The Federal Infrastructure Funding Tracker: User Guide

Transit, roads, internet access, power lines, and even homes are all examples of infrastructure that can connect people to the resources they need to live a full life. Ideally, infrastructure ensures access to quality dwellings, education, and jobs; it transports clean water; and it promotes community health through parks and green space. To ensure infrastructure can support these use cases and benefits, the US federal government funds infrastructure maintenance and expansion projects nationwide.

Historically, however, federal infrastructure funding has immensely benefitted some communities while harming others, including many low-income communities of color. If federal infrastructure funds are not distributed to communities based on their needs and vulnerabilities, the investments may perpetuate disparities in health, poverty, and overall life outcomes. Infrastructure investment decisions made by Congress and federal agencies today have the potential to reinforce—or reverse—previous outcomes.

To identify and prevent investments that could worsen disparities, it’s critical to study the distribution of federal infrastructure funds. In this tool, we explore the implications of federal infrastructure investments by evaluating the funding distribution of federal infrastructure grant programs. Readers may also be interested in exploring the data and analyses available at the following sites:

Elected officials, policymakers, and practitioners at the federal, state, and local levels can use this tool to understand how federal funds have been distributed. Here are some possible ways to use the tool:

This tool allows users to explore data by three different geographies: state, county, and core-based statistical area (CBSA). CBSAs are made up of metropolitan and micropolitan areas, which include an urban area and its surrounding communities. For example, the New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA Metro Area includes New York City and several surrounding counties in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The tool also allows users to explore the data by specific types of infrastructure (e.g., public transportation or housing and community development) funded through federal investment programs.

The state, county, and CBSA pages include five data visualizations: a table of programs by infrastructure type and their funding amounts; a map and a beeswarm chart comparing the amount of funding nationally (for states and CBSAs) and state-wide (for counties); scores comparing an infrastructure category’s per capita funding to characteristics of need in that geography; and a barbell chart showing differences in category funding between the selected geography and the median of similar geographies. These pages intend to show how much funding an area has received compared with its need for infrastructure investment relative to other areas across the country.

The infrastructure category pages list all the programs included in the category as well as four data visualizations: a map and a beeswarm chart comparing the amount of funding for that infrastructure category nationally; a table indicating whether communities received the expected share of funding, when adjusted for population; and a bar chart comparing program funding across different community characteristics. These pages intend to show how much funding has been made available for a specific type of infrastructure and how well that funding addresses the communities most in need of investment.

On the program pages, we include a brief description of the program, a breakdown of annual program funding, and one data visualization: a map comparing the amount of program funding obligated nationally.

To learn more about the data behind each of these visualizations, see the About the Data section below.

Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act: This law, passed by Congress in November 2021, was designed to distribute $1.2 trillion through various funding programs between fiscal years 2022 and 2026 to rebuild American infrastructure and “invest in communities that have too often been left behind,” according to the Biden White House. We refer to the infrastructure law as IIJA; others refer to it as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, or BIL.

Inflation Reduction Act (IRA): This law, passed by Congress in August 2022, was designed to distribute or provide tax credits of more than $800 billion between 2022 and 2032 to strengthen America’s clean energy economy, cut pollution, and promote environmental justice (much of the law’s elements, however, were eliminated by congressional action in 2025). We refer to the act as IRA.

Formula grant: Formula grants are awarded to eligible entities based on congressionally established or agency-established funding formulas, often based on population and other local characteristics. In some cases, these formulas were established decades ago, and Congress has maintained funding levels to state and local jurisdictions based on those formulas without updating them to account for present conditions. Most formula grants are distributed to states, but some (such as Community Development Block Grants) are distributed to localities and others (such as Housing Choice Vouchers) are distributed to public agencies.

Competitive grant: Competitive, or discretionary, grants are awarded by federal agencies following a request for proposals process that invites applicants to submit potential projects that meet federal priorities. Governmental bodies, public agencies, and occasionally nonprofit and for-profit entities can apply for federal funding for specific programs or project ideas through competitive grant programs. Once received, applications are evaluated and funded based on merit by a team of reviewers from the awarding agency.

Per capita measurements: Per capita measurements calculate specific data per person. In this project, per capita calculations typically represent data values per 1000 people; we note if otherwise. Per capita measurements allow us to compare funding amounts across CBSAs, counties, and states with different populations. For example, a county with 1 million residents is likely to receive more funding overall than a county with 100,000 residents, but per capita measurements may show that the latter county received more funding per person.

