Few people thought President Donald Trump would really pull the plug on the nation’s largest public works project — not even some members of his own administration.
But now work on the $16 billion train tunnels between New York and New Jersey is winding down, as POLITICO reported Tuesday morning, because Trump won’t pick up the tab for a project supported by Democrats, Republicans, labor unions, business groups and civic organizations.
Some of those same supporters lashed out at the Trump administration Tuesday, with the governor of New Jersey and a labor leader both calling it an “attack.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the situation “insane” and “absurd.”
“This makes absolutely no sense, yet here we are,” Schumer said during remarks in New York City to the bistate agency tasked with building the tunnels. “There is only one person who terminated Gateway and there is only one person who could get it back on track, and that’s President Trump.”
The federal Department of Transportation referred a request for comment to the White House, which did not immediately respond.
Trump first said the project was “terminated” back in October, in the early days of the 43-day government shutdown. In doing so, he explicitly tied his opposition to the project to Schumer’s longtime support for it.
Now the federal government is again on the brink of a shutdown with Schumer at the center of negotiations — this time with the main fight over Homeland Security funding after the killing of American citizens by federal immigration authorities in Minnesota.
Immediately after Trump’s threat to defund Gateway, some administration officials worked to soften the comments, saying the project was alive and suggesting the only holdup was a review of the project’s diversity hiring practices.
Republicans, meanwhile, refused to criticize Trump. In October, during his losing campaign for New Jersey governor, Jack Ciattarelli said the president was merely playing “hardball.” In November, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) said after the shutdown ended that the project should be “back on track.”
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, the Democrat who beat Ciattarelli, said Tuesday that Trump’s decision to bottle up the funds is “an illegal attack on New Jersey” and “shows a reckless disregard for our economy and the livelihoods of working families.” One of her campaign promises was to immediately sue over the funding holdup, but that hasn’t happened.
In the months since, the bistate Gateway Development Commission said it’s gone back and forth with the administration to try to get money released. Instead, it’s eaten through a $500 million line of credit it took out to keep construction going uninterrupted.
On Tuesday, the agency’s leader, Tom Prendergast, said work is now slowing down on the project and will pause entirely on Feb. 6 at four of five construction sites — a fifth is funded separately.
Union officials and laborers packed the commission’s meeting room at the World Trade Center and urged the president to reverse course, arguing he was not putting America first and rather hurting workers by idling a project that is expected to eventually employ 95,000 people.
“President Trump needs to stop the war against unions and American families,” said Robert Brunotte, a Brooklyn representative of Construction and General Building Laborers’ Local 79.
Gateway is meant to replace a pair of century-old tubes that were old and in bad shape even before they were damaged during Hurricane Sandy.
Trump would not be the first Northeast Republican to kill a version of the project. In 2010, New Jersey’s then-Republican Gov. Chris Christie, pulled the plug on a prior iteration of the project to help shore up the state budget.
Trump delayed the project during his first term when he tried to use it as a bargaining chip with Schumer to get his border wall built. Schumer refused to make the deal.
It’s unclear if Trump has a current, specific deal he would make to release the money for Gateway.
Because of the delay during the first term, the costs of the project increased by $2 billion. During the Biden administration, Schumer was able to secure funding guarantees from the federal government, which put it on the hook for the bulk of the project’s costs, and former President Joe Biden came to New York to break ground.
When Trump first came into office with a coalition of voters that included union members, many people didn’t expect him to touch the project.
During an interview a year ago, Prendergast didn’t seem too worried. “Transportation, by nature, has been bipartisan my entire career,” he told POLITICO.
Then the shutdown came, which Trump blamed on Democrats.
In direct retaliation, White House budget director Russell Vought said he was going to withhold $18 billion from New York City-area transportation projects — most of that being Gateway funding.
When the shutdown ended, the funding blockade didn’t.
The procedural justification is “unconstitutional DEI principles” at New York-area transit agencies — Gateway and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Leaders from both said they have been cooperating with the federal Department of Transportation to comply.
