Trump Threatens to Defund the NYC Subway

There are few things scarier to the conservative mind than mass transportation in a major metropolitan city. To that end, Donald Trump’s pick to run the Department of Transportation, Sean Duffy, is demanding New York City officials provide a list of actions that they will take to reduce crime on the city’s subway system or risk losing out on federal funds.

In a letter delivered Tuesday to New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority head Janno Lieber, Duffy asked for a list of “actions and plans to reduce crime on its system,” including addressing assaults, fare evasions, and “subway surfing”—the act of riding outside of a moving rail car. Lieber and the MTA will have until March 31 to provide Duffy with his sought after list, or face “enforcement actions up to and including redirecting or withholding funding”—though he didn’t offer any specifics as to how deep the cuts could be.

There have been several high-profile and particularly brutal crimes on New York’s subway in recent years, including a woman getting set on fire, the killing of a homeless man, and a series of incidents in which people have been pushed in front of trains.

But in the overall scheme of things, those high-profile cases seem to outweigh in the public mind the fact that crime is down on the subway. Overall crime dropped 5.4% year-over-year, per NYPD statistics, and down 40% since the pre-pandemic period, according to MTA Chief of Policy and External Relations John McCarthy. There were 1.2 billion rides on New York City’s subways in 2024, and 2,211 crimes reported. An analysis of transit data from 2023 found that about 1 in every 740,000 rides experiences assault and about 1 in every 1 million experiences harassment.

Of course, for most people, perception is reality. As Vital City, a journal focused on issues in New York City, points out, crime is not the only thing that can make people feel unsafe. Seeing dilapidated and neglected infrastructure adds to a sense of unease. So, too, can seeing a whole slew of police, who may convey a sense that an area is unsafe rather than protected. Notably, New York Governor Kathy Hochul deployed 1,000 additional members of law enforcement in the subway last year as part of her own five-step plan to increase safety on the subway.

All of that to say, you know what won’t make the subway safer? Cutting off its funding. According to The Gothamist, the MTA has about $14 billion earmarked in funds from the federal government over the next five years, much of which will go to fund a significant undertaking to restore critical infrastructure in the transit system, including upgrading systems that are several decades past their recommended usage limits.

The Trump administration is already making funding this initiative harder than it needs to be by challenging the MTA’s congestion pricing program in Manhattan, which had generated about $50 million in just its first month of operation and was expected to help open up about $15 billion in available funding for the city once fully implemented. Instead, that policy is hung up in court, and now Trump’s DoT is trying to squeeze more concessions out of the city. Sure seems like they might be more interested in winning a political battle than actually improving safety.