U.S. Highway Agency Launches $848M IIJA Resilience Grant Program

Roads and bridge, transit, port, passenger rail and pedestrian-oriented projects are eligible for grants.

The U.S. Dept. of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration has launched another in its long series of Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act competitive grant programs—this time focused on projects aimed at protecting roads, bridges, ports, passenger rail and pedestrian facilities from damage from storms and other natural disasters.

The new round of Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient and Cost-Saving Transportation, or PROTECT, grants, which the agency announced on April 21, makes available a total of $848 million, which will draw on the law's fiscal 2022 and 2023 dollars.

According to the funding-availability notice, applications are due by Aug. 18.

Projects can involve hardening, raising or moving roads and bridges. FHWA Administrator Shailen Bhatt told reporters in an April 20 briefing that the PROTECT grants also can go for planning and for using technology, for such uses as improving sign systems for highways designated as evacuation routes in times of disasters.

Follow-on to Formula Grants

The round of discretionary PROTECT grants follows a $1.4-billion initial installment of PROTECT formula funding that FHWA allocated to states last July.

Among the projects being funded by those PROTECT formula grants are design work to raise a section of Kentucky Route 459 above the floodplain. Plans would include raising Bull Run Creek Bridge.

In New Hampshire, PROTECT formula funds will help to move state Route 16 a distance of 200 ft to deal with washouts and unstable slopes from flooding of the Androscoggin River.

Unlike the PROTECT formula money that was distributed among states, discretionary grants under the program are also available to cities, counties and other entities.

The funding-availability notice says that projects should use "innovative and collaborative approaches to risk reduction, including the use of natural infrastructure" such as conservation, restoration or building marshes, wetlands, stormwater bioswales, breakwaters, reefs, dunes and shade trees.

Deputy DOT Secretary Polly Trottenberg said the discretionary PROTECT round is the last of some 40 competitive infrastructure act grant programs launched by U.S. DOT in the first year of funding under the law. .

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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