Liam Beran
A Metro Transit bus at a charging station on the east-west route.
City officials are working on 'alternate strategies' to implement the route if funding falls through.
Shortly before President Donald Trump took office, city officials were unsure how federal funding for Madison infrastructure projects would be affected under the new administration. Now, the city’s transportation director says the city is at “high” risk of not getting an anticipated $118 million in funding for Madison’s north-south bus rapid transit route.
“In the past administration, this grant program continued. But this administration is doing a lot of things they didn’t do in the first round,” transportation director Thomas Lynch said at a March 3 finance committee meeting. “So I would say the risk for that is high, meaning that we may not get that grant in the next four years.” It could occur, he added, “after the next four years.”
Though the Federal Transit Administration recommended the funding in May 2024, the city does not yet have a contract, said Lynch. The north-south route, planned for a 2028 launch, would be Madison’s second BRT route; the east-west route, buoyed by nearly $140 million in federal funding, launched in September.
City officials are currently working on “alternate strategies” to provide “some of the BRT improvements” without federal funding, said Lynch. Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway told The Capital Times in November that even without federal funding, the city may look at implementing the north-south route on a smaller scale.
Ald. MGR Govindarajan says the Trump administration's actions are an unfortunate impediment to the city’s efforts to implement BRT service citywide — a project that was nearly over the finish line.
“Over the last five years, there's been a lot of concrete city time and effort going into it,” says Govindarajan. “So when all of that is just stalled because of the Trump administration's actions of cutting funding, it's just very frustrating.”
He notes the east-west route increased Metro Transit’s ridership — Metro reported that systemwide ridership in November and December 2024 was 10% higher than it had been in those months during 2023 — and that the city’s implementation of BRT was “supposed to help stir economic activity in” Madison’s north and south sides.
Govindarajan says any cut would disproportionately impact low-income residents and people of color.
The city’s plan for the north-south BRT route states it would service areas that “have some of the greatest racial, ethnic and income diversity within the city.” The proposal also notes that Madison College, the Urban League’s Black Business Hub, Centro Hispano, and the Center for Black Excellence are located near the proposed route.
During his first months in office, Trump has targeted climate-focused projects like the all-electric buses used on the east-west BRT route, which save up to 135 metric tons of greenhouse gas per bus annually, defending such cuts as “unleashing American energy and eliminating the Green New Scam.”
The president has endorsed a House GOP budget proposal that would enact $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over the next 10 years, alongside a $2 trillion spending cut. Noting that some federal agencies are still offering funding opportunities, Ald. Marsha Rummel asked at the transportation meeting whether the city has “any sense of what this administration’s philosophy is about funding opportunities.”
Programs adopted over the last three years and green energy projects seem “particularly at risk” under the proposal, city finance director David Schmiedicke responded.
“There is probably some amount of agreement among the majority in Congress that those would be a part of the reductions made to pay for making these tax cuts permanent,” said Schmiedicke.
City Attorney Michael Haas said at the meeting that while some court decisions have struck down executive orders that halted federal funding, future funding challenges are likely. Courts have so far not weighed in on other “laws or authority” that the administration has to halt federal funds, he added.
“The biggest tool for that is the upcoming federal budget, [which] we’ll be keeping an eye on,” Haas said.
Govindarajan, for one, has not yet given up on BRT funding.
“We have a federal lobbyist that will be continuing to talk to the folks at the federal level and hoping that we can get the funding through,” Govindarajan says. “Because if that happens, then all of these hypotheticals are just hypotheticals.”
