All work on the critical $16 billion project to build a rail tunnel under the Hudson River to New York City will come to a halt by the end of next week unless the Trump administration reinstates federal funding for it, the project’s builder is expected to announce Tuesday.
The project, known as Gateway, sits at the middle of the busy Northeast Corridor rail route running from Boston to Washington and is one of the largest infrastructure initiatives in the United States. It has been under construction for more than a year after it received pledges of about $12 billion from the federal government. Workers have been preparing to assemble the first of two massive tunnel boring machines, which recently arrived in pieces from Germany.
But that money from Washington stopped flowing in October while the government was shut down. Officials at the federal Department of Transportation said the funding would remain suspended until the project’s contracts could be reviewed for compliance with new rules about businesses owned by women and minorities.
Despite assurances from the tunnel project’s manager, the Gateway Development Commission, that it would comply, the funding has not been restored.
Close to 1,000 union laborers have continued working on the project at four sites in Manhattan and northern New Jersey. But officials of the development commission warned that they could not stay on schedule toward completion in 2035 unless the suspension was lifted soon.
At the commission’s monthly board meeting on Tuesday, its chief executive, Thomas Prendergast, plans to warn the board that construction would have to stop by Feb. 6 when a line of credit that has kept it going would be exhausted, people with knowledge of the situation said.
Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and minority leader who shepherded the tunnel project through the complex process of obtaining federal funding, said on Monday that he would attend the meeting to discuss the shutdown plan. In recent weeks, Mr. Schumer has implored President Trump to stop withholding funding for what Mr. Schumer called “the most important infrastructure project in the nation.”
The two men met at the White House in mid-January, but Mr. Trump did not accede to Mr. Schumer’s pleas. Last week, he held Mr. Schumer responsible for the suspension.
In a post on social media, Mr. Trump said, “Remember, everybody, it is Chuck Schumer, the under siege Senator from New York, who is holding up the Gateway Project!”
On Monday, Mr. Schumer responded by saying that Mr. Trump would have only himself to blame for the lost jobs and drastic effects on the economy of the Northeast.
“For four months now, funding that is already appropriated and allocated for the Gateway tunnel has been frozen,” Mr. Schumer said. “There is only one man responsible for cutting off the funds and only one man who can get it back on track. If he doesn’t, work will halt by next week on the project with dire consequences for the metropolitan area and the entire Northeast Corridor.”
The federal Department of Transportation did not respond to a request for comment.
The Gateway tunnel was conceived as a supplement to a pair of single-track tunnels under the Hudson that were built 115 years ago. Those tunnels, which deliver about 70,000 commuters from New Jersey each weekday, have been deteriorating rapidly since they were flooded with salty water when Hurricane Sandy roared into New York Harbor in 2012.
Officials of Amtrak, the national railroad that owns the tunnels and the tracks that run through them along the corridor, have warned for years that a failure of one of them would reduce train traffic in and out of New York City by as much as 75 percent.
The Gateway project is not the first attempt to add train tracks under the Hudson. Funding was lined up for a previous plan, known as the ARC tunnel, which was about to begin construction. But in 2010, Chris Christie, then the Republican governor of New Jersey, canceled the project, citing concerns about cost overruns.
Gateway is even closer to starting its digging than ARC was. The giant cutter head of the first boring machine has arrived on site. That machine, which was built and taken apart in Germany and then shipped to New Jersey, was scheduled to be reassembled soon.
Before long, it would have been boring down through a mile of rock toward the river’s edge. Now, it is unclear whether that journey will ever begin.
Patrick McGeehan is a Times reporter who covers the economy of New York City and its airports and other transportation hubs.
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