The feds are threatening funding cuts to the MTA if the company doesn’t file an amended danger evaluation for monitor staff inside 30 days, based on a letter despatched Tuesday by the Federal Transit Administration.
FTA Chief Security Officer Joe DeLorenzo claimed New York Metropolis Transit “essentially obfuscates risks to workers and downplays the necessity for updated worker protections” and should resubmit an evaluation of risks confronted by monitor staff for a 3rd time or else face “prompt enforcement action … including withholding up to twenty-five percent of funds.”
“FTA will not afford NYCT an opportunity to submit a fourth [assessment,]” the letter reads.
Tuesday’s letter comes eight months after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and NYCT filed an amended response in January to an FTA directive printed underneath the Biden administration, which took the transit company to process for what regulators on the time referred to as “an escalating pattern of safety incidents.”
Each males have been working as “flaggers” — alerting oncoming practice operators to the presence of labor crews on the tracks — after they have been hit.
MTA monitor employee Hilarion Joseph was killed when he was dragged beneath a passing Manhattan subway practice about 150 toes south of the thirty fourth St.-Herald Sq. station.
In his letter, DeLorenzo says the MTA’s January response — a mandated doc referred to as a “safety risk assessment,” filed within the first week of the Trump administration — “continues to significantly underestimate actual worker risk exposure.”
It additionally cites the MTA for not together with 2024 information within the January 2025 evaluation and accuses the company of “diluting” incident information by “averaging across a broad 11-year analytical period,” understating dangers to trace staff.
“Specifically, several track worker events occurred from calendar years 2021-2023, representing an incident rate approximately 3.4 times higher than the preceding eight-year period, calendar years 2013-2020,” DeLorenzo wrote.
DeLorenzo mentioned the MTA had 30 days to include 2024 information into its evaluation and revise its willpower of how doubtless trains are to strike or come near placing transit staff.
“Let me be very clear,” Marc Molinaro, President Trump’s FTA administrator, mentioned in a press release. “We will not accept being jerked around on safety and security issues any longer. By anyone, anywhere.”
However the risk to subway funding comes amid months of federal efforts to defund the trains and a sequence of political fights.
Sean Duffy, the federal Division of Transportation secretary, has, in current months, threatened to tug funding over New York Metropolis’s congestion pricing program — till a federal choose forbade him from doing so. Duffy additionally has threatened to tug funding over supposedly excessive crime on the subways — even though main crime within the system is down.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy joins New York Metropolis Mayor Eric Adams for a practice experience into Manhattan from the Dekalb Ave-Flatbush Ave subway station in Brooklyn on Friday, April 4, 2025. (Theodore Parisienne / New York Every day Information)
In a press release Tuesday, John McCarthy, the MTA’s chief of coverage and exterior relations, accused the feds of utilizing employee security to make one more defunding risk.
“Clearly, this was not urgent for Washington until it was decided it was time to fire off yet another letter and press release in what is a pattern of threatening letters and punitive actions by US DOT following New York’s successful implementation of the first in nation Congestion Pricing program,” McCarthy mentioned.
Calling the subway “a system that won’t compromise on safety for customers or employees,” McCarthy mentioned transit officers have been assembly often with FTA officers for the reason that monitor security directive was issued final August, and have been conducting security audits alongside transit employee unions.
However John Chiarello, president of Transport Employees Union Native 100, which represents subway staff, together with those that work on the tracks, welcomed the FTA’s letter.
“This is the second administration — first Biden’s and now Trump’s — to call out the MTA for not adequately addressing real safety concerns,” Chiarello mentioned in a press release.
“The tracks are a dangerous environment and the MTA has not conducted a safety assessment of the risks as required,” he mentioned.
In its 2024 directive, the FTA mentioned it was conscious of 38 “near-miss” incidents involving New York Metropolis monitor staff in 2023. That quantity was up 58% from 24 such near-misses in 2022, and up 65% from 2021.
Brooklyn
Gardiner Anderson for New York Every day Information
MTA staff reply after a extreme thunderstorm knocked a tree onto the N practice monitor on nineteenth Ave. and 63rd St. in Brooklyn, New York, on Tuesday, July 25, 2023. (Gardiner Anderson for New York Every day Information)
The feds listed suspected causes, together with improper communications or radio use, lack of supervision, practice operator inattention, or failure to disable computerized practice management on sections of the system utilizing computerized indicators.
FTA officers mentioned the “recurring nature of certain rule violations,” together with points with correct flagging — alerting practice operators to the presence of staff — or computerized practice management, “suggests systematic issues that require more comprehensive monitoring.”
On the time, NYCT President Demetrius Crichlow — who was then the top of NYCT’s subway division — pushed again, saying the 38 near-misses in 2023 represented 0.03% of the 127,355 instances staff have been on the tracks that 12 months.
“We will be interested to learn if FTA has established a standard in excess of this 99.97% safety record,” he mentioned.
Initially Printed: August 19, 2025 at 2:06 PM EDT
