Few individual animals have ever been more important to their species than 2323M — a red wolf, dubbed Airplane Ears by advocates for his prominent extremities, who spent his brief but fruitful life on North Carolina’s Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge.

Red wolves, smaller, rust-tinged cousins to gray wolves, are among the world’s rarest mammals, pushed to the brink of extinction by threats such as habitat loss, indiscriminate killing, and road collisions. By 2019 fewer than 15 were known to survive in the wild. Against that grim backdrop, 2323M offered hope.

Born at a federal site in Florida, he was released in 2021 onto the Alligator River refuge, a swath of coastal plain on North Carolina’s eastern shore. Over the next two years, he and a female known as 2225F raised 11 pups.

Alas, in September 2023, Airplane Ears was killed by a car on US 64, the highway that runs through the refuge. One of the world’s rarest species had lost its most prolific member.

Airplane Ears was an extraordinary animal who suffered a common fate. Around one-fifth of red wolves meet their end on a bumper, many on US 64, a primary route that vacationers take to the Outer Banks, the picturesque chain of barrier islands that line North Carolina’s seaboard. Black bears and white-tailed deer, and even alligators fall victim to collisions that kill animals and result in “significant harm to humans and vehicles,” according to the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Even the occasional alligator blunders onto the highway.  

While US 64’s roadkill rates are exceptional, it’s far from the only perilous highway in the United States, where animal crashes annually cost society more than $10 billion in hospital bills, vehicle repairs, and other expenses.   For species from Florida panthers to California tiger salamanders to North Carolina’s red wolves, collisions pose an extinction-level threat. 

After 2323M perished, a coalition of conservation groups began pushing the North Carolina Department of Transportation to retrofit the highway with fences and underpasses — essentially spacious tunnels that would allow red wolves and other animals to slink safely beneath US 64. “We knew that something had to be done, quick,” says Ron Sutherland, chief scientist at the Wildlands Network, a conservation group that focuses on habitat connectivity throughout North America. Otherwise, wild red wolves could be lost. 

Drumming up millions of dollars for wildlife crossings has always been a tall order. In December, however, North Carolina received $25 million from the US Department of Transportation to build underpasses on Highway 64. Combined with $4 million that Wildlands Network and the Center for Biological Diversity raised in donations, as well as state funds, it was enough to make a stretch of Highway 64 safe for wolves. “It felt really good to know that something had gone right for the red wolf, for once,” Sutherland says. 

That the transportation department invested in animal underpasses may come as a surprise — its primary mission, after all, is to facilitate human movements, not the peregrinations of wolves and deer. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), however, contained an initiative called the Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program, which allotted $350 million in competitive grants for animal passage,  the largest pot of federal funding ever earmarked for the cause. In addition to North Carolina’s red-wolf crossings, the program has awarded grants for nearly three dozen projects — some of which will aid imperiled species such as ocelots and desert tortoises, many more that will seek to avert dangerous crashes with large mammals like deer, elk, and moose.

“This is not ornamental,” Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden’s transportation secretary, told Vox of the wildlife crossings program in an interview earlier this year. “This is something that ties into the very core of our mission, which is to secure the safety of the American traveling public.” 

Unfortunately for the red wolf and many other species, President Donald Trump’s administration may not agree. 

The future of the wildlife crossings program, and many similar initiatives that the BIL supports, is uncertain. Shortly after taking office, Trump suspended the disbursement of BIL funds, leaving hundreds of Biden-era initiatives twisting in the political wind. Will animal passages, traditionally an overwhelmingly nonpartisan solution, endure? Or will the Trump administration stymie crossings, and a plethora of other BIL projects, before they ever truly get off the ground — perhaps dooming red wolves, and many other animals, in the process? 

A tenuous renaissance for wildlife-friendly infrastructure

The Pueblo of Santa Ana is an approximately 79,000-acre shard of New Mexican desert that’s criss-crossed by roads. Highway 550 plows below the southwestern edge of the Pueblo, known to its Native inhabitants as Tamaya; to the east and south, I-25 barrels along from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, impeding the movements of elk, pronghorn antelope, mountain lions, and other species. As in North Carolina, constructing wildlife crossings and fences along these highways, says Myron Armijo, the Pueblo’s governor, will save the lives of both drivers and wild creatures. “These animals are part of our culture and tradition, and we have very high respect for them,” he said. 

It’s thus only fitting that the Pueblo is where Buttigieg chose to launch the wildlife crossings program. On a windy day in April 2023, Buttigieg spoke with tribal leaders, made a brief speech backdropped by one of the Southwest’s busiest interstates, I-25, and toured a concrete underpass, its walls scrawled with graffiti, through which animals already cross the interstate.

“You couldn’t help but be struck by the deep connection that these tribal communities have with wildlife and the natural environment,” Buttigieg said. “And at the same time, this is not just a spiritual concern, because they’ve also tallied up the car crashes that are caused by these wildlife-vehicle collisions that we can prevent with better roadway design.”

Over two rounds of grants since, the wildlife crossings program has awarded an eclectic array of crossings. Western states, where animals often move along clearly defined migration routes, have historically built more passages than Eastern ones, and the wildlife crossings program has duly channeled money to states like Colorado, for a major overpass on I-25 south of Denver, and Utah, for underpasses on Highway 89. 

But the program has also funneled money eastward. Maryland, New York, and Georgia are among the states that received relatively modest planning grants in December, and Maine earned $9.3 million to build a passage for moose and deer. 

“If you look at a map that overlays the projects from the first two rounds of funding, you will see coast-to-coast diversity,” said Renee Callahan, executive director of ARC Solutions, a group that studies and supports animal passages.

In today’s politics, wildlife crossings may seem like a flight of fancy, but in reality, they’re critical safety infrastructure. Deer collisions alone kill an average of 440 drivers annually, making white-tailed deer deadlier than bears, alligators, and sharks combined. One study found that underpasses in Wyoming prevented so many perilous, expensive crashes that the state was on pace to recoup their costs in just five years.

If the program has a shortcoming, it’s that it doesn’t go far enough. In 2024 alone, applicants requested $585 million in federal funding, nearly five times more than the transportation department made available that round. That left lots of worthy crossings unbuilt, like passages on Highway 191 south of Bozeman, Montana, that would have spared elk, deer, and grizzly bears.

Callahan, like many conservationists, hopes that the pilot program will eventually be made permanent, ideally at a minimum of $1 billion over five years. “There are thousands of projects where today, based on a flat-out cost-benefit analysis, we’re going to save money in the long term by investing in this infrastructure,” Callahan said. 

In Callahan’s view, the pilot program has another flaw: The states and other entities that apply are required to bring up to 20 percent of their project’s costs to the table, a serious obstacle to Native tribes, which, in Callahan’s view, shouldn’t be subject to the matching-funds obligation. That didn’t dissuade the Santa Ana Pueblo, who drummed up their share through a separate state grant. In December, the Pueblo learned that it had received close to $6.4 million to design passages on the highways bordering their lands. “I was totally elated,” Armijo said. No longer would the Pueblo be an ecological island in an ocean of asphalt.  

What will Trump mean for infrastructure? 

As John Oliver once observed, rarely is infrastructure sexy — and neither is retrofitting it for nature. Consider the National Culvert Removal, Replacement, and Restoration Grant Program, which allocated $1 billion over five years to fix decrepit culverts, the unglamorous pipes that funnel water beneath roadways. Derelict culverts both threaten the integrity of roads and block fish migrations; on one stream in western Washington, for example, a series of too-narrow, impassable culverts prevent salmon from reaching their spawning grounds, violating the fishing rights of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe.  

When the first round of culvert funding was announced in August 2023, the Jamestown S’Klallam received $4.2 million to replace a pair of outdated culverts and thus restore nearly four miles of salmon habitat. 

“It doubles as two things — it opens up blocked fish passage, and we’re repairing road infrastructure,” said LaTrisha Suggs, the Jamestown S’Klallam’s restoration planner. 

Now, however, such initiatives are in jeopardy. In his first month in office, Trump has proposed slashing budgets, environmental protections, and the federal workforce alike. Among his first acts was to sign an executive order, titled “Unleashing American Energy,” that instructed agencies to “immediately pause the disbursement of funds” authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, pending review within 90 days. 

According to a January 29 memo from new Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, that executive order has led the agency to evaluate and potentially revoke many of its existing funding agreements, including any that mention climate change or environmental justice. The order could violate the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which prevents presidents from withholding congressionally authorized funds. On February 13, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro sued the Trump administration, arguing that its funding freeze broke the federal government’s contract “to provide billions of dollars in congressionally approved funding,” and in late February the administration restored more than $2 billion to the state.

The wildlife crossings program is among the many confronting uncertainty. 

According to Erin Sito, US public policy director for the Wildlands Network, a number of states have been told by the Federal Highway Administration (FAA) that their grants are “on hold,” without any clear next steps. (The agency did not respond to a request for comment.) “It’s definitely caught up with all the transportation projects that are not getting funded or administered at the moment,” Sito said. The Santa Ana Pueblo is among the affected recipients: Glenn Harper, the Pueblo’s wildlife biologist, said that the FAA informed the tribe that its grant was “on pause,” though Harper remains optimistic that the Santa Ana’s crossings will eventually move forward.

Delays notwithstanding,  conservationists still have ample reason to hope that the program will ultimately endure. As Deb Kmon Davidson, chief strategy officer for the nonprofit Center for Large Landscape Conservation, puts it, wildlife crossings tend to be “super bipartisan.“The preservation of migration routes enjoys broad support in red-swinging Nevada and in blue Oregon, and in conservative states like Wyoming, hunters are among the issue’s staunchest champions. Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) included a forerunner to the wildlife crossings program in a 2019 highway bill, and US Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana, who served as interior secretary during Trump’s first term, implemented a secretarial order directing Western states to protect big-game habitat and migration pathways. With Reps. Don Beyer (D-VA) and Alex Padilla (D-CA), Zinke is also cosponsor of the Wildlife Movement Through Partnerships Act, a bill that would help states, tribes, and federal agencies study and protect animal corridors, which was reintroduced to Congress in January. Animal passages may be that most endangered of Washington species: a relatively nonpartisan issue.

“Frankly, when we launched this program, I was ready for folks from the other side of the aisle to pounce and say, ‘Oh, you’re building highways for bunny rabbits,’ … when actually some of the strongest and most enthusiastic responses we got were from Republican legislators from states that have confronted wildlife-vehicle collisions on a daily basis,” Buttigieg told Vox. “My hope is that this will be a proverbial bridge-building exercise that enjoys support, whoever’s in charge.”

In the meantime, many states are just hoping they receive the funding they’re due. In North Carolina, the state’s transportation department is still figuring out precisely what its red-wolf crossings will look like and how many to build. (Although its grant application included a conceptual map with potential passage locations, a spokesperson from the agency said that “no additional analysis” has since been conducted.) But that planning and implementation can’t take place until the federal government releases money to the state. “NCDOT has yet to receive any guidance on the status of the Wildlife Crossing Pilot Program,” the spokesperson told Vox in an email. 

The fate of that funding could mean the difference between life and death, both for red wolves and the many other species that call the Alligator River refuge home. 

In August 2024, Wildlands Network launched daily roadkill surveys along US 64, cruising the highway and counting dead deer, bears, snakes, turtles, otters, bobcats, and other critters. In February the researchers counted their 3,000th animal — and though the survey hasn’t yet documented a dead red wolf, it seems only a matter of time. In an email, Sutherland said that federal turmoil was likely to “induce some delays” in building crossings, “which is sad for the wolves and other wildlife.”

Delays are the one thing red wolves can’t afford. 

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