Trump Official Threatens to Withhold M.T.A. Funding Over Safety Data

The Trump administration threatened on Tuesday to withhold federal funding from New York’s mass transit network if the Metropolitan Transportation Authority did not respond to a series of demands about efforts to prevent crime on the city’s subway and buses.

Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, said in a letter that the M.T.A. must provide a long list of details about crime in New York City’s transit system, including expenditures on programs to combat it, or face the prospect of losing an untold sum of federal funding.

The threat comes amid a continuing battle between the Trump administration and the state-run transit agency over the congestion-pricing toll program that began operating in Manhattan in January. Mr. Trump has moved to kill the program and has given the authority until Friday to abandon it. Gov. Kathy Hochul and M.T.A. leaders have sued to keep it intact.

Mr. Duffy’s letter did not mention congestion pricing, but transit experts and legal observers have said that the federal government might threaten to withdraw funding from other projects to gain leverage in its opposition to the toll.

The M.T.A. relies on billions of dollars a year from the federal government to improve service and is seeking $14 billion from Washington in its next five-year capital budget.

But it was unclear what the federal agency was aiming to accomplish. Crime in the subway has been trending down in New York City, and much of the data related to its prevention is publicly available.

The letter, addressed to Janno Lieber, the head of the M.T.A., demands that the transit authority share the number of assaults on transit workers in the last two years; statistics on fare evasion; attacks on passengers, including the number who were pushed onto train tracks; and evidence of its efforts to prevent these crimes, among other requests.

“People traveling on the N.Y.C.T. system to reach their jobs, education, health care and other critical services need to feel secure and travel in a safe environment free of crime,” Mr. Duffy wrote, referring to the division of the M.T.A. that operates the subway and buses.

He added, “I appreciate your prompt attention to this matter to avoid further consequences, up to and including redirecting or withholding funding.”

In a statement, John J. McCarthy, the chief of policy and external relations at the M.T.A., said the agency was “happy to discuss” its continuing efforts to reduce crime in the transit system. He noted that the authority was already making progress, with subway crime down 40 percent so far this year, compared with the same period in 2020, shortly before the pandemic. Fare evasion had declined by 25 percent in the second half of 2024, he said.

Just 4 percent of violent crime in the city occurs in the subway, but a few recent traumatic events have shaken riders.

In December, Debrina Kawam, a 57-year-old woman, died after she was set on fire as she slept on a train. Later that month, Joseph Lynskey was shoved in front of an oncoming train at the 18th Street station in Manhattan and survived. There were 10 murders in the subway in 2024, up from three in 2019.

And in 2023, for the first time in nearly two decades, felony assaults outnumbered robberies in the subway, raising concerns that the nature of violence underground was becoming more unpredictable.

The letter sent to the M.T.A. resembles one that the Trump administration sent on March 6 to the head of the transit authority in Washington, D.C., which called for a similar crackdown on crime and fare evasion.

In both cases, Mr. Duffy reminded the authorities that their federal resources could and should be used for crime prevention. Neither letter referred to the use of federal funding to pay for infrastructure projects.

The Trump administration has also wielded the threat of withdrawing federal funds against Columbia University. Earlier this month, it canceled $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia, saying it was the “first round of action” in response to what it called the university’s failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitism.

Ms. Hochul has said she is making subway safety a priority. Last year, she ordered 1,000 members of the National Guard into the subway. About 1,250 Guard members, M.T.A. officers and state police officers now patrol the system, according to the governor’s office.

That doesn’t include several hundred New York City police officers who have been added to subway patrol assignments, allowing the department to place two officers on every overnight train, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a recent City Council hearing.

In a statement, the governor’s office cited its recent deployment of uniformed officers on the subway and said it was open to “partnering with the federal government on ways to fund New York’s priorities.”

But critics of the city’s and state’s approaches have pointed to the limits of flooding the system with officers, when there is also a need for more social service outreach. Nearly two-thirds of people with repeated arrests in the subway had a history of homelessness or mental illness between 2022 and 2023, according to John Hall, a retired police official and an adviser to Vital City, an urban policy think tank.

Ed Shanahan contributed reporting.