New DOT Grants Bill Slashes Local Match by 50% for Rural Counties with High Federal Land Ownership

If you live in a rural county where the federal government owns a lot of the land, the MORE DOT Grants Act (More Opportunities for Rural Economies from DOT Grants Act) is designed to make it much easier for your local government to secure federal funding for infrastructure projects.

This bill targets what it calls "High-Density Public Land Counties." To qualify, a county must have a population under 100,000, and over 50 percent of its land must be owned or managed by the Federal Government (Section 2). For local or Tribal governments within these specific counties, the bill changes the game for a long list of qualifying Department of Transportation (DOT) grant programs—everything from the popular RAISE grants to funding for bus facilities and rural surface transportation.

Cutting the Cost of Entry

The biggest financial win here is the matching requirement reduction. Normally, when a local government applies for a federal grant, they have to put up some of their own money—the local match. This can be a huge hurdle for small, cash-strapped communities. This bill automatically cuts that required local match in half (by 50 percent) for these designated counties (Section 3). For a county trying to fund a $10 million road project, this could mean saving millions in local taxpayer dollars, making vital infrastructure projects suddenly affordable. This benefit is especially significant for Tribal governments within these counties, who often face similar funding challenges.

Priority Access and Hand-Holding

Beyond the money, the bill mandates a significant boost in assistance. The Secretary of Transportation must provide extra technical help and guidance to these applicants, both before and during the application process. This is the policy equivalent of the federal government holding your local planner’s hand through the paperwork maze, which is critical since small-town staff often lack the resources or expertise to compete with large cities for complex grants.

Furthermore, the bill creates a “priority lane” for applicants who have been previously overlooked. When DOT reviews applications, it must give preference to any local or Tribal government in a High-Density Public Land County that has not received money from that specific grant program in the last 10 years (Section 3). This is a clear effort to direct funding toward long-underserved areas, leveling the playing field for communities that have been waiting decades for upgrades.

Flexibility for Small-Town Realities

One of the most interesting provisions grants the Secretary of Transportation the power to be flexible with application rules. Standard grant scoring often favors large projects that promise huge metrics, like creating thousands of jobs or serving massive populations. This puts smaller, rural projects at a disadvantage. Under this bill, the Secretary can waive or adjust requirements that focus too much on numerical size—like the number of jobs created or people served—and can relax strict cash-on-hand rules (Section 3). This recognizes that a new bridge serving 500 people in a remote county is just as essential to that community as a subway line serving 500,000 people in a city, allowing the evaluation to focus on necessity over sheer scale.

The Trade-Offs for Taxpayers and Competitors

While this is great news for the targeted rural counties, it does introduce a couple of trade-offs. First, the 50% reduction in the local match means the federal government (and by extension, the national taxpayer) is picking up a larger share of the cost for these projects. Second, by creating a priority system for these specific counties, the bill inherently increases competition for other applicants—say, a city or a rural county that doesn't meet the high federal land ownership threshold—who will now have to compete against applicants with mandated priority status.