Trump’s tunnel vision hurts the economies of New York and the US
Some actions by political leaders are capricious. Some can be shortsighted. And some are sheer lunkheaded. President Donald Trump hit the trifecta last week when he encouraged the House speaker, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-wis., to scrap startup money for an additional rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey, a project essential to the economic health not only of those two states but of the entire country.
Worse yet, the president’s action bore no relation to objective analysis of the region’s infrastructure needs. Accounts in The Times and The Washington Post said he did it to spite the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, whose sin is failure to fall in lock step with Trump on a variety of issues.
This is foolishness. Republicans and Democrats alike broadly agree on the essentiality of the Gateway tunnel, described by many officials as the most urgently needed infrastructure project anywhere in the United States. It will not come cheap, with $11 billion required for the first phase and an estimated $19 billion more needed to finish the job. “People get frightened by the cost,” said John Banks, president of the Real Estate Board of New York. “But the alternative is worse.”
Existing tunnels under the Hudson River are more than a century old and stressed by damage from Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Losing one of those tubes would greatly reduce train capacity, to devastating effect. With the metro region said to account for about 10 percent of the national economy, it doesn’t take a seer to appreciate that such a blow would be, to borrow from Trump when he’s in high dudgeon, a disaster.
It was bad enough that in 2010, then-gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican, killed a predecessor to the Gateway, a project known as Access to the Region’s Core. That decision hit the same trifecta. The Obama administration, graced with the good sense to make a top priority of a new tunnel across the Hudson, agreed informally to have Washington split the initial costs with New Jersey and New York. When officials from both states met with Trump in September, they were led to believe he was fully on board with a similar funding plan.
That commitment grew shaky in December, when an administration official expressed grave doubts. Now Trump seems intent on plunging a dagger through the project’s heart by pressing Ryan to eliminate $900 million for Gateway in a House spending bill expected to be voted on this month.
It is but one instance among many of the president showing zero concern for the region and the city that created his wealth and his reputation. More than most states, New York and New Jersey are adversely affected by his 2017 tax legislation, by his anti-immigrant rhetoric and by his lack of interest in lifting a finger to help rescue his hometown’s ailing mass transit system.
Assuming Trump doesn’t change his mind — he can be as constant as a reed in a stiff wind — the best hope may be that Ryan shows backbone, for a change, and supports money for Gateway as benefiting the nation. It may be worth noting that Trump urged the speaker to eliminate the funding when they were together at the Capitol for a memorial ceremony for the Rev. Billy Graham. It would have been a fitting time for both men to recall words from Luke 6:48, about the importance of building well and laying a foundation on rock so that “when a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it.”