The MTA faces the grim prospect of $250 million in annual federal funding formula cuts under legislation currently being pushed in the Republican-controlled Congress — reductions that MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber warned Wednesday could spell big trouble for New York’s mass transit system.
Lieber, during the latest meeting of the agency’s board on Sept. 30, warned that the reductions would come in a proposed Republican-led extension to former President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). Although the legislation would keep the IIJA in place, Lieber said, it would exclude key funding known as advanced appropriations.
Congress passed a three-month extension that makes the same reductions, which went into effect on Oct. 1. The extension expires after the midterm elections on Dec. 11.
“The long-term version, the one that is floating around now, would significantly cut funding from what we received in the past, actually hitting us for about $250 million in formula funding,” Lieber said. “So they’re underfunding what was allocated in the past. This is unacceptable, considering the MTA is already widely underfunded in the first place.”
Lieber said that currently, the MTA receives under 17% of federal formula funding, even though the system accounts for over 40% of transit ridership nationally.
“New York already gets shorted on billions of dollars that we send to Washington,” he said. “We are a donor state always. But mass transit is our thing. Denying New York our fair share of mass transit is a little like telling Florida, ‘Sorry, you can’t get your fair share of hurricane relief.’”
MTA Chair & CEO Janno Lieber provides a weather update at the MTA Situation Room on Friday, Sep 25, 2026.Marc A. Hermann / MTA
Overall, the IIJA extension would cut $4.2 billion of transit funding, or 20%, nationwide, according to Lisa Daglian, executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA. It would also cut nearly $12.9 billion (81%) of rail funding across the country.
The cuts to transit funding in the IIJA extension are equivalent to another surface transportation bill that Republicans are kicking around Congress: the BUILD America 250 Act, Daglian said.
More federal money at risk for MTA
Adding fuel to the fire, Lieber said, is that the Trump administration is putting less funding into a slew of capital investment grant programs that the MTA relies upon to pay for various projects, including accessibility upgrades and state of good repair work.
Daglian said that if they go through, the funding reductions would hit riders directly, by potentially leading to worse service and the cancellation of vital capital projects.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars are at risk in federal formula transit dollars, with many millions more in doubt in grant funding,” Daglian said in a Wednesday statement. “These cuts would directly affect transit riders. They would sharply reduce the money available for investments in and improvements to the system, including for accessibility and state of good repair projects.”
But when asked how the MTA is preparing for the gloom-and-doom scenario, Lieber responded: “We’re not.” Instead, he said agency leadership wants to work with Democratic members of Congress to fight the proposed legislation once lawmakers return to Washington.
“We’re fighting it,” Lieber said. “We are getting the word out, first and foremost to the New York legislators, including the leadership in both houses, that there are real problems for the MTA if this bill becomes permanent.”
Separately, Lieber and other top MTA officials also took time during the board meeting to sound the alarm that the Trump administration’s chaotic tariff regime could add $1 billion to the agency’s purchases of new trains and buses. That comes on top of the $23 billion that the agency is already set to pay for new rolling stock in its current five-year capital plan.