Donald Trump famously said he could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, yet the war is still raging more than two months after he took office. In the same way, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently said that New York City could solve all of the problems with its subway system “in hours, not days” (he generously allowed the city 36 hours instead of just 24) if it just had the will to do so. Note that Trump promised to stop the war himself while Duffy is demanding that someone else save the subways.
This is the level of naïveté that we’ve come to expect from the Trump administration. New York City subways have problems with fare evasion, homelessness, drugs, property crime, vandalism, and violent crime that stretch across 472 stations, 850 miles of track, and nearly 6,800 subway cars. The idea that it could solve all of these problems by simply flooding the system with police for 36 hours is so ludicrous it isn’t even funny.
Even if those problems were solved, they are really just symptoms of the real problem, which is that transit agencies have no incentive to operate efficiently or even to attract riders. Instead, all of their incentives are to increase costs as much as possible while doing as little work as possible. These perverse incentives are not the fault of the New York MTA or any other transit agency but are due the federal government, which began throwing money at transit in the 1960s and responds to every transportation issue by increasing the flow of money.
I understand why Trump appointed non-experts to run his departments and agencies. You can’t fight the Deep State by putting members of the Deep State in charge. At the same time, the people fighting the Deep State need to understand the real problems or they are just going to flounder around.
Last November, I urged Musk to take a scalpel to the federal budget, cutting wasteful programs and making sure such cuts are sustainable by combining them with new policies that will give government agencies incentives to operate efficiently. Instead of a scalpel, he is using a chainsaw, and the cuts he is making are not going to solve the government’s problems.
Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.
Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.
Photo: EmperorOfNYC via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.
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