Transportation departments in all 50 states and Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico used engineering consultants to assist them on federal-aid highway construction projects, a survey by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act authorized an average of $54.6 billion a year from FY 2022-2026 for the federal-aid highway program. The most important factors in state transportation departments’ decisions to hire outside engineering consultants were the size and skill of their own workforces. Half of state transportation departments reported that at least 60% of their engineering and design-related expenditures on these federal-aid projects were for engineering consultants. Read more here.