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Tag: gateway tunnel project

  • Gateway Tunnel: Appeals court declines to overrule order that Trump regime must release more than $200M in funding | amNewYork

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    View of construction underway for the Gateway Program’s Hudson River Tunnels, New York, NY, at Hudson Yards, Oct. 6, 2025.

    Photo by Anthony Behar/Sipa USA

    The Trump administration must release over $200 million in funds for the Gateway Tunnel rail project after a federal appeals court declined on Thursday to overrule a lower court’s Feb. 6 decision compelling it to let the money flow for two weeks.

    The Second Circuit Court of Appeals referred the federal government’s appeal of U.S. District Court Judge Jeannette Vargas’s decision that it must temporarily release funds it has withheld from the project since October to a motions panel on Feb. 12. 

    The higher court’s decision to refer the appeal to another panel of Second Circuit judges, rather than ruling itself, means Vargas’ decision last Friday will automatically go into effect. The feds are expected to be compelled to release the funds tomorrow, and the motions panel is not expected to convene until the week of Feb. 23, at the earliest. 

    It was initially expected that the money would begin flowing on Monday, but Vargas temporarily stayed her initial ruling until 5 p.m. on Thursday to allow the appeals court a chance to weigh the feds’ request.

    The Gateway Development Commission, which is leading the project, took a victory lap over the court’s move on Thursday evening.

    “This is good news for the Hudson Tunnel Project, and we anticipate receiving the $205 million in reimbursement funds from the federal government,” GDC said in a statement. “While this is a positive step, we need consistent, reliable access to the Hudson Tunnel Project’s federal funding moving forward. GDC continues to pursue all avenues to regain access to all the federal funds for this urgent project, including our lawsuit.”

    The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

    Gateway Tunnel work can resume once the money rolls in again

    Once the feds begin sending the money to GDC, construction on the $16 billion undertaking can resume. Work on the new two-tube rail tunnel, which will connect Penn Station with New Jersey underneath the Hudson River and replace a 116-year-old decaying passage, halted last Friday when the GDC was no longer able to pay for it without promised federal reimbursements.

    Vargas’ Feb. 6 ruling came after the New York and New Jersey Attorneys General Letitia James and Jenifer Davenport brought a joint suit on Feb. 4. In their legal action, they argued that the pause in construction brought on by the funding freeze would inflict irreparable harm on both states.

    They argue that the immediate harms caused by the project’s work stoppage include the loss of 1,000 construction jobs and the ballooning cost of keeping the dormant work sites safe. In the long term, continuing to use the decaying rail tunnel runs the risk that it could shut down and paralyze travel between New York and New Jersey and throughout the northeast.

    Additionally, they argued that the move was illegal, contending it was motivated by President Trump’s desire for political retribution against Congressional Democrats rather than any purported compliance issues.

    The feds, meanwhile, have claimed that the states do not have the legal standing to sue over the funding freeze because they were not parties on the contract inked between them and GDC. Furthermore, they’ve argued a GDC suit seeking to unfreeze the funds is enough to get relief.

    Trump’s Department of Transportation initially withheld the funds pending an agency review of the GDC’s contracts with minority-and-women-owned businesses to ensure they were in-line with new federal rules. GDC officials have said they have answered all of USDOT’s questions regarding its contracting in letters sent late last year.

    While the ruling allows funds to flow until late February, the states and the GDC will still be left without enough funding to finish the project once the expected $200 million runs out, unless Vargas compels the federal government to release all of its initially promised funding. 

    The states have asked Vargas to extend her order requiring the federal government to temporarily fund the project until March 6, which it suggested is when a decision should be made on the case in court filings. The federal government has asked for “any further briefing in this matter [to] be postponed,” until a decision on GDC’s suit comes, which is expected on March 12.

    Vargas has not responded to the parties’ requests.

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    Isabella Gallo & Ethan Stark-Miller

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  • Judge rules feds must temporarily resume funding for Gateway tunnel rail project | amNewYork

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    View of construction underway for the Gateway Program’s Hudson River Tunnels, New York, NY, at Hudson Yards, Oct. 6, 2025.

    Photo by Anthony Behar/Sipa USA

    The Trump administration will have to temporarily resume funding the Gateway tunnel rail project for two weeks, following a stay from a Manhattan federal judge on Friday, allowing construction that was set to halt on Feb. 6 to continue.

    U.S. District Judge Jeannette A. Vargas’s decision came five hours after a Friday afternoon hearing in a suit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James and her New Jersey counterpart, Jennifer Davenport, earlier this week. 

    The states argue the feds are illegally withholding the funds because the move was for political reasons rather than based on any legal merits — citing Trump’s Truth Social posts framing the freeze as political retribution against Congressional Democrats. 

    Vargas’s decision said she believed the states would “suffer irreparable harm” if she didn’t force the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) to temporarily unfreeze funding to the project. She requested the parties meet and confer over next steps in the case by Feb. 11. 

    The USDOT froze federal funding for the $16 billion project, amounting to $11 billion in grants and $4 billion in loans, on the basis that it needed to review compliance with new rules around contracting with minority-and-women-owned businesses. Court filings state that the entity overseeing the project the Gateway Development Commission (GDC), has provided the federal government with the information it requested. 

    In a statement, James said she was grateful the court acted quickly to block the funding freeze, calling it a “critical victory for workers and commuters.”

    “The Hudson Tunnel Project is one of the most important infrastructure projects in the nation, and we will keep fighting to ensure construction can continue without unnecessary federal interference,” James said.

    The GDC announced Friday that construction work would stop at 5 p.m. if the feds did not release $205 million in reimbursements by then. The commission warned 1,000 construction workers would immediately lose their jobs and that a prolonged pause would put tens of thousands more, along with the nearly $20 billion in economic activity the effort is expected to spur, at risk. 

    After Vargas’s ruling, GDC said they hoped federal disbursements resumed “soon” so they could get workers back on the job, as they had already stopped work earlier that evening.  

    Attorneys for the New Jersey Attorney General’s office, Shankar Duraiswamy and Jeremy Feigenbaum, argued Friday that both states will experience “irreparable harm” if funding for the project remains frozen. They said that’s both because the states will be forced to foot the bill to safely maintain the active construction sites (money they say they’d never be able to recover) and because the states have vested nonmonetary interests in the project’s success, including that of safe, reliable rail travel in the region, and the time and resources they’d already poured into it. 

    “There is literally a massive hole in the ground in North Bergen, New Jersey,” Duraiswamy said, referring to one of the project’s five active construction sites. He also cited a 1,600-pound tunnel boring machine and another active construction site in the Hudson River, both of which he said could not “simply be left abandoned” without incurring significant health and safety risks to the surrounding areas.

    If completed, the Gateway project will replace a two-tube rail tunnel running between New York and New Jersey underneath the Hudson River, known as the North River Tunnel, that is falling apart after 116 years of wear-and-tear as well as storm damage from Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The tunnel facilitates the movement of hundreds of Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains carrying a couple hundred thousand passengers each weekday to and from Penn Station.

    Duraiswamy and Feigenbaum argued that even a few days’ delay on the project could have a significant impact on its timeline, as the construction crews would have to be demobilized and remobilized and design planning would have to pause, adding costly weeks or months to the work. 

    Furthermore, the GDC has raised alarms that a prolonged work stoppage could permanently derail the project, increasing the likelihood that the current tunnel could shut down. The closure of such a major transit artery has the potential to significantly harm the regional and national economies, officials have warned.

    Prior to Vargas’ ruling, Tara Schwartz, an attorney for the USDOT, argued the court shouldn’t force the federal government to temporarily resume funding for the project for a few reasons: because this court didn’t have the proper jurisdiction to do that, a separate lawsuit brought by the Gateway Development Commission earlier this week would be enough to provide any relief necessary and the states weren’t contesting a policy choice, but a simple decision by USDOT not to fund a project anymore. 

    “Plaintiffs are not challenging a policy or directive; they literally just want the government to act differently,” Schwartz said. She also suggested that because the GDC had enough funds for a few more weeks, the states weren’t at risk of imminent monetary harms incurred by footing the bill for construction site maintenance, so an immediate temporary order wasn’t necessary. 

    Duraiswamy and Feigenbaum argued the states had their own separate and distinct harms from the commission — including nonmonetary interests of preventing further disrepair and degradation of the country’s busiest rail tunnel — and that there was no guarantee the commission’s suit would be able to recover money on the state’s behalf, or that it would even win the suit at all. 

    “It’s not enough to say Gateway Development Commission’s suit may recover monetary damages for the states,” Duraiswamy said, calling that a thorny legal question at best. “Even if that’s true, it doesn’t recover damages to [our interest injuries].”

    As it stands, work will continue on the project for the next 14 days —  the length of the temporary stay — before facing the same funding block again. 

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    Isabella Gallo & Ethan Stark-Miller

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