TRANSPORTATION/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The Trump administration has more than tripled the amount of money flowing from an Obama-era transportation program to projects in rural areas, shifting aid to localities that the White House says have been left behind in years of postrecession economic expansion. The $211 million swing toward rural communities in the Transportation Department grant program is one of the most concrete policy shifts in the agency’s stated goal of helping less densely populated areas of the country—most of them regions that voted for Mr. Trump in 2016. The 2017 grants announced earlier this month under the program, called Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery, or Tiger, total nearly $500 million in funding for highway and transit projects across the country. Some $314 million of those grants, or 64% of the total, will go to projects in rural locations, defined as those outside areas with 50,000 or more residents. About 19% percent of the U.S. population lives in those rural areas.”
-Ted Mann, “Trump Shifts Focus of Transportation Grants From City to Country,” The Wall Street Journal online, Mar. 28, 2018, 9:00am