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When Trump returned to the White House in 2025, the Austin Transit Partnership (ATP) that’s overseeing a $7.1 billion to $8.2 billion light rail system radically retooled its pitch for more than $4 billion in crucial federal funds. It quickly deemphasized – or eradicated – references to minorities, environmental justice and climate change in its paperwork with the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), which disburses mass transit dollars.
New Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy – who oversees the FTA – issued a memo in early 2025 explaining that his agency now would prioritize projects with benefits that “outweigh the cost.” The memo said the agency no longer was interested in “the social cost of carbon.” It favored projects with “strong co-funding requirements,” obviating the need for “future DOT support.” The agency would favor “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average” and it would mandate local “cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.”
“It is unfortunate that the administration has taken that approach, Travis County Commissioner Jeff Travillion, who sits on ATP’s board, told Austin Free Press.
To gauge ATP’s prospects of getting two-thirds of its rail funding from the federal government, Austin Free Press filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking FTA correspondence with ATP since September 2024. The agency recently provided almost 1,600 pages of heavily redacted documents.
Citing disclosure exemptions for attorney-client privilege and deliberative processes, it blacked out every word on 40 percent of those pages.
What the agency did disclose paints a picture of federal and local bureaucrats looking for ways around Duffy’s memo to lay tracks in Austin. FTA officials, accustomed to presidents of opposing parties rescinding and replacing one another’s executive orders, coached ATP on revising its proposals to avoid conflicts with Trump administration policies on minorities and climate change. Records show ATP accepted the guidance as it pursued $4.6 billion in federal funding.
When “you revise or outright eliminate the histories that Black and (people of color) bring, then that’s to me a very violent display of disregard,” said Skyller Walkes, a Columbia University faculty member and former assistant dean of diversity and inclusion at the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Pharmacy. “It’s violent because erasure is violent, and it’s violent because advancing policies that cause harm or advance harm is a violent act,” said Walkes. “Who is authorizing those edits and what’s the justification behind those edits?”
It’s “disheartening” when “people don’t speak up” to confront such Trump administration policies, she added.
“Austin Light Rail was overwhelmingly approved by the voters and is rapidly advancing through a competitive federal funding process hitting major milestones, including the Final (Environmental Impact Statement)/Record of Decision from the Federal Transit Administration,” ATP said in a written statement to the Austin Free Press. “ATP will continue to adhere to the current administration’s guidelines and work with our federal partners in order to build this infrastructure investment which will support economic growth and connect people to jobs, housing and opportunity.”
“Clearly what they’re doing is they’re responding to this new environment” under the Trump administration that has been “on the attack on those kinds of programs,” said Austin NAACP President Nelson Linder. He called the changes ATP made under Trump “very concerning.”
‘Woke’ wars
Under Biden in 2024, ATP Senior Vice President Deron Lozano had cited “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” as the reason for rescheduling an FTA meeting. When Trump returned to the White House, ATP changed a reference in its “Project Coordination Plan” from engaging “Black, Indigenous and People of Color” to just engaging “minority populations.”
That was minor compared with the flurry of edits on the “Environmental Justice” chapter of ATP’s draft Environmental Impact Statement. By the time ATP released its Final Environmental Impact Statement in January 2026, it removed that entire chapter to comply with Trump executive orders with titles such as “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.”
Walkes said ATP’s vaporized environmental justice chapter reminded her of how UT’s College of Pharmacy has erased all her diversity work from its website. “If there’s public evidence of something, there … remains an opportunity to be accountable,” she said. “But when things are erased, you know the likelihood of accountability is eliminated.”
“From a public policy perspective it is always dangerous to fully remove chapters without understanding the implications of their removal,” Travillion said. “We expect that we will see some of the things that have been removed discussed in lawsuits that communities bring.”
Six months into Trump’s second term, FTA contracts consultant Harold Tye instructed ATP that its contracting provisions to promote disadvantaged businesses and to collect data on the race and gender of its contractors’ employees might “have to be abandoned.” Meanwhile, ATP Senior Vice President Brad Cummings assured multiple federal transit officials that ATP is ready “to comply with any changes to Applicable law.”
Just “because the administration opposes DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion policies), that does not mean that women-owned and minority owned businesses can’t apply” for Project Connect contracts, Travillion said.
Notes on a June 2025 FTA-ATP meeting about the National Environmental Policy Act show that Trump’s Council on Environmental Quality “withdrew GHG (greenhouse gases) and climate change from the Federal Register” and said that ATP’s draft Final Environmental Impact Statement “eliminated all references to climate change.”
“As far as DEI (Diversity Equity and Inclusion) is concerned, we’ve kind of had the worst in my opinion and I sense that many people are fighting back,” said the NAACP’s Linder, citing research that suggests that diverse and inclusive companies “are more profitable.”
Instead of participating in the Trump administration’s “erasure” of people of color, Walkes said that ATP should convene diversity experts to co-design transportation “solutions alongside the communities that are going to be impacted by them.”
Andrew Wheat is the Data, Information and Enterprise Editor of the Austin Free Press.
