Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll look at the Trump administration’s move to end congestion pricing in Manhattan. We’ll also get details on a hearing on the administration’s effort to drop the criminal charges against Mayor Eric Adams.
President Trump said last week that he had a plan to force New York to “kill” the congestion pricing program.
But the death of the seven-week-old program, if its death comes at all, will probably be slow — and, for the New York officials who were counting on the revenue from congestion pricing, painful.
The secretary of transportation, Sean Duffy, told Gov. Kathy Hochul in a letter that the Trump administration planned to rescind federal approval of the tolling program, which was granted by the Biden administration two weeks after the November election. Duffy said federal officials would contact the state to “discuss the orderly cessation of toll operations.”
The discussion will probably begin in court. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency in charge of the congestion pricing program, immediately filed a challenge in federal court in Manhattan. The agency’s chairman and chief executive, Janno Lieber, said that toll collection would continue.
Trump declared on his social media platform, Truth Social, that New York was “saved” as a result of the action. “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED,” he wrote. “LONG LIVE THE KING!”
Hochul, in a statement that said benefits of congestion pricing were already apparent, countered, “We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king.” She added, “We’ll see you in court.”
Congestion pricing started on Jan. 5. Most drivers are charged $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street.
It was intended to raise $15 billion for the M.T.A., which would fund major projects like upgrading aging signal systems and extending the Second Avenue subway into East Harlem. If congestion pricing ended, the state would have to come up with another way to raise $1 billion a year to pay for the M.T.A.’s capital plan. Ending it would also leave the state with little way to recoup the half-billion dollars it spent preparing for the program.
But Trump has said that the tolls were keeping visitors and businesses out of Manhattan. And Duffy, echoing arguments he made in his letter to Hochul, said in a statement that congestion pricing was “a slap in the face to working-class Americans and small business owners” who rely on customers who drive into Manhattan. He also complained in the letter that revenue from drivers should not be spent on maintaining mass transit, “as opposed to the highways.”
“I don’t believe that this is a fair deal,” he said.
Supporters of congestion pricing immediately took issue with the administration’s move to stop it. “The Trump administration is choosing gridlock over people, when we need the federal government to be a partner in solving congestion, not a roadblock,” said Julie Tighe, the president of the New York League of Conservation Voters. “I live in the zone, I work in the zone and I own a car in the zone. There is unquestionably less traffic. This is what New York deserves — cleaner air and less traffic and gridlock, which waste time and money, and better transit.”
Kathryn Wylde, the president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, an influential consortium of corporations and business leaders, said that withdrawing federal approval of congestion pricing was “a terrible mistake.” And Representative Dan Goldman, a Democrat whose district includes Lower Manhattan and a stretch of Brooklyn, called the move “as hypocritical as it is groundless.”
“To claim that the law does not allow for the program while simultaneously ignoring every statute that checks his authority is patently absurd,” Goldman said. “Numerous courts have upheld congestion pricing’s legality.”
Congestion pricing was unpopular, but supporters pointed to indications that opposition had softened. Wylde cited a Morning Consult poll that found that 66 percent of drivers who have been paying it support congestion pricing and that 59 percent of voters statewide had wanted Trump to allow it to continue.
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The hearing ended with the judge declaring that “it’s not in anyone’s interest here for this to drag on.”
If that sounded as if the judge, Dale Ho, was about to rule on the Justice Department’s motion to drop corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams, Ho immediately made it clear that he was not. “I’m not going to shoot from the hip right here on the bench,” he said.
Earlier, the acting No. 2 official from the Justice Department had suggested that the Trump administration was justified in putting a public official’s political cooperation over prosecutors’ suspicions that the official might have broken the law. In response to questions from Ho, the Justice Department official, Emil Bove III, renewed his assertion that the case against Adams should be dismissed because it was limiting Adams’s cooperation with Trump’s crackdown on immigration.
Bove’s presence at such a hearing was unusual. Absent were the assistant U.S. attorneys from Manhattan who had overseen the investigation and indictment of Adams, the first mayor in modern New York City history to face criminal charges while in office.
Last week Bove directed prosecutors to move to end the case, prompting the resignations of prosecutors in Manhattan and at the Justice Department in Washington. Bove said that his order to pull the plug on the case was “a standard exercise of prosecutorial discretion,” adding that the indictment “impacts the national security and immigration objectives” of President Trump.
One of the prosecutors who quit, Danielle Sassoon, the interim U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said last week that Adams’s lawyers had “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo” during a meeting with Bove in Washington. She said that the mayor’s lawyers had indicated that Adams would help the Trump administration with immigration enforcement if the case was thrown out.
Bove pushed back against that idea during the hearing. At one point Adams was asked whether he was promised anything to induce him to go along with the motion to dismiss his case. He said no. As my colleague Jonah E. Bromwich noted, it remains to be seen whether the judge will agree. And after the hearing, Bove issued a blistering statement inviting other Justice Department officials to resign if they disagreed with his efforts to have the charges against Adams dismissed.
METROPOLITAN diary
Tomorrow
Dear Diary:
My friend of 72 years and I stopped at a bodega on Broadway and 107th Street to buy lottery tickets. We don’t play unless the payout is astronomical.
It was 9 o’clock on this particular Saturday evening, and we thought we were the only customers in the place. We asked the owner when the drawing would be announced.
Midnight, he said.
My friend and I agreed that we would be asleep by then and would have to learn the results the next day.
At that moment, a man dressed entirely in black whom we hadn’t noticed standing in a back corner spoke up.
“No one promises you tomorrow,” he said without looking up from the gardening magazine he was reading.
My friend and I, both 79, were all too familiar with this wisdom. We exchanged knowing glances with the bodega’s owner and politely thanked the man in black for his advice. He ignored us.
We went to my friend’s apartment, where we tried, and failed, to stay up till midnight.
We learned in the morning that we had unfortunately not won the lottery. On the other hand, we had our tomorrow.
— Michael Weiden
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post ‘See You in Court’: The Fight Over Congestion Pricing’s Future appeared first on New York Times.
