Half a century of building the country's transportation.
The Department of Transportation's budget authority, FY1976– FY2031, from OMB's Historical Tables. This is agency-wide budget authority — because most of DOT's money is Highway-Trust-Fund contract authority under obligation limitations, the line moves with surface-transportation reauthorizations and the periodic infrastructure supplementals (the 2009 Recovery Act, the 2021 IIJA) far more than with annual discretionary appropriations. It is not the same construct as the FY2027 Budget Highlights total-budgetary-resources or discretionary-BA frames, and is never conflated with them.
FY2027 budget authority
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nominal · OMB estimate · agency-wide
Series peak
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Series span
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0 fiscal years
Years parsed
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contiguous, numeric — self-checked
DOT budget authority — the arc
nominal (current $) · OMB Historical Table 5.2Reading the arc
The steady baseline is the recurring surface-transportation program — Highway Trust Fund contract authority that Congress reauthorizes in multiyear bills (ISTEA, TEA-21, SAFETEA-LU, MAP-21, FAST Act) and caps each year with an obligation limitation. The spikes are the extraordinary infrastructure surges: the 2009 Recovery Act and, above all, the 2021 IIJA, whose one-time advance appropriations push the line to its peak and then expire — which is why the FY2027 estimate falls back toward the recurring baseline. That is exactly why a department-level monitor keeps this agency-wide budget authority distinct from the discretionary program budget: the discretionary side is a small, deliberately-appropriated number this line would otherwise swallow. This series is shown in nominal dollars: OMB's Historical Table 5.2 does not publish a constant-dollar basis, and we do not synthesize one.