For this tool, we analyzed 71 major federal infrastructure programs funded by IIJA, the IRA, and annual congressional appropriations. The data presented in the tool are limited to fiscal years 2022 through 2025 and were collected in March 2026. For this version of the tool (updated in 2026), we collected data on funding obligations released on USAspending.gov. Data in the initial tool release (2023) and update (2025) came from a combination of sources, including USAspending.gov, program fact sheets, and agency-level press releases and award announcements.

Other federal infrastructure programs may not be included in the tool because they distribute relatively little funding or because data are unavailable. Eight programs were included in a previous version of this tool but were removed because they could not be distinguished on USAspending.gov. These programs were the Rural Water Projects program, the Drought Mitigation program, National Laboratory Infrastructure Grants, the Indian Health Service Sanitation Facilities Construction program, the Aging Infrastructure Account, the Land Port of Entry program, US Army Corps of Engineers IIJA Construction Projects, and the Civil Nuclear Credit program. Other programs from previous versions of this tool were combined or split up to reflect how data is recorded by USAspending.gov.

USAspending.gov includes information about all federal government spending, including obligated funding amounts, awarding agency, program information, type of award, intended use, recipient, and place of performance. We use transaction-level data, rather than award-level data, to leverage the most granular program information possible. To isolate transactions that belong to awards made in our years of interest (fiscal years 2022–25), we first downloaded all transactions made between fiscal years 2016 through 2025. We then removed any transactions that belonged to an award ID that had any transaction activity before fiscal year 2022. One limitation of this approach is that we may still include some transactions for awards that originated before 2016; however, these cases should be minimal, and we consider it reasonable to treat any new activity after six years of inactivity as a new award.

We assign transactions to programs using federal assistance listings, which the federal government uses to categorize federal programs that provide grants, loans, scholarships, insurance, and other types of assistance awards. Assistance listings are the most consistent and reliable program information in the USAspending.gov data, but they might not always match the colloquial title or categorization of a program. For example, assistance listings may combine closely related activities that are described or awarded separately in other federal agency materials, and marketing materials may combine several assistance listings as a larger program or initiative. You can see a description of each assistance listing on its program page.

To give a more complete picture of the total funds a community might have received to support a type of infrastructure, we summed program-level data into nine distinct categories:

Most of our analysis of the distribution of federal infrastructure funds is done at the category level.

The federal government issues funds to regional, state, local, tribal, and private recipients. We indicate the CBSA, county, and state where funding was injected, but do not indicate the specific recipient. The CBSA, county, or state associated with an overall funding amount is not necessarily the specific recipient of some program funds (we use the county level as the smallest unit of geospatial analysis in this tool because it is nationally comprehensive). For example, we would assign an obligation for the Chicago Transit Authority to Cook County and to Illinois.

USAspending.gov data includes geographic information for both the recipient of an obligation and the “place of performance” of the funds, which is the location where the funds will be spent. When assigning obligations to counties, we used the place of performance county when available. In cases where the place of performance was missing, we used the recipient county. Therefore, there may be instances where the assigned county is not the location where the funds were spent. For example, an obligation for a statewide effort may list the state capital as the recipient, even if funds were distributed throughout the state. This may result in counties or CBSAs that contain state capitals appearing to receive more money than they did. The extent of this issue may vary by program or agency, as data collection and reporting practices differ.

For eight formula programs across multiple categories (Clean Water State Revolving Fund; Drinking Water State Revolving Fund; Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program; Weatherization Assistance Program; Motor Carrier Safety Assistance Program; State Safety Oversight Program; Housing Trust Fund [HTF]; and the Highway Safety programs) where funds were overwhelmingly concentrated in counties that contain state capitals or major state agencies, we redistributed each state’s total program funding to all counties in the state based on their share of the state population. This helped prevent the tool from artificially inflating the funds going to counties with state capitals. For the Formula Grants for Rural Areas and Tribal Transit Program, which is intended for rural and tribal areas with transit service, we distributed funds to any county with at least 50 transit riders (according to American Community Survey 2016–20 five-year estimates) based on their proportion of the state’s rural population. Finally, for several programs, we found that all funds going to New York City were concentrated in only one of the five New York City counties. In cases where it seemed reasonable to assume that funds would have been used across the entire city (All Stations Accessibility Program [ASAP], Bus and Bus Facilities programs, Community Development Block Grant [CDBG] Program, Federal Transit Administration Urbanized Area Formula Grants Program, Enhanced Mobility of Seniors and Individuals with Disabilities Program, State of Good Repair Grants Program [transit], Housing Choice Voucher Program [Section 8], HOME Investment Partnerships Program, Emergency Solutions Grants Program, Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS [HOPWA] Program, Public Housing Capital Fund, Public Housing Operating Fund, Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development [BUILD] Grant Program [formerly RAISE], and Safe Streets and Roads for All [SS4A] Grant Program), we redistributed New York City funds to all five New York City counties based on each county’s share of the New York City population.

