Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images
The Trump administration has implemented its agenda in rapid fashion since January, instituting steep cuts across the federal government and workforce and wielding its power over the nation’s cultural and educational institutions. But no other city has felt the brunt of Trump’s policies like New York as the president looks to force his political ideas upon his traditionally Democratic hometown. The federal government has sought to shutter the city’s congestion-pricing program and challenge the leadership of Columbia University while clawing back millions of dollars in federal funds allocated to the city’s migrant care. Here’s a look at some of the ways that the city has been challenged by the federal government.
The city’s long-awaited and divisive congestion-pricing program went into effect following the New Near after a scuttled launch in June prompted a revamp that lowered the proposed toll from $15 to $9. But the future of the program was immediately called into question when Trump entered the White House. Trump had long made his opposition to congestion pricing known, calling the program a “disaster for NYC” last year and vowing to “TERMINATE” the toll if elected to a second term.
The administration attempted to fulfill that promise, as Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced in February that the federal government was pulling its approval of the city’s congestion-pricing program. In a letter to Governor Kathy Hochul, Duffy cited the fact that the program is intended to generate revenue for the transit system rather than the highways and said the tolling zone leaves commuters without a “free highway alternative” to travel to their destinations. “I do not believe this is a fair deal,” he said.
Soon after, the Metropolitan Transit Authority filed a lawsuit in federal court, arguing that the government doesn’t have the ability to unilaterally end congestion pricing. “It’s mystifying that after four years and 4,000 pages of federally-supervised environmental review — and barely three months after giving final approval to the Congestion Relief Program — USDOT would seek to totally reverse course,” MTA executive Janno Lieber said in a statement.
Hochul has also vowed to keep the tolling program’s cameras on as the legal challenge proceeds, denouncing the administration’s action as an attempt by Trump to exert his will over residents. “I don’t care if you love congestion pricing or hate it,” she said at a press conference. “This is an attack on our sovereign identity, our independence from Washington.”
Though the government initially gave an official deadline of March 21 to wind down the program, Duffy later gave the state a 30-day extension paired with a threat. “Know that the billions of dollars the federal government sends to New York are not a blank check. Continued noncompliance will not be taken lightly,” he wrote on social media. That deadline will likely be pushed back even further following reports that the federal government and the MTA have agreed on a timeline to present their arguments in court, delaying any further action until at least October.
It was last September that Manhattan federal prosecutors unveiled an indictment of Eric Adams, alleging that the mayor knowingly solicited illegal campaign contributions from Turkish nationals in exchange for luxury travel perks, among other offenses. Though Adams professed his innocence in the matter, the five-count indictment led to calls for his resignation, which he quickly rebuffed.
With Adams due to stand trial in April, the mayor was soon the center of numerous overtures from Trump himself, who compared his own legal plight to the mayor’s and said the two New Yorkers were the victims of a political vendetta from the Biden administration. Unlike his fellow big-city Democratic mayors, Adams struck up a far more cordial relationship with Trump, vowing to work with his administration and not against it and even traveling to attend his inauguration in Washington, D.C.
The legal saga appeared poised to derail Adams’s reelection campaign until the mayor received a late-stage intervention from an unlikely source. In February, the Trump Justice Department directed the Manhattan prosecutors to drop their pending case against Adams, arguing that former U.S. attorney Damian Williams had political motivations behind the case and that the charges were hindering the mayor’s ability to support federal immigration-enforcement efforts.
Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney, resigned in protest, saying that Acting Deputy U.S. Attorney General Emil Bove’s directive to her office to drop the case amounted to a “quid pro quo” between Adams and the federal government. Several Justice Department officials would follow her, tendering their own resignations rather than carry out Bove’s order.
The issue then came before District Judge Dale Ho, who was set to preside over Adams’s trial in April. Ho sought to hear the arguments from both sides as well as an outside view from Paul Clement, an experienced litigator and former solicitor general. Last week, Ho officially moved to dismiss the charges against Adams “with prejudice,” meaning that the Trump administration would be unable to revive the case in the future. Though Ho’s ruling aligned with the government’s wishes, the judge notably criticized its reasoning for the dismissal and signaled that he believed some of the arguments against dropping the case had merit. “Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the Indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions,” he wrote.
In February, comptroller Brad Lander said his office discovered that the Trump administration had revoked $80.5 million in FEMA funds allocated to the city government. The money, disbursed by Congress as part of the agency’s Shelter and Services program, was intended to go to the city’s migrant shelters. “This is money that the federal government previously disbursed for shelter and services and is now missing. This highway robbery of our funds directly out of our bank account is a betrayal of everyone who calls New York City home,” Lander said at the time.
The revocation appeared to have its roots in a social-media post from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who wrote that his DOGE team had “discovered that FEMA sent $59M LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants.” He alleged, without evidence, that the funds were coming at the expense of disaster relief, despite money from FEMA’s shelter program originating from a separate part of the budget. Musk’s words prompted the interim FEMA administrator to freeze the funds and the subsequent firings of agency staffers, who were accused of “circumventing leadership” to allow the payments but with no further detail provided.
The city officially filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, calling the revocation of funds unlawful. “The $80 million that FEMA approved, paid, and then rescinded — after the city spent more than $7 billion in the last three years — is the bare minimum our taxpayers deserve. And that’s why we’re going to work to ensure our city’s residents get every dollar they are owed,” Adams said in a statement.
However, the federal government did not stop there. The New York Times reported Tuesday that FEMA is canceling $106 million in grants for the city’s migrant care with the agency seeking the money’s return. In addition, the agency cut $300 million in grants intended for flood mitigation in the state. “These cuts are a complete dereliction of duty from FEMA and will put lives at risk. Shame on them,” Hochul said on social media.
Though the Trump administration has targeted numerous colleges and universities, arguably none has been more on its radar than Columbia University. Since the divisive on-campus protests against the conflict in Gaza last year, conservatives have directed their ire at Columbia, calling for an overhaul of the Ivy League school’s policies and leadership.
In March, the federal government announced that it would be cancelling $400 million in grants and contracts with Columbia, citing the university’s “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” The Trump administration issued an ultimatum Columbia would have to comply with to save its federal funding. The university was ordered to enforce steep punishments of students who participated in the Gaza encampments and building takeovers; institute a mask ban; and agree to place its Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies Department under an academic receivership for five years. Columbia would go on to agree to the federal government’s terms.
The administration has also begun to target the university’s students as part of its crackdown on campus activism. In one of its highest-profile cases, ICE agents arrested and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student who played a role in the Gaza protests on campus, despite his having a green card.
On the campaign trail, Trump frequently railed against diversity-equity-and-inclusion programs, vowing to remove DEI policies and teachings from American schools and even threatening to revoke funding from institutions that don’t follow his directives. But in April, New York signaled that it would not be complying with the federal government’s order on the subject.
Daniel Morton Bentley, counsel and deputy commissioner of the state education department, wrote in a letter that the state is “unaware of any authority” that the U.S. Department of Education has to force compliance without a formal process. “We understand that the current administration seeks to censor anything it deems ‘diversity, equity &inclusion,’” he wrote. “But there are no federal or State laws prohibiting the principles of DEI.”
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