $200 million shortfall,” she said. Efforts to balance the authority’s budget may result in “increases in fare” and “decreases in service,” Richards remarked, indicating the spillover effects of funding gaps on the public constituency. Glasgall noted that states will have limited ability “to bail out mass transit systems” as they face broader federal funding cuts across the board under Trump.
Greising spoke to the effects of this rampant uncertainty as a “statewide concern” in the case of Illinois generally and Chicago specifically, which he described as being “in the crosshairs” of ongoing and looming changes at the federal level, partly because of its sanctuary city practices. Despite a binding, full-funding grant agreement from the Biden Administration to extend the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) Red Line, a key commuter rail artery, some in Chicago fear that “the funding could potentially be at risk,” said Greising.
“The prospective merger of the Chicago area transit systems,” Greising noted, has emerged as a potential strategy to consolidate the city rail line, Metra commuter rail system, and suburban bus system in an effort to address a cumulative budget deficit of $771 million, which is “expected to grow to about a billion dollars a year in coming years.”
Greising highlighted both governance and funding as key focuses for state and local stakeholders in navigating the new federal policy environment. “There’s a lot of uncertainty about what the federal outlook is in the midst of a significant structural question about the future of transit in Chicago,” he summarized. Forsgren further noted that S&P has “maintained negative outlooks on three mass transit operators that have ongoing structural imbalances,” including the CTA as well as the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority and Bay Area Rapid Transit.
West Coast Transit: Challenges and Innovations
Sharing a West Coast perspective, Iwasaki said that the current administration’s particular focus on curtailing discretionary grants requires additional layers of review and bureaucracy, which “slows the process down to get funding in the hands of the agencies that need it.” Nevertheless, the short-term outlook for mass public transit projects in California remains strong as ridership has recovered to pre-pandemic levels, with logistical needs for the upcoming 2026 World Cup and 2028 Summer Olympics continuing to drive demand.
Iwasaki highlighted the role of innovation, including the rise of autonomous vehicles, in enhancing the accessibility, reliability, and efficiency of public transportation. Richards echoed the importance of leveraging technological advancements to address operational challenges, such as using artificial intelligence “to better understand rider behaviors.”
With ridership metrics serving as one of the primary indicators of successful public transportation, transit-oriented development presents a symbiotic opportunity to align public transit design with the living arrangements and working habits of its user base. The feasibility of such projects, however, is subject to important limiting factors, Forsgren noted, foremost among which is markedly heightened “build-out and construction risk” under the current uncertain federal funding environment.
The challenge of bringing transit-oriented development to market is further exacerbated by an inherent trade-off between the public need for affordable housing versus lender and investor expectations for project returns, noted Trottenberg. Strategic coordination on both developmental and operational levels will become increasingly important across the state and local spheres as well as private and public sectors as uncertainty abounds at the federal level.
The Need for Resilient, Well-Funded Transit Systems
Concluding the Special Briefing, Richards emphasized the prevailing importance of mass transportation as a public good in American cities regardless of the current political moment: “When you look at cities where people want to live and work, they have strong, healthy transit systems. I don’t see a future without strong, healthy transit systems if we want healthy, vital areas and communities here in the U.S. So we have to figure this out.”
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Moderated by William Glasgall, Volcker Alliance Public Finance Adviser and Penn IUR Fellow, and Genie Birch, Co-Director of the Penn Institute for Urban Research and Planning Professor at Penn’s Weitzman School of Design, this briefing is the fifty-eighth in a series of sixty-minute online conversations featuring experts from the national research networks of the Volcker Alliance and Penn IUR, along with other leading academics, economists, and federal, state, and local leaders.
Special Briefings are made possible by funding from The Travelers Institute, the Volcker Alliance, and members of the Penn IUR Advisory Board. Recordings of the entire Special Briefings series are available on the Volcker Alliance or Penn IUR websites.
Be sure to subscribe to the Special Briefing podcast, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, iHeart Radio and more.
Subscribe to the Volcker Alliance newsletter and Penn IUR newsletter for advance notice of new Special Briefings.
Related Materials
From David Greising, President and CEO, Better Government Association:
- My latest column in the Chicago Tribune, focused on merger proposals for the Chicago-area transit systems. It mentions uncertainty about a federal commitment to the CTA is a complicating factor.
- A report from the Civic Federation of Chicago last spring about the proposals for a merger of mass transit agencies in the Chicago metropolitan area.
- A link to a Jan. 2025 speech by Kirk Dillard, chair of the Regional Transportation Authority, arguing for a restructuring of transit governance in order to address a $771M "fiscal cliff" in the coming fiscal year.
- This Jan. 2025 order from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy , which signals a plan to withhold federal transport funds from sanctuary cities and favor those with high birthrates
- A Feb. 2025 letter from Gov. J.B. Pritzker and the Illinois congressional delegation requesting details from OMB about federal funds withheld from Illinois by the Trump administration.
- The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) explains the complicated structure of Chicago-area transit in this May 2023 document.
- This Plan for Action on Regional Transit, produced by a CMAP-led task force of government, business, labor and civic leaders.
- This review of the O'Hare expansion plan by the Illinois Economic Policy Institute
- The state's summary of the $44.8B, six-year Rebuild Illinois Capital Plan, which began in 2019 - $33.2B is allocated for transportation projects.
- This summary of the impact of the federal Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act on the Rebuild Illinois plan.
From Kurt Forsgren, Managing Director –Sector Lead, S&P Global selection of S&P Global research reports relating to the topic:
9-Jan-2025: Our 2025 outlook for transportation sector including mass transit U.S. Not-For-Profit Transportation Infrastructure 2025 Outlook: Tariffs May Rock The Boat As The Sector Stays On An Even Keel and 2025 U.S. Transportation Infrastructure Activity Estimates: Generally Steady Demand And Growth
22-Nov-2024: Upgrades in 2024 to seven (7) transit entities based on strength of tax support U.S. Not-For-Profit Transportation Issuers Strengthen On Tax Revenue Growth And Support; Priority Lien Ratings Unchanged
11-Sep-2024: Outlook on Mass Transit sector revised to Stable from Negative: U.S. Transportation Infrastructure Transit Update: Sector View Now Stable As Dedicated Tax Growth Mitigates Lower Ridership Revenue
5-Mar-2025: BONUS article - Economic Research: Growth Prospects Strained After The U.S. Takes The Tariff Plunge
From Polly Trottenberg, recently Deputy Secretary of Transportation:
