Assistance program
Motor Carrier Safety Assistance
$3.5 Billion committed in FY2018–FY2026
- Agency
- Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, Transportation, Department of
- Assistance
- Formula Grants
- CFDA number
- 20.218
- What it does
- The Motor Carrier Safety Assistance Program (MCSAP) is a Federal formula grant program that provides financial assistance to States to reduce the number and severity of crashes and hazardous materials incidents involving commercial motor vehicles (CMV). The goal of the MCSAP is to reduce CMV-involved crashes, fatalities, and injuries through consistent, uniform, and effective CMV safety programs. Investing grant monies in appropriate safety programs will increase the likelihood that safety defects, driver deficiencies, and unsafe motor carrier practices will be detected and corrected before they become contributing factors to crashes.
- Who benefits
- Under the Basic and Incentive grant programs, a State lead MCSAP agency, as designated by its Governor, is eligible to apply for Basic and Incentive grant funding by submitting a commercial vehicle safety plan (CVSP), in accordance with the provisions of Title 49 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Part 350.201 and 205.
- Who applies
- All States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, are eligible for MCSAP. The MCSAP grants are provided annually to the State’s MCSAP lead agency. A MCSAP lead agency is designated by the Governor as the State motor vehicle safety agency responsible for administering the Commercial Vehicle Safety Plan (CVSP) within the State. The CVSP is also known in statute and regulation as the “Plan†and serves as the MCSAP grant program application, project plan, and budget.
- Program site
- https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/mission/grants ↗
Committed by fiscal year
* FY2026 is year-to-date — the fiscal year is still in progress, so its total is still filling in. The striped band and dashed line mark that provisional stretch.
Top recipients
By dollars committed.
How to read these numbers
- Committed through this program
Money committed under this assistance listing (its CFDA program), counted in the year each action happened.
- How it's paid
Most programs pay out one way — a grant, or a direct payment to individuals; the flow bar only appears when a program genuinely mixes types.
- Some recipients aren't itemized
For entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government reports one aggregate instead of naming tens of millions of people, so the recipient roster isn't part of the public record.
- Awards, counted once
An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, however many times it was amended.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct payments