A program focused on boosting high speed rail expansion retained the full $10 billion promised in the last version of the bill, while the now-$9.75 billion Affordable Housing Access program, which most advocates expect to primarily benefit transit agencies, lost only a small fraction of its initial funding of $9.9 billion. But among sustainable transport advocates, some of those losses were more painful than others:Īmong the sectors that survived the slashing with no or only minimal funding reductions was transit. The transportation title of the legislation suffered fewer losses than others, losing $17 billion of the $57 billion originally devoted to keeping Americans moving. Late last week, the House Rules Committee released the revised text of the Build Back Better Act, which was slashed from $3.5 trillion to just $1.75 trillion during negotiations with Senators Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who both objected to the scale of the bill and have so far blocked their Democratic colleagues from passing it through reconciliation. Most programs favored by sustainable transportation advocates have survived negotiations over the massive social infrastructure package that’s held up the country’s transportation ambitions for months - though a few of them have gotten a little skinnier.

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