Photo: Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
The Trump administration once again has the MTA in its sights.
On Tuesday, U.S. Transportation secretary Sean Duffy wrote a letter to MTA chairman and CEO Janno Lieber, directing him to share the agency’s plans to address crime and public safety on its system. The missive came with a threat. Duffy warned Lieber to respond promptly or risk the federal government withholding funds from the MTA.
In the letter, Duffy said that the agency “must ensure a safe and clean environment, reduce crime and fare evasion, and maintain a safe operating system” for its riders, noting that there’ve been several high-profile incidents on the subway. The Transportation secretary then requested that the MTA provide its plans to reduce crime and specific concerns such as transit-workers assaults, fare evasion, and subway surfing and statistics related to those incidents. He also asked for the MTA to detail the funds allocated to those measures.
Duffy said the agency must respond by a March 31 deadline to “avoid further [Federal Transit Administration] enforcement actions up to and including redirecting or withholding funding.”
The MTA’s letter closely resembles ones sent by the department to Washington, D.C., mayor Muriel Bowser as well as the CEOs of Amtrak and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, or WMATA, the main transit agency in D.C. In those messages, Duffy similarly requested risk assessments and plans to reduce crime and protect riders and transit workers.
Much of the information that Duffy is requesting is already publicly available through the NYPD, which publishes transit-crime reports, as well as through the MTA, which shares recordings and associated documents from its board meetings and publicizes its funding data. Recent statistics don’t appear to support Duffy’s contention of a transit system out of control. Earlier this month, the NYPD reported a 15 percent decrease in subway crime in February compared to the previous year. That figure follows a reported steep 36.4 percent drop in January.
The agency relies heavily on federal funding. The MTA previously unveiled its four-year $68 million capital plan, which anticipates $14 billion of that total coming from federal money and grants, per the Daily News.
John McCarthy, MTA’s chief of policy and external relations, said in a statement that the agency is ready to discuss its crime-reduction efforts with the federal government. “The good news is numbers are moving in the right direction: Crime is down 40 percent compared to the same period in 2020 right before the pandemic, and so far in 2025 there are fewer daily major crimes in transit than any non-pandemic year ever. Moreover, in the second half of last year subway-fare evasion was down 25 percent after increasing dramatically during COVID,” he said, per CBS News.
This warning from Duffy is just the latest in the Trump administration’s focus on the MTA. In February, the Transportation Department officially revoked federal approval for New York City’s congestion-pricing program, setting a March 21 deadline for the tolling to end. However, the MTA immediately challenged the government’s move in court with Governor Kathy Hochul making it clear that congestion pricing will continue until the matter is heard. “The cameras are staying on,” she said.
