In the latest episode of the Volts podcast, Evergreen Action Senior Transportation Policy Lead Liya Rechtman breaks down a little-known state authority allowing governors to transfer federal highway dollars into public transit, EV charging, safe streets, and bike and pedestrian projects—without new legislation. As Rechtman notes, “A very tiny fraction of highway dollars can make massive inroads in digging transit out of a hole or accelerating vehicle electrification.” With federal clean transportation policy under attack, she lays out a practical, immediate step governors can take to give people healthier, easier, cleaner—and cheaper—travel options.
Listen: Volts: Hey governors: you can salvage sustainable transportation, but you need to do it quick!
Host: David Roberts
November 5, 2025
David Roberts
Clean transportation policy is under assault by the federal government. Congress has phased out the tax credits for electric vehicles. It has removed California’s waiver from the Clean Air Act, which allowed that state and more than a dozen others to set more ambitious auto-emission standards. Now, the EPA is going after basic federal fuel-economy standards. It is grim out there.
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Rechtman is now serving as the senior transportation policy lead for Evergreen Action, a research and advocacy outfit. She has recently been alerting governors to the fact that they have a lot of authority to fund clean transportation — more perhaps than they are aware of — but their window to act is shrinking, especially with dimwit Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy getting ready to reshape how federal transportation funds are allocated (think babies, not bike paths).
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Liya, it is grim out here. I want to start with a little context setting. Not about all the things that the government is destroying, as we just mentioned, but the opportunities that remain. Tell us, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law set some new formula for funding transportation in states. As I understand it, that’s about to run out. Can you tell us a little background on what the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law set up and when it runs out?
Liya Rechtman
I am here with some good news on multiple fronts in a very grim moment. The very short version is that there is a lot of really horrible, very depressing stuff going on in climate policy, in sustainable transportation, in transit funding, but there are some solutions. Not everything is as complicated or as hard to fix as it seems. Sustainable transportation does not have to be our biggest problem. In terms of what the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law set up — the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is a five-year “surface transportation reauthorization,” this massive bill that funds all of transportation.
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Liya Rechtman
[Surface transportation reauthorization is] supposed to be every five years. Of course, it’s not perfect. In the last 25 years or so, there have been a couple of quick fixes, one-year continuing resolution type of things. But in general, historically, transportation has been a super bipartisan issue that has passed. Congress has not dropped the bag on transportation funding to date. Now this could be our year because we’re up for another negotiation.
David Roberts
This is a standard congressional process that got folded into the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law because that was happening anyway, and it set a funding formula for transportation that was better in numerous ways than the previous funding formula. Now, as you say, that whole process is underway, about to happen again, and the results are likely to be grim. But we have one year left of that funding formula set up, is that correct?
Liya Rechtman
Yeah. Just to get into the weeds here, there’s the Highway Trust Fund, which is a massive chunk of change from the federal government that is meted out to every state based historically on some basic principles — how many miles of highway are in the state, how many people are in the state.
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David Roberts
But this year left we have of the extant funding, this is our main focus today because we have one year left for states to access this money and spend it in productive ways.
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The funding comes in certain buckets. One way that states can have some autonomy. There are two things states can do that you describe in your piece: flexing funding versus transferring funding. I want to talk about those briefly. Flex funding allows states to take a chunk of this money that comes via transportation and shift it to other transportation priorities. Is that correct? Tell us about what flex funding is and what is involved in doing it.
Liya Rechtman
Yeah, let’s talk about flex funding. Because it’s a more popular state authority, it is less feasible right now. That’s not the good news I have to share, but...
David Roberts
I know that is the bad news, but we have to get through it.
Liya Rechtman
That’s the bad news. Very quickly, what flex funding is: states have the authority to move funding from specific highway projects into specific transit projects. That requires the state to go to their district highway office. The district highway office brings that to the headquarters office. The headquarters office has a negotiation with the headquarters transit office, and then they are able to move the money along in a political negotiation between the state, the highway administration, and the transit administration. They are able to move that money from specific highway projects into specific transit projects.
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David Roberts
The background to all this is that most of the funding goes to highways and has traditionally. But as we say, that flexing, because it requires close consultation and work with the federal government, is likely off the table. But there is this other authority states have to transfer money, which to my uneducated ears sounds like the same thing. Maybe you can explain how transferring money from one of these programs to another is different than flexing money from one to another.
Listen to the full episode here.
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