Last September, the big hats in the political hierarchy of New York and New Jersey spent an hour at the White House with President Trump. They were seeking a pile of money to pay for a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River connecting northern New Jersey and Manhattan.
The cost would be an astronomical $30 billion. The states wanted Trump to sign off on a deal under which the federal government would pay half the tab. That wasn’t all. The feds would also provide a loan covering 45 percent of the cost. The states would be obliged to pay what’s left out of their own pockets.
It was a big ask. So when the delegation departed, Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the Senate minority leader, stayed behind to make the case for Trump’s support one-on-one. That was probably a mistake, but not the only one.
Schumer and Trump, both New Yorkers, have known each other for years and got along peaceably. When Trump was a Democrat, he gave money to Schumer’s campaigns. Now Trump is a Republican of sorts, and they’re enemies. Schumer’s specialty is blocking nominees to the Trump administration. The president likes to humiliate Schumer any way he can, particularly on Senate votes.
In late February, Trump let it be known he opposes federal funding of the tunnel, formally known as the Gateway Program. There was no actual announcement from the White House. The president merely instructed Speaker Paul Ryan to cut a $900 million earmark from a $1 trillion omnibus House spending bill.
That proposed expenditure had been slipped into the legislation by Rodney P. Frelinghuysen, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. He’s a Republican, but what’s more important is he’s from New Jersey. There was no matching earmark in the Senate.
Democrats assumed Trump’s decision was political payback: The president didn’t want Schumer to benefit from anything he did. Chances are that sentiment played a part in Trump’s decision, but only a part. There’s a lot more to the tunnel issue than Trump.
Politicians, transportation officials, and the media in New York and New Jersey have been promoting the new tunnel for years. They make a pretty good case. It goes like this: The two tubes of the rail tunnel under the Hudson are badly aging, and if one has to shut down for repairs, there will be hell to pay if a replacement isn’t ready. Commerce, train service, indeed the economy of the entire Northeast would suffer.
After the White House session in September, Schumer and his entourage were optimistic the project would fall into place. The federal money would flow. New York and New Jersey would get the special treatment they were seeking. They’d hopscotch over other states eager for federal funding of transportation projects. They were dreaming.
They should have known better from their experience with the Obama administration. In November 2015, Transportation secretary Anthony Foxx agreed to a tunnel deal in which the federal government would cover nearly all the costs with grants or loans. A “new federal commitment” to the Hudson tunnel project was announced in a press release.
Nothing came of it. There was no deal, only the press release. Some tunnel backers have claimed the “informal” agreement was binding on the federal government. But that didn’t fly. Officials in the Department of Transportation—the Trump department—scoured the agency for a contract obligating the parties or any agreement to share costs. They found zilch.
But after the hour with Trump in September, hope returned, with little basis for it. “Just a few months ago, the idea once again appeared to have gained the support it needed in Washington and, once again, it looks as if one powerful official—in this case, the president—could put a stop to it,” the New York Times reported.
Sure enough, that’s now Trump’s position. He is threatening to veto the entire spending measure if the money for the tunnel remains. Maybe this is just a bargaining position. However, that isn’t the only impediment. There’s the populist problem. Why should flyover states heavily subsidize a project of two of the richest states? Answer: They shouldn’t. New York and New Jersey should pay more. Since 90 percent of the tunnel’s commuters are expected to come from New Jersey, shouldn’t that state pay a bigger share? Same answer.
Then there’s the queue problem. The new tunnel is eligible for a Transportation Department program called New Starts. As of last week, 52 New Starts projects were in line ahead of it. New York and New Jersey have shown no interest in getting in that line. They’d rather take the buttinski approach, which Frelinghuysen’s earmark would, in effect, let them do. And by the way, the earmark would be a down payment, guaranteeing the rest of the federal bucks would follow.
Would the other 48 states stand by mutely as two big, brash, and bountiful states laugh at their expense all the way to the federal bank? I doubt it. And what about Trump’s infrastructure program? Those projects are supposed to be spread around the country, not concentrated in a few gigantic undertakings.
It’s common in our political system to exaggerate the need for federal aid, to insist a crisis exists when it’s only a serious problem. What prompts suspicion is the inactivity of the Obama administration after the agreement in November 2015. There were 14 months left in the Obama era. Yet a contract with the states wasn’t signed, much less put in force.
Where was Schumer when nothing was happening?
