Congestion Pricing Was Going Well and Trump Is Killing It

You can see the impact of Manhattan’s congestion-pricing plan — which President Trump capriciously announced plans to suspend on Wednesday — in the very concrete car crash data. In the first 10 business days of 2020, Gersh Kuntzman noted last month for Streetsblog, there were 400 crashes in what would later become the congestion relief zone. In the first 10 such days of 2025, there were 90.

The year-on-year improvements have been somewhat smaller — but, remarkably, they are citywide, with big declines not just in Manhattan but in each of the five boroughs. According to an analysis by Jeff Asher, the rolling 30-day average of car crashes throughout the entire city fell about 20 percent in January.

Since the program began, belatedly, on Jan. 5, much of the commentary has swirled around its effect on driving times. And those signs were positive: In the first week, 7.5 percent fewer cars entered the zone, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced, significantly speeding