US DOT Awards $5B to Major Bridge Projects

Winners Picked for $5B in DOT Bridge Grants

Bridge grants come from a five-year, $40-billion IIJA program.
Illustration by Scott Hilling/ENR, original elements by Getty Images.

In one of its highest-profile infrastructure grant announcements, the U.S. Dept. of Transportation has awarded $5 billion to projects to rebuild, repair and restore 13 large, critically important bridges from coast to coast

The grants are funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act’s Bridge Investment Program and will go to projects in 16 states. Overall, the program contains $40 billion over five years. The latest awards are Large Bridge Grants, a subset of the Bridge Investment Program.

In a July 16 briefing for reporters, DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg said, “These bridges affect whole regions and ultimately impact the entire U.S. economy.” Buttigieg added, “And what they all have in common is that their condition means they need major, urgent investment to help keep people safe and to keep our supply chains growing smoothly.”

Top Five Grants

The largest grant in the group is $1.4 billion to the Oregon Dept. of Transportation, for a project to replace two vertical lift bridges carrying Interstate-5 over the Columbia River and connecting Portland, Ore., with Vancouver, Wash. The project also won a $600-million grant in January through DOT’s Mega grant program.

The second-largest award in the new bridge grant round is $993 million to the Massachusetts DOT for the planned replacement of the Sagamore Bridge in Cape Cod. That project, too, received a $372-million Mega grant earlier in January.

Ranking third among the awards is $550 million to the Alabama DOT, to replace the Mobile River Bridge and the Bayway Multimodal Project.

Next in size is a grant to the Pennsylvania DOT, which is receiving $500 million to replace the I-83 South Bridge in Harrisburg.

Also among the top awardees is the Tennessee DOT, which gets $394 million for the America’s River Crossing project, which is to replace the 75-year-old I-55 Bridge spanning the Mississippi River between Memphis, Tenn., and West Memphis, Ark.

As with other DOT discretionary grant programs, the funds from the large bridge program were in great demand. Shailen Bhatt, head of DOT's Federal Highway Administration, said that the agency received 33 eligible applications, seeking a total of almost $10 billion, in the latest round.

The large bridge program is open to projects whose total costs exceed $100 million.

The minimum grant is $50 million. The maximum grant is 50% of eligible project costs. According to the FHWA, a priority is given to projects that are ready to go to construction.

More broadly, Buttigieg also said that through the IIJA’s several bridge programs, there are more than 10,200 projects underway, “and counting.”

U.S. DOT announced the new awards on July 17. But governors and members of the congressional delegations from states where the winning projects are located got earlier notifications about the grants and broke the news several days before U.S. DOT did.

Tom Ichniowski has been writing about the federal government as ENR’s Washington Bureau Chief since the George H.W. Bush administration, and he has covered at least five major highway bills. A recognized expert on government policy on infrastructure and regulation, Tom is also a Baltimore native and Orioles fan who grew up rooting for Brooks and Frank Robinson. He is a graduate of Columbia College and Columbia’s graduate school of journalism, where he once used “unrelentless” in a headline.

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