The grant list is out. On July 7, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced $1.73 billion in BUILD awards spread across 127 projects in 52 states, territories and the District of Columbia, the latest tranche of IIJA-funded discretionary money for roads, transit, ports and rail.
Roads and bridges took the lion’s share at $1.3 billion. Transit landed $169.9 million, ports $136.8 million, and freight and passenger rail $87.7 million. A quieter line item: $62 million for truck-parking projects in Kentucky, Wyoming, Louisiana, Mississippi and Illinois, a persistent safety headache that rarely makes headlines.
Demand still dwarfs supply
The awards read small against the appetite. DOT fielded nearly 1,200 eligible applications requesting more than $14.5 billion, roughly eight times what was on the table. That ratio is the real story: state and local sponsors have shovel-ready work far exceeding federal capacity to fund it.
Where the dollars land
Individual awards range from a $24 million pavement-and-guardrail package on North Dakota’s I-94 to $8.5 million to widen the Port of Seward’s freight dock in Alaska. It’s the unglamorous backbone work, resurfacing, dock widening, transit-maintenance upgrades, that keeps the network moving. Big signature jobs like the O’Hare Global Terminal get the attention; these grants keep the rest of it standing.
Details via Construction Dive and USDOT.