Trump Dispatches Top Justice Official to Torpedo Manhattan Congestion Pricing, Tolls Still Rolling

Donald Trump’s brazen effort to torpedo congestion pricing in Manhattan could reshape the city’s arteries and bankroll, and echoes a wider conflict over urban policy and federal power.

New Yorkers nearing 60th Street in their motorcars may soon notice their wallets feeling notably heavier—or lighter—depending upon how Washington fares in a legal counteroffensive. The litigation over New York City’s hotly debated congestion pricing scheme, long overshadowed by louder national feuds, erupted back into the headlines last week when President Donald Trump dispatched one of the Department of Justice’s most seasoned legal brawlers to do battle. Eric Hamilton, Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General and no stranger to highly charged executive causes, has taken up the task of persuading a federal judge to strike down the city’s $9 base toll to drive south of 60th Street in Manhattan.

This abrupt escalation is no mere bureaucratic reshuffle. Hamilton’s résumé boasts courtroom brawls over birthright citizenship and presidential authority to deploy the National Guard—matters dear to the White House’s political id. His new portfolio signals not just legal wrangling but the administration’s deep investment in killing congestion pricing. This comes after President Trump, in classic bluster, promised to “TERMINATE” the plan and crowed on social media last February that “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD”—a claim, we note, that remains premature.

As of now, the tolls persist. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which oversees the scheme, collected $562m in revenues last year, earmarked for subway and bus upgrades. Governor Kathy Hochul, for her part, may lack the president’s penchant for uppercase invective, but she is equally blunt: “The tolling cameras are staying on.”

Should the administration succeed, the blow to the city’s aspirations would be palpable. The lost windfall threatens not just the MTA’s capital programme—a perennial concern for New Yorkers forced to endure wheezing signal systems and glacial trains—but also signals that Washington remains keen to meddle with Gotham’s urban experiments. Worse yet, the prospect of a federal veto over congestion pricing raises uncomfortable questions about which interests ultimately steer city policy: those who ride its packed subways daily, or the partisans in distant Washington.

The legal brouhaha provides New Yorkers with more than tabloid drama. The tolling pilot, many believe, is the city’s best hope to reduce gridlock in its most crowded precincts. If snuffed out, the next era of Manhattan’s development—one already grappling with post-pandemic workforce shifts and fragile retail spending—risks drowning in honking chaos, sluggish buses, and reduced public investment. Meanwhile, the MTA is left to budget with uncertainty, an especially rickety foundation for America’s largest transit agency.

Nor would the pain be confined to commuters. Congestion pricing, as designed, was to fund projects reaching well into the city’s outer boroughs and even Westchester County. If revenue dries up, deferred maintenance and long-postponed accessibility upgrades will join the junk heap of urban promise. The episode underlines a curious tension: New York state and city governments, while often at loggerheads, are jointly incentivised to keep these dollars flowing—not least because half-measures tend inevitably to cost more down the road.

National politics and local arteries collide

The federal interference is as political as it is legal; Mr. Trump’s interest in the scheme is less technocratic than tribal. Congestion pricing featured prominently on the president’s campaign trail, with sharp messages to suburban commuters and police unions alike. In a pattern by now familiar, the administration insists such urban tolling is a “disaster,” and has ordered the Department of Transportation to withdraw support at every procedural turn.

Sceptics may dismiss these maneuvers as parochial populism. But the case reveals more—an ever-widening partisan cleavage over urban policy. American cities from San Francisco to London and Singapore have seen congestion charges morph from novelty to norm. New York’s scheme, while not unprecedented globally, is the first of its scope in the United States. That it faces such headwinds from Washington is, in part, a proxy fight over how cities are allowed to govern themselves, and who reaps the spoils or bears the cost.

If precedent is any guide, few bets are safe. Last spring, federal lawyers inadvertently published self-sabotaging memos bemoaning missteps and tactical weaknesses; whether this was simple incompetence or deliberate slow-rolling is, in Washington fashion, a matter of competing conspiracy theories. Yet such bumbling has not dulled the White House’s ambitions. With Mr. Hamilton, a lawyer the Columbia Law School’s Dan Richman describes as a “top priority” pick, the administration is clearly doubling down.

Globally, the politics of congestion charging tend to settle as their effects materialise. London’s introduction of a daily tax in 2003 was initially met with howls—then quietly accepted as air cleared and traffic thinned. In Stockholm, a trial programme was so successful it became permanent after a referendum. New York, grander and more fractious than both, finds itself at a crossroads: will it join the urban moderns, or slump back into a status quo of gridlock and patchwork governance?

We reckon much of the fuss is political theatre. The sums, while large, are dwarfed by broader federal spending figures; the real issue is symbolic. If the city’s right to price its streets can be overridden, what stops further incursions on local control? The court’s ruling, likely months away, will set precedent not only for New York’s ambitions, but for the dozen or so other American metros keen to pilot their own congestion charges. For city-dwellers plagued by traffic and decrepit infrastructure, the stakes are far higher than nine dollars at a toll gantry.

In the end, one can only marvel at the energy expended to contest a policy whose primary effect will be to render Manhattan slightly less clogged and its subway cars slightly less medieval. But in America’s present political climate, even modest urban reforms acquire outsized symbolic weight. The real congestion, one suspects, is in Washington’s corridors of power, not just on Sixth Avenue. ■