Transaction data from USAspending.gov also includes negative obligations, or de-obligations. De-obligations usually come after an original obligation was made to return any project funds that weren’t spent. Most negative transactions cancel out positive transactions in our data and are included in our analysis to avoid overstating funding totals. However, if a jurisdiction still had negative totals after we summed transactions by category and jurisdiction, we recoded them as $0. This avoids implying that jurisdictions are paying the federal government outright. Because CBSAs are made up of counties, we aggregated the county-level funding data to create the CSBA-level funding data.

We collected data for community demographic and need characteristics from a wide range of publicly available sources, including the US Census Bureau 2016–20 five-year American Community Survey and data produced by other federal agencies. These characteristics allowed us to investigate how infrastructure funds were disbursed compared with (1) local demographics and (2) a jurisdiction’s investment needs. Demographic characteristics include the share of residents who are people of color and median household income. Need characteristics include broadband speed, number of public transit stops, share of vacant housing units, and share of bridges in poor condition, among others. For the full list of characteristics and data sources used in this tool, see table 1.

We provide data on a variety of characteristics that may help paint a picture of the level of need for infrastructure in specific communities and whether it is currently being met by federal funding. However, these characteristics do not always tell a clear story.

We use highway prevalence (miles of major roads and highways per capita per square mile), for example, as one way to evaluate transportation programs. Places that have more roads might need high levels of transportation funding to help maintain those roads, but places with fewer roads might also have a high need for funding to build new roads and connect communities that currently lack transportation options.

How agencies distribute funding depends on the processes and people in charge of making funding decisions. These actors may differ depending on whether a program uses a formula funding process or a competitive funding process.

Once we collected the funding data and established the demographic and need characteristic categories, we analyzed each of the 71 programs by comparing the distribution of funds across CBSAs, counties, and states against the various characteristics. This process allowed us to explore whether infrastructure funds are more likely to support communities with certain characteristics.

For each jurisdiction and category of infrastructure spending, we calculated where that jurisdiction ranks in terms of per capita funding. We then calculate where that jurisdiction ranks across a suite of relevant need characteristics. Comparing these characteristic rankings to the jurisdiction’s funding rank can help illustrate how places are being funded relative to their need.

We also calculated funding concentration measures for each infrastructure category. This measure evaluates whether funding in a category is concentrated in the highest-need jurisdictions according to specific characteristics. We consider the highest-need jurisdictions those that rank highest according to a given characteristic and contain 25 percent of the population.

For example, if the housing and community development category distributes about 25 percent of its funding to the counties where the quarter of the population with the highest housing cost burdens live, those counties receive as much funding as expected, based on population distribution. If the housing and community development category distributes 50 percent of funds to these places, they receive twice as much funding as expected. From a need perspective, it may be appropriate for the highest need places to receive more than 25 percent of the funding.

We also measured how much funding was distributed to counties with persistent poverty and to disadvantaged counties for each infrastructure category. Counties are considered to be in persistent poverty if 20 percent or more of the population lived in poverty in the 1990 decennial census, the 2000 decennial census, and the 2022 Small Area Income Poverty Estimates. As part of the Biden Administration’s Justice40 Initiative, census tracts were considered disadvantaged—and therefore a priority for funding—if they met several characteristics of underinvestment and environmental burden, including for income levels, climate risk, legacy pollution, energy costs, health risks, housing affordability and quality, transportation barriers, water quality, and unemployment. Federally recognized tribes, including Alaska Native villages, are also considered disadvantaged communities. We consider a county to be disadvantaged if more than 50 percent of its census tracts are disadvantaged, or if more than 50 percent of the county’s population lives in disadvantaged tracts.