WASHINGTON — After blocking funding for the Gateway tunnel-and-bridge construction project for months, the White House relented, releasing a hold the president had placed on the project.
Available cash for the project ran out two weeks ago and work stopped Feb. 6 because President Donald Trump personally intervened to deny Gateway over a feud with Chuck Schumer, a Democratic senator from New York.
Work is expected to resume next week, according to the Gateway Development Commission, the body created to oversee the project. The commission said it has more than $205 million at hand.
“It never should have gotten this far,” David Rible, chief executive officer of the Utility and Transportation Contractors Association, said Wednesday. “This is the most important infrastructure project of our lifetime and should never be held up by gamesmanship again.”
The Trump administration lifted its hold on the funding after a federal appeals court judge late last week cleared the money for release.
White House spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment from NJ Spotlight News about why the president approved the money.
Spokespeople for the federal Department of Transportation, which had pending reviews of Gateway that had halted work, did not immediately reply to NJ Spotlight News about the status of those reviews.
A steel-and-concrete project decades in the making, Gateway is the largest public-works program in the Western Hemisphere and contains a series of elements, including new tunnels beneath the Hudson River between Newark and New York Penn Station, bridge upgrades and replacements and miles of new track.
Legislation Congress passed and Trump signed into law this year contains $700 million to fund Gateway’s centerpiece — the rehabilitation of two century-old tunnels beneath the Hudson and the creation of two more.
House Republicans, including Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a Trump ally who represents an Upstate New York congressional district, pushed for that chunk of money to be included in the new law. That law also sets aside about $307 million to expand the Second Avenue Subway line in Manhattan north to East
Harlem.
Together, New Jersey and New York sued the Trump administration, as did the Gateway Development Commission, to release funding Congress had approved for the program.
The U.S. lost at the district court level — where the case was filed — and after the White House appealed that decision, the appellate court late Thursday sided against the White House.
“The worst part about it is now, he’s probably cost the project, which was on time and on budget, millions of dollars by halting all this work,” New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, said to reporters on Wednesday after the money had been released.
The commission said it would put the influx of cash to use straight away. “We are working with our contractors to deploy these funds to resume work as soon as possible,” the body said Wednesday.
Trump’s campaign against Gateway fits a pattern. Across his two presidencies, Trump has often stepped in to block funding Congress had approved, almost certainly running afoul of a 1974 federal budget law. Funding he’s blocked, likely breaking the law, include $214 million in military aid for Ukraine and money approved for national transportation, health and education systems.
On Monday, Trump, who grew up in Queens but now considers Florida his home state, called Gateway a “boondoggle” and said the $16 billion project was expected to cost billions more — a claim without facts.
After the money dried up, a skeleton crew of workers oversaw Gateway worksites. Some watched expensive pieces of machinery, like a tunnel-boring drill custom-made in Germany, while the project idled.
