American Infrastructure Is About to Get Even Worse
NEWS | 18 October 2025
In what appears to be a case of extreme political hardball, the Trump administration has frozen funding for two of the most important infrastructure projects in the country, both based in New York City: the construction of new tunnels to carry trains under the Hudson River, known as the Gateway project, and the extension of Manhattan’s Second Avenue Subway. The White House’s decision, announced during the government shutdown, seems designed to put pressure on Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leaders in the Senate and House respectively, who both happen to represent New York State. But the specific way in which Donald Trump has decided to block the projects—by imposing an onerous regulatory-review process—is a troubling omen of how he might broadly undermine development across the country. A figure who campaigned on promises to slash government bureaucracy and unleash prosperity has now become the nation’s NIMBY in chief. If anyone should appreciate the downsides of excessive red tape, it’s Trump. Forty years ago, the New York City parks department was struggling to rebuild Central Park’s decrepit Wollman ice-skating rink. But a state anti-corruption statute known as the Wicks Law precluded the city government from hiring a single general contractor to do the job. Instead, the parks department was required to bid the plumbing, electrical, and ventilation jobs separately, lest they all be awarded to some corrupt municipal official’s incompetent brother-in-law. As a result, the new rink’s construction had run behind schedule and over budget. Most dispiriting, when the project was ostensibly completed in 1986, the ice wouldn’t stay frozen. Mayor Ed Koch was rightfully enraged. Then swooped in a local builder named Donald Trump, who made the mayor an offer he couldn’t refuse: Hand the rink over to the Trump Corporation, and the private company would rebuild it once more, for a much lower fee and no profit. What Trump understood was that, as a private developer, he could bypass the demands of the Wicks Law and accomplish what government had proved incapable of doing. And he did: The rink opened under budget and before the next holiday season, and Trump became known as a man who got things done. One skater, interviewed following the new rink’s celebratory opening, said of the future president: “Anybody who can get anything done right and done on time in New York is a bona fide hero. He should get a ticker-tape parade.” Now New York City is again trying to get something done, and this time, Trump is the obstacle. The problem revolves around diversity mandates. The federal government has long required that companies hired with federal funds direct at least 10 percent of the subcontracts for any given project to “disadvantaged business entities,” typically small businesses owned by minority or female executives. Because New York’s tunnel projects, as with essentially all major U.S. infrastructure, rely substantially on federal funding, the firms employed to build them have been subject to that requirement. Marc J. Dunkelman: How progressives broke the government Given Trump’s well-established antipathy toward diversity initiatives, you might have expected him to reverse any policy designed to benefit minority and female-owned businesses moving forward. Instead, in the case of the New York City projects, his administration has replaced one set of rules with an even more burdensome process that requires changing contracts for work that has already begun. As soon as the shutdown began on October 1, the Department of Transportation announced that it would investigate whether New York’s application of the rules favoring minority and female-owned businesses was contrary to new rules that the Trump administration had announced the day before. Until the review was complete, Washington would not uphold its financial obligations to the two projects. And thus, it seemed, the whole stack of financing, with preparatory work and manufacturing already under way, was at risk. Whether the “disadvantaged business entities” rule is good policy—whether the costs that it imposes on extending public transit to underprivileged communities, for example, outweigh the benefits to those communities—is up for debate. But when the various state agencies building these megaprojects signed the contracts to begin construction, they were unquestionably in compliance with the guidance they had received from Washington. Typically, when the government changes its guidance, the update applies only prospectively; projects that broke ground before the change are grandfathered in. But that’s not what Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy asserted. The government entities overseeing the tunnel projects, he announced, would need to follow the newly issued rules even though their contracts had already been signed. Until he was satisfied that they were in compliance, the agencies would be cut off. The implications of Trump’s stance are remarkable. After all, the Second Avenue Subway and Gateway projects are not the only ones to have heeded the federal law first passed decades ago to direct contracts to disadvantaged businesses. All of the major federal transportation projects being pursued in red and blue states alike have taken pains to comply. The Trump administration seems to be claiming the right to shut down every federally subsidized transportation project across the country. (On Wednesday, Trump told reporters that the Gateway project had been “terminated.”) America pays orders of magnitude more for infrastructure projects than other wealthy countries do. And a growing body of research reveals that the ultimate source of those added costs is process. Any given project faces so many legal hurdles—environmental reviews, community demands, preservation standards, and more—that contractors are compelled to charge higher prices for fears of delays, changes, and unforeseen hurdles. Trump seems to have won office in part by convincing some voters that he would do for the whole country a version of what he had done with Wollman Rink: sidestep burdensome regulations and simply get the job done. As president, however, he isn’t reprising his old role as a fixer. He is using the power of the White House not to get things done but to load projects down with bureaucracy. Instead of cutting through red tape, he’s adding more. Trump was right when he argued that America needed a builder as president. Unfortunately, that’s not what he has turned out to be.
Author: Marc J. Dunkelman.
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