Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act Bill Analysis
The Senate approved historic spending in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) – a $1.2T bill that reauthorizes the nation’s surface transportation and drinking water and wastewater legislation and pours additional billions into new programs in transportation, energy transmission, resilience, broadband, and many others. NARC has conducted an analysis of much of the bill which is presented in two parts: a summary analysis of the provisions most applicable to metropolitan and regional planning organizations and a chart with an analysis of all of the transportation-related sections and most of the additional new spending contained in the IIJA.
The bill’s $1.2T includes approximately $550B in new spending; approximately half of that new spending goes to the U.S. Department of Transportation. The IIJA would also provide billions in funding for energy transmission infrastructure, resilience, broadband, and many others. The result is higher funding levels in some existing programs and the creation of many new programs as well.
The IIJA contains three types of funding:
- Highway Trust Fund – These are funds taken from either the Highway Account or the Transit Account of the Highway Trust Fund. These funds are provided as Contract Authority over the five years of the bill and act like “real money” that is available to spend.
- Guaranteed Appropriations – These are funds added by the bipartisan agreement and used to either increase funding for existing programs or create and fund new programs. Most of these funds will also be provided over five years but are “real” funds that do not need any additional action in the future to be made available.
- General Fund – These are funds that have been “authorized” to be spent but require future action by the Appropriations Committee to be made available. It is likely that most of these funds will end up in the authorized pots, but examples do exist of programs that were authorized but never appropriated.
In total, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) will receive $567.5 billion from the BID. Of that amount, $293.4B is “baseline” spending (the level of spending from the current reauthorization bill, the FAST Act). That means USDOT will receive $274.1 billion in new spending authority, which is almost exactly half of the $550 billion in new spending that the BID contains overall. Of that $274 billion, $90 billion is provided as contract authority through the reauthorization bill. The other $184 billion in new spending is provided in “guaranteed appropriations” – funding that is outside of the HTF funding structure, in some cases to provide additional funding for existing programs and in others to create new programs.
For more information about the funding included in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal:
Please direct questions about the IIJA to Erich Zimmermann, Deputy Director/Director of Transportation Programs at erich@narc.org.