President Donald Trump said he plans to revoke federal funding for the $16 billion Hudson River Tunnel project, a move that could halt one of the nation’s most critical infrastructure efforts and strike directly at a decades-long priority of Sen. Chuck Schumer.
“The project in Manhattan, the project in New York — it’s billions and billions of dollars that Schumer has worked 20 years to get,” Trump said Wednesday. “It’s terminated. Tell them it’s terminated.”
What You Need To Know
President Trump says he will revoke federal funding for the $16 billion Hudson River Tunnel, calling it a “wasteful Democratic project”
The tunnel, part of the Gateway Program, is considered vital to the Northeast Corridor and supports an economy that generates 20% of U.S. GDP
New York and New Jersey leaders, including Gov. Hochul and Sen. Schumer, condemned the move as “petty revenge politics” that could cripple regional transit and kill thousands of jobs
The president has argued that the ongoing government shutdown gives him an opening to cut what he calls “wasteful Democratic-backed projects,” including the Gateway Tunnel — the linchpin of the busy Northeast Corridor that links New York and New Jersey.
Work began two years ago on the tunnel, which engineers and transportation officials have described as vital to the region’s economy and safety.
The new rail tubes are meant to supplement and eventually allow for the rehabilitation of the existing 115-year-old North River Tunnel, which carries Amtrak and NJ Transit trains beneath the Hudson River.
That tunnel was severely damaged by saltwater flooding during Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
Each day, roughly 800,000 commuters pass through the corridor — a route that helps power an economic region responsible for about 20% of the nation’s gross domestic product. A report last year found that closing even one tube of the existing tunnel could cost $100 million a day in lost productivity and economic output.
Gov. Kathy Hochul called the president’s move “reckless” and vowed to challenge it in court.
“This is not sticking it to New York,” she said in an interview on MSNBC. “This is the Northeastern Corridor. If this system of transportation collapses, the economy of the country collapses. So why be so short-sighted?”
The governor noted that a federal judge only this week ordered the restoration of transit security funding that the administration had previously withheld.
Schumer, a Democrat from New York who has championed the tunnel project for two decades, said the president’s threat amounted to “petty revenge politics that would screw hundreds of thousands of New York and New Jersey commuters, choke off our economy, and kill good-paying jobs.”
The Hudson River Tunnel project, part of the broader Gateway Program, is already well underway. Construction began in late 2023, with New York and New Jersey contributing nearly $4 billion toward the effort. A $7 billion federal funding agreement was finalized in July 2024.
The new tunnel is scheduled for completion in 2035, after which each of the two existing tubes will be closed in turn for extensive repairs.
Killing the project, regional officials warned, would not only halt years of progress but threaten thousands of construction jobs and the economic stability of the Northeast itself.