Mobile’s congressman has a pointed response to the celebration around the I-10 Mobile River Bridge and Bayway project: the president who is getting the credit did the least to pay for it.
U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures, D-Mobile, criticized President Donald Trump for not doing enough to fund the long-delayed project, pushing back on the Republicans around the state who have credited the White House with getting the multi-billion-dollar infrastructure work moving toward groundbreaking later this year.
The breadcrumbs quote
I am grateful we are at a point now where we can finally get shovels in the ground, Figures said. But to sit here and praise this administration for making this happen is almost like praising someone for giving you breadcrumbs while they sit there and eat steak in your face.
Donald Trump and his administration, he added, did not stand up for the state of Alabama and Mobile and Baldwin counties the way they stood up for him.
Figures made the remarks the day after ALDOT announced work on a new six-lane bridge over the Mobile River will begin by the end of 2026, with a new Bayway to follow. Tolls collected from the completed $3.2 billion Mobile River Bridge will help fund construction of the new Bayway. The bridge could be completed as early as 2031, and the existing Bayway — formally known as the Jubilee Parkway — will be restriped to three lanes in each direction in the meantime.
The funding record
Figures’ argument rests on the project’s funding history. The first Trump administration provided $125 million in grant funding for the project through the Infrastructure for Rebuilding America program in 2019 — a significant down payment. But Figures pointed out that the Biden administration’s $550 million Bridge Investment Program grant, awarded to the state in 2024, was the single largest federal contribution the project has received.
Interstate projects typically receive more than 70 percent of their direct funding from the federal government, Figures noted, but the lion’s share of the I-10 Mobile River Bridge and Bayway will instead be financed through a federal Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act loan that will be largely repaid with toll revenue — a loan the U.S. Department of Transportation, under the current administration, closed to fill the project’s financing gap.
Figures said the current administration has strung the project along and denied direct requests for funding support that he submitted to the White House, along with similar requests from U.S. Sens. Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville and from state and local officials.
The other side of the argument
ALDOT has credited recent actions by the Trump administration with making construction possible this fall, and the state’s Republican officials have been effusive. Tuberville thanked Trump, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles for listening to Alabama, cutting through red tape and helping get the project moving forward. Britt said she could not be more grateful to the president for recognizing the project’s importance. U.S. Rep. Barry Moore, R-Dothan, called the project a generational investment in South Alabama.
The disagreement is partly about what counts as credit. The federal loan and the regulatory fast-tracking that allowed the bonds to be sold did come during the current administration. But the two biggest grant awards — the $125 million INFRA grant in 2019 and the $550 million Bridge Investment Program grant in 2024 — came from two different administrations, and the project has been in the works for more than three decades across a dozen Congresses.
What Figures wants next
Figures said he will keep pushing for more direct federal funding for the project in Congress. A proposal he has championed to increase the federal funding Alabama receives for bridge improvements recently advanced out of a U.S. House committee, and he has argued that interstate projects of this scale should not lean so heavily on toll-backed loans when the federal government funds a majority of interstate work nationally.
The debate over credit is more than political theater: it shapes future funding requests. If the project is remembered as a triumph of the current administration, future requests for federal transportation dollars from Alabama’s delegation will be measured against that narrative. Figures, the first person to hold the newly redrawn Mobile-based congressional seat, has made infrastructure funding one of his early priorities, and his framing — that Alabama got crumbs while other states got steak — is designed to keep the pressure on the administration for the second phase of the project, the new Bayway, which will need its own funding in the years ahead.
For now, the project moves forward: groundbreaking expected before the end of 2026, tolling to begin when the bridge opens, and a yearslong argument in Washington over who deserves the credit.