The U.S. Government Accountability Office has concluded that the Department of Transportation failed to meet a core statutory obligation tied to its Office of Multimodal Freight Infrastructure and Policy: periodic reporting to Congress on the office’s activities, staffing, and program administration. The finding, released April 20, 2026, carries immediate weight as lawmakers prepare to deliberate on the reauthorization of federal surface transportation funding, which expires at the end of fiscal year 2026.

The GAO’s March 2026 report on telework and travel patterns contains a data point that deserves to stand alone: as of fiscal year 2024, exactly one of the 26 cities the Federal Transit Administration designates as top transit cities had recovered ridership to 2019 levels. That city is Miami–Fort Lauderdale, at 104 percent. Every other major transit system in the country remains below the line. The spread is wide. Salt Lake City recovered to 91 percent.

A March 2026 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office puts hard numbers on what transit agencies and metropolitan planners have been navigating since 2020: telework rates tripled during the pandemic and have not come back down to earth. According to American Community Survey data analyzed by GAO, the share of workers who primarily worked from home stood at 5.7 percent in 2019. By 2021 it had reached 17.9 percent. By 2024 it had declined to 13.