If the five projects are approved for the loans, the amounts probably won’t be as large as their sponsoring agencies or companies  had desired. Their TIFIA loan requests total about $1.63 billion, which would require direct DOT subsidies of about $163 million.

DOT said it has $110 million in direct subsidy assistance available for TIFIA this year.  That would support about $1.1 billion in loans.

TIFIA was created under the 1998 Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21). 

The program has strong support in Congress. The surface transportation authorization bill that the Senate passed in March would boost direct TIFIA funding nearly tenfold, to $1 billion a year.