How Trump Set Back “The Most Important Infrastructure Project” In The Country

A look inside Amtrak's 108-year-old Hudson River train tunnel last year.

This story is part of a WNYC/Gothamist series exploring policy differences between President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden. The stories will focus on their positions around housing, infrastructure, coronavirus response, and tax policies—and specifically how those policies will affect the New York City region."

For all the rancor in politics, there was one thing that has united Republicans and Democrats in the tri-state region: The threat of the Hudson River train tunnel between New York and New Jersey failing.

After New Jersey Governor Chris Christie killed an earlier tunnel proposal to stave off a gas tax hike, leaders from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Amtrak, NJ Transit, and local politicians reconvened to devise a new iteration dubbed “Gateway.”

Other than the technical challenges, the players overcame the political ones too. New York and New Jersey agreed to pay half of the cost (which was then pegged at $8 billion), with the federal government picking up the rest. In 2015, President Barack Obama backed it, calling it the most important project in the country.

Every year the project is delayed, the cost of labor and materials rises. Gateway is now estimated to cost $13 billion dollars, according to the Gateway Development Corporation, the group leading the project that is made up of representatives from New York, New Jersey, and Amtrak.

Gateway is made up of three main pieces. The first is replacing the century-old Portal Bridge in New Jersey over the Hackensack, a notorious choke point for NJ Transit and Amtrak because of its tendency to get stuck in the open position.

Then there’s building a second tunnel under the Hudson between New York and New Jersey, and repairing the existing tunnel, which was badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy.

When President Donald Trump was on the campaign trail, he promised to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure, complaining that the U.S. was “like a third world nation,” and that “our infrastructure is falling apart.”

During his victory speech on election night he promised to rebuild highways, bridges, and tunnels.

“We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which, by the way, will become second to none,” he said.

A few months later, Trump’s Transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, told members of Congress that the Gateway Project was at the top of her agenda.

“Please be assured Gateway is an absolute priority,” Chao said. “In terms of our focus we understand what is happening there, I’ve been a passenger myself, as mentioned, I’ve been delayed, I know the New York area very well, the president is a New Yorker, so this is a priority and I look forward to working with you on it.”

This bipartisan deal, which many thought should have been an easy lay up for the president, collapsed as Trump seemed to walk away from it for no logical reason. To transportation experts, the Gateway saga symbolized the way in which the administration has failed to make meaningful progress on infrastructure. And now that he’s running for re-election against a railroad booster, they say the fate of this rail project—considered the most important in the region, if not the country—hangs in the balance.

Steven Cohen, the Chairman of the Gateway Development Corporation, said the project unraveled gradually throughout the first year of the Trump administration. There was a whiff of gaslighting at private meetings, even after federal officials voiced support, according to Cohen. Those representatives from the DOT began casually mentioning that despite what Chao, Trump, and Obama had said before, there was no federal commitment for Gateway.

Cohen remembers leaving these meetings with his team, stunned.

“I remember there was just general consternation,” Cohen told Gothamist. “This project, politically, for a president, is nothing but upsides. It creates jobs in the short run. It fosters the economy in the long run. And it’s necessary which everyone agrees on.”

Then, in the fall of 2017, the federal representatives for the project just stopped showing up to meetings, Cohen said.

By the time budget negotiations in Washington got underway that winter, it was clear the Trump administration was done with Gateway. The scuttlebutt was that Trump was using it as a carrot, to get Senator Chuck Schumer to support his tax reform package.

New York Congressman Sean Maloney grilled Secretary Chao about this a couple months later.

“Is the President of the United States personally intervening with the Speaker to kill this project?”

In her response, Chao sounded like an entirely different person than she had a year earlier.

“The president, yes.” she said. “The president is concerned about the viability of this project and the fact that New York and New Jersey have no skin in the game.”

The Washington Post gave Chao’s statement four Pinocchio’s, signalling a “whopper” of a lie, given their earlier commitment.

Listen to reporter Stephen Nessen's radio story for WNYC:

Since then, there has been little movement on the overall project, which, because of the costs, and the required permits, can’t move forward without federal support. The one exception is for the Portal Bridge replacement, which finally secured federal funding this August, and is now fully underway.

“We are living on borrowed time,” Tom Wright President and CEO of the Regional Plan Association, a non-partisan think tank that focuses on transit and planning in the northeast said recently. “There really is a possibility that someday an engineer is going to go down and see new cracks or another storm is going to hit.”

In non-pandemic times, Wright predicted that if the tunnels were closed, and NJ Transit service was disrupted, there could be as many as 10,000 more people driving into Manhattan, resulting in crippling gridlock. And Amtrak trains—which also rely on the tunnels for service between Washington, D.C., and Boston—would grind to a halt.

A spokesperson for the Federal Department of Transportation wrote in a statement that it has “worked with project sponsors to deliver significant progress on elements of the Gateway Program.”

The spokesperson didn’t address exactly why the Trump administration slowed down the project and walked away from the table, as Cohen described.

“The Department’s Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) is working with Amtrak to advance the design and implementation of a program to rehabilitate the North River Tunnel on a possible limited service outage basis. FRA is continuing to work with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ), NJ TRANSIT, and Amtrak to ensure that the EIS [Environmental Impact Study] is responsive to all stakeholder concerns, technically sound, and legally sufficient,” the spokesperson wrote.

By contrast, former Vice President Joe Biden is Mr. Amtrak. He used the passenger train to commute to Washington when he was in the Senate and now he’s using it for campaign travel. He recently gave his full support to the Gateway project.

"It's about each area in the nation making up for shortcomings in other areas. How many times have you as New Yorkers bailed out the farmers in Iowa or Nebraska?" Biden said, according to NJ.com. "What happens every time we talk about what our needs are?"