Judge orders Trump administration to resume funding Hudson Tunnel Project

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Courthouse News Service

February 6, 2026


MANHATTAN (CN) -- A federal judge on Friday ordered the Trump administration to restore more than$200 million in federal funding for a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River, on the very day the project ran out of cash and was winding down construction.

U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas, a Joe Biden appointee in the Southern District of New York, granted a temporary restraining order just hours after presiding over an emergency hearing on the project's fate. In an 11-page ruling, Vargas found that "the public interest would be harmed by a delay in a critical infrastructure project."

Without funding, state lawyers for New York and New Jersey warn that the $16 billion Hudson Tunnel Project will be left abandoned, posing a "substantial public safety and public health threat." "There is literally a massive hole in the earth in North Bergen, New Jersey, that has to be secured," said Shankar Duraiswamy of the New Jersey Attorney General's Office in the hearing.

New York and New Jersey filed a lawsuit earlier this week, accusing the Trump administration of "political retribution" in its withholding of allocated federal funds for the highly anticipated Hudson Tunnel -- a massive infrastructure effort aimed at increasing reliability for Amtrak and NJ Transit riders.

Read more: https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-orders-trump-administration-to-resume-funding-hudson-tunnel-project/

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Link to ORDER (PDF) - https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/hudson-tunnel-funding-ruling.pdf

REFERENCES

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143610455
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143612216

[LetMyPeopleVote]

1. Thank you, NY AG James

Link to tweet

[LetMyPeopleVote]

2. Breaking: Judge rules for NY NJ and against @USDOT in Gateway funding TRO

I have some fun reading for this weekend

Link to tweet

[FakeNoose]

3. Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Rec! Rec! Rec!

Thank you Judge Jeannette Vargas



Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeannette_Vargas

[MyOwnPeace]

6. Nice to see......

Gillibrand could actually do something that was a positive action for Dems - and American citizens.......

[LetMyPeopleVote]

4. Court blocks Trump administration's freezing of Gateway funding

This ruling makes me smile

Link to tweet

https://longisland.news12.com/court-blocks-trump-administrations-freezing-of-gateway-funding

A federal court has blocked the Trump administration from freezing federal funding for the Gateway Tunnel Project.

Work on the Hudson River rail tunnel officially stopped at 5 p.m. Friday after funding ran out.

Officials from both New York and New Jersey sued the Trump administration over the issue. They were looking for a temporary restraining order to keep the work going.

The project would double the number of rail tunnels between New Jersey and Manhattan. Construction has been going on since 2023, and $1 billion has already been spent. There were five active worksites.

The project was fully funded by Congress in 2024. New Jersey and New York argue that withholding the funds is a breach of contract.

[Initech]

5. Fuck the man baby and his bullshit demands for putting his name on everything!

[MyOwnPeace]

7. Got THAT right!

Most appropriate would be the tunnel straight to HELL would be called the "TRUMP EXPRESS!"

[Initech]

8. Ha ha ha, true!

[LetMyPeopleVote]

9. Trump's obsession with renaming buildings after himself is about more than ego

Cultural omnipresence is a strongman tactic.

Trump’s obsession with renaming buildings after himself is about more than ego
Cultural omnipresence is a strongman tactic. www.ms.now/opinion/trum...

— News Wire - World 🌎 Independent News Network Pro-Democracy (@democracyblue.bsky.social) 2026-02-07T14:14:33.588Z

https://www.ms.now/opinion/trump-rename-dulles-airport-penn-tunnel-schumer

President Donald Trump’s reported effort to hold a giant infrastructure project hostage unless he gets to rename Washington-Dulles International Airport and New York’s Penn Station after himself, on the surface, seems like yet another of his narcissistic gambits. But taken with all his other efforts at self-commemoration, it should also be seen as something more: an authoritarian tactic to dominate the public’s consciousness. .....

This isn’t normal political dealmaking. It’s an abuse of power. The president is interfering with funds that were already allocated by Congress for an important public works project in order to effectively skim something off the top for himself (even if in this case he’s trying to secure symbolic power, and not money). As my colleague Steve Benen put it, it’s an “attempt at extortion.”

And as Benen detailed, his obsession with renaming things after himself is unrelenting:

Trump and his allies have now applied the president’s name to the Kennedy Center and to the Institute of Peace, announced the construction of ‘Trump-class’ battleships, unveiled a commemorative legal-tender coin that will feature his face on both sides and have launched ‘Trump Gold Cards,’ ‘Trump Accounts’ and ‘TrumpRx’ (the government’s new drug-pricing website). By some accounts, the president wants the forthcoming White House ballroom to be named after him, too.

Presidential historians have pointed out that Trump’s renaming spree is unprecedented; typically a president is commemorated by other people after the president dies.

But Trump’s insistence on plastering his name is not only a matter of troubling self-obsession; it also serves a political purpose — by making him seem more powerful than he is.

It is standard fare for autocratic leaders to erase boundaries between themselves and the state. Turkmenistan’s late strongman leader Saparmurat Niyazov made his birthday a national holiday, which involved over-the-top celebrations of him, including military parades and a declaration by his ministers that he was a prophet from God. In North Korea’s totalitarian state, cultish praise and ubiquitous imagery of the country’s leaders are an essential part of the government’s social structures designed to induce the public to submit before its authoritarian leader. The effect of these social rituals is to make a leader appear invincible, untouchable.

As The Boston Globe pointed out in December in its analysis of Trump’s renaming obsession, strongmen across history often compelled their subjects or allies to participate in the spectacle of renaming:

Allies of Rome’s Julius Caesar, Germany’s Adolf Hitler, the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, India’s Narendra Modi, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan named sports stadiums, cities, roads, schools, and other public buildings after them.

In this specific situation, it seems Trump is unlikely to get what he wants because there’s no way that Schumer — who has already refused — could give him what he wants. But we should expect Trump to continue angling to add his name and his visage everywhere he possibly can. Like so many aspiring strongmen before him, Trump views cultural omnipresence as a gateway to political omnipotence. But given that Trump is manifestly not all-powerful, right now, many people can see it for what it is: graffiti.