Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D – N.Y.) vowed Thursday to fight to keep the Gateway/Hudson River Tunnel project funded, hours after President Trump insisted — perhaps incorrectly — that the project had been “terminated.”
“Yesterday, President Trump and his administration ‘terminated’ funding for Gateway,” Schumer said on the floor of the Senate Thursday morning, putting air quotes around the operative verb.
“Donald Trump is trying to kill it again, in pure spite and with sheer stupidity — it’s petty revenge politics,” the senator continued. “We will fight the president on this in every way, to preserve this crucial, vital infrastructure project.”
The Hudson River Tunnel — a $16 million portion of the larger Gateway project, which seeks to double the number of rail connections between the New Jersey meadowlands and New York Penn Station — was one of two New York area transit projects whose funding was held up under unusual circumstances on the first morning of the ongoing government shutdown.
In the hours before the shutdown, the US Department of Transportation published a new rule regarding what businesses qualified for a special contracting program, and then said all federal reimbursements for the Hudson River Tunnel and the Second Avenue Subway were on hold until their compliance with the new rule could be assessed.
Hours later, the Trump administration claimed that assessment was now being stymied by the shutdown.
“When the shutdown happened, our civil rights division, most of it was furloughed,” Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, told the Daily News a few days later. “So the review process is going to take longer than what we would anticipate.”
“We’re not trying to shut down these projects – to the contrary, we’re trying to make sure these projects move forward, move forward fast. They’re important,” Duffy added.
But Trump said the opposite on Wednesday at a wide-ranging Oval Office Q&A, appearing to boast about gutting the key infrastructure project.
“Russell Vought is really terminating tremendous numbers of Democrat projects,” Trump said of his Office of Management and Budget director, who first tweeted about the funding hold.
“Billions and billions of dollars that Schumer has worked 20 years to get — it’s terminated,” the president gloated. “Tell him, ‘It’s terminated.’”
Despite that, there was no indication Thursday that the federal government had in fact cut any funding from the project on a permanent basis.
A spokesman for the Gateway Development Commission, which oversees the $16 billion tunnel project, told The News Thursday that there had been no new guidance from the Feds since last month, when the Department of Transportation informed the GDC it was withholding reimbursement of state expenditures pending the compliance review.
Work on the project has continued in the meantime.
