Transit Sec Sean Duffy slashes $54 million in university grants for woke projects

"The previous administration turned the Department of Transportation into the Department of Woke," said Duffy. "I’ve focused the Department on what matters; safety, making travel great again, and building big, beautiful infrastructure projects. The American people have zero interest in millions of their tax dollars funding research on the intersection of gender non-conforming people and infrastructure inequality or whether road improvement projects are racist. It’s time to inject a dose of reality back into our higher education system, and that starts with ending these wasteful and divisive grants."

Duffy posted a video on X talking about the cuts and slamming the universities for the way they'd used American taxpayer funds. "This is the garbage the last administration was funding," he said.

The grants that have been canceled are to:

• University of California, Davis - National Center for Sustainable Transportation
• $12M for “accelerating equitable decarbonization” research.
• City College of New York - Center for Social and Economic Mobility for People and Communities through Transportation
• About $9M for “equitable transportation for the disadvantaged workforce” research.
• University of Southern California - Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Center
• About $9M for research on how “the transportation system creates and perpetuates inequities.”
• New York University - Connected Communities for Smart Mobility Toward Accessible and Resilient Transportation for Equitably Reducing Congestion
• $6M for “e-bikes to low-income travelers in transit deserts” research.
• San Jose State University - Mineta Consortium for Emerging, Efficient, and Safe Transportation
• About $6M for research on “intermodal inequities, particularly how improvements to auto travel can benefit higher income, often white drivers, while depressing transit ridership potential and depriving it of revenues necessary to provide comprehensive services to lower income, often BIPOC people and research into using crowdsourcing and collaborative planning to address safety concerns of women and gender non-conforming people using public transportation.”
• University of New Orleans - Center for Transit Oriented Communities
• $6M for “equitable transit-oriented communities [and] how neighborhood stabilization efforts support environmental justice” research.
• Johns Hopkins University - Center for Smart Transportation
• $6M for research on “hyperlocal pollution exposure inequalities in New York City, promoting EV usage for low-income gig workers, long distance ride sharing, gentrification” and making climate change the center of transportation decisions.

This comes as the Trump administration has gone after universities over Title IX violations, antisemitism, and other civil rights violations. The administration has paused or canceled funds for Harvard University, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Berkeley, as well as launched investigations into dozens of other schools.