Trump Casts Doubt on Gateway Tunnel Funds as Feds Reluctantly Release First $30 Million

The delayed Gateway Tunnel rail project beneath the Hudson River reopens perennial debates about big-ticket infrastructure, political grandstanding, and the future of New York’s economic lifeblood.

New York’s Penn Station, which once saw the arrival and departure of half a million rail passengers a day, remains the city’s busiest transit hub and a symbol of both its dynamism and its perennial infrastructure woes. In recent weeks, those woes found a new stage. On February 12th, former president Donald Trump took to his social media pulpit to deride the Gateway Tunnel—a planned $16.1bn railway link between Manhattan and New Jersey—as a “boondoggle,” predicting costs would soar “many BILLIONS OF DOLLARS more than projected.” No evidence was offered; the timing, however, was precise. Just days before, a federal judge had reluctantly forced the Department of Transportation to release a $30m sliver of overdue funding for the project, despite ongoing appeals and White House hostility.

At stake is more than concrete and track. The Gateway Tunnel, if ever finished, would replace the crumbling, century-old tubes under the Hudson River—vital arteries for 200,000 daily commuters and a backbone of the Northeast’s economy. With the existing tunnels severely hobbled by Superstorm Sandy’s saltwater deluge in 2012, Amtrak engineers warn that without intervention, one tunnel may need to close for long-term repairs within a decade. Were that to happen, the region’s already strained rail link would halve in capacity, with knock-on delays and economic aftershocks likely to reverberate across cities from Boston to Washington.

For New York itself, the Gateway project has always carried existential weight. The city’s global status, not to mention its $2 trillion regional economy, rests disproportionately on fast, reliable movement across a narrow stretch of river. Since 2014, the project has alternately marched and limped forward under a succession of governors, mayors, and presidents, each brandishing bold pledges, but few delivering lasting commitment. The recent stalling owes as much to Washington’s partisan ferment as to anything technical; the Trump administration’s protracted funding freeze, nominally about compliance with contracting rules, looks in practice almost entirely political.

Such brinksmanship is hardly new. Big metropolitan infrastructure ventures have a grim record of cost overruns: the Second Avenue Subway’s first leg cost a staggering $2.5bn per mile, more than quadruple comparable European efforts. But Gateway, thus far, has managed to steer clear of the most florid calamities, with project overseers—the Gateway Development Commission—insisting both construction and spending remain “on time and on budget.” Their reticence to spar with Mr. Trump in public reflects a bureaucratic wariness learned at great cost.

The funding freeze has already begun to exert pressure beyond bureaucratic headaches. Contractors, once sanguine about timelines, now mutter about supply-chain disruptions. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority warns that any misadventure could ripple out, affecting not only commuters but also the city’s post-pandemic economic hopes—an unpalatable prospect for employers weighing office returns. For Governor Kathy Hochul and her counterparts in New Jersey, the stakes are political as well as practical: failure here bodes ill for any administration’s reputation for competence.

The federal government’s fitful support complicates these local anxieties. In response to Mr. Trump’s rhetorical bombast, state officials note that Washington is already insulated from footing any cost overruns by existing contracts—an implicit correction to the president’s flamboyant, if ungrounded, threats. With America’s longstanding appetite for grand projects now tempered by fiscal caution and intergovernmental mistrust, Gateway faces a uniquely American malaise: no single actor can kill it, yet none possess unambiguous authority to see it through.

The politics of big projects, the realities of urban decline

Other global cities offer examples both salutary and cautionary. Europe’s Crossrail (now the Elizabeth Line) in London, conceived in the late 20th century and beset by delays and overruns, nonetheless delivered an operational quantum leap upon completion. In Japan, the Sanyo Shinkansen, built in the 1970s, typified disciplined project management—and now underpins the nation’s economic dynamism. American mega-projects, by contrast, resemble passion plays: bitterly contested, then grudgingly executed, usually at extravagant cost.

Mr. Trump’s comparison of Gateway to California’s beleaguered high-speed rail initiative is only middlingly apt. That project, born amid political fanfare but hampered by cost inflation and shifting requirements, is today a national byword for boondoggles. Gateway, unlike California’s rail, addresses a present, not notional, demand—its necessity barely disputed even among its sternest critics. Whether it succumbs to the same inertia, however, will hinge on institutional stamina, not rhetorical flourishes.

As the

legal and administrative maneuvering continues, New Yorkers endure daily reminders of infrastructure held together by hope, epoxy, and years of deferred maintenance. Longer-term, the risk is less some spectacular collapse than the slow-bleed diminishment of the region’s competitiveness—the sort of declinist drift that, once established, proves stubbornly hard to reverse. Each missed deadline bodes less well for investment, job growth, and the city’s ability to lure high-value industries.

We reckon, in sum, that the debate over Gateway embodies both the promise and pathology of American public works. Political jousting, grand pronouncements, and judicial interventions cannot substitute for the allied virtues of steady funding, realistic budgeting, and managerial discipline. While this latest squabble may appear as another episode in the city’s parade of civic dysfunction, the project’s supporters can draw faint comfort in one truth: the stakes are too high for even the most flamboyant adversaries to truly torpedo the tunnel.

Whether the Gateway Tunnel sees completion before existential calamity descends on Penn Station is another matter. Yet, for a city that prides itself as a capital of ambition—even, and especially, when that ambition is costly and contentious—there is scant alternative to pressing on, eyes open, shovel in hand. ■