(The Center Square) — Construction on New York’s $16.6 billion Hudson River tunnel project could grind to a halt next week unless the Trump administration releases federal funding, state officials said Tuesday.
The Gateway Development Commission, which is overseeing the tunnel project, announced during its monthly meeting Tuesday that the work at the project’s five sites in Manhattan and northern New Jersey will likely have to stop by next Friday unless the federal government releases more than $12 billion in funding that was frozen this fall.
“We have notified contractors that work will have to stop on Feb. 6,” Thomas Prendergast, Gateway’s chief executive, told the board at Tuesday’s meeting. “We have gone as far as we can possibly go with the available resources.”
Sen. Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat who has championed the project, is among those urging President Donald Trump to release funding for the project to allow construction to continue.
“There is only one person who terminated Gateway and there is only one person who could get it back on track: Donald Trump,” Schumer posted on social media.
Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul called the commission’s announcement Tuesday “the latest collateral damage of Donald Trump’s vindictive quest to hurt New Yorkers no matter the cost.”
“The stakes are enormous: hundreds of thousands of daily commuters, 10,000 union jobs and billions of dollars in economic benefits all now imperiled by Donald Trump’s attempts to rip away infrastructure funding from New York, Hochul said in a statement.
“Make no mistake, the Gateway Tunnel is vital to the economy of this state and the entire region, and I will fight like hell to ensure it gets built,” she added.
Trump has targeted his former state with federal funding cuts in response to Democrats’ pushback over immigration crackdowns, a rollback of transgender protections and other divisive White House policies. Trump has blamed Schumer for blocking the project over his opposition to the White House’s agenda and stop-gap measures to keep the federal government from shutting down.
Last year, the Trump administration withheld $18 billion in congressionally approved infrastructure funding for the Hudson tunnel and Second Avenue subway, along with $36 million in cyber security funding. Both funding cuts have been challenged in court.
The project, billed as the largest construction project in the nation, calls for renovating the 1910 tunnel, which carries about 200,000 weekday passengers on Amtrak and NJ Transit beneath the Hudson between New Jersey and Manhattan. It’s expected to be completed by 2035.
The renovations, years in the making, are expected to double the capacity of the Northeast Corridor train line between Newark and New York City — which state and federal officials say will improve rail mobility from Washington, D.C., to Boston and other destinations.
New York and New Jersey agreed last year to split the 30% local share of the cost of building the tunnel, a move that was required to apply for federal funding.
In 2024, the commission secured about $12 billion in federal funding for the project under agreements with the Federal Transit Administration for $6.88 billion and federal infrastructure loans from the Build America Bureau for $4.06 billion to fund the local share of the $16.6 billion project.
A portion of the funding will come from a $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure package signed into law by then-President Joe Biden in November 2021 after receiving bipartisan support in Congress. It is expected to distribute about $550 billion of new federal spending over five years.
Backers of the massive taxpayer-funded Hudson Tunnel project say the work will create 72,000 jobs and $19 billion in economic activity and demonstrates that the federal government can tackle massive projects during a critical time for transportation and mass transit.
They also say it will ease a bottleneck of rail traffic coming to and from the city, which could worsen if renovations aren’t completed.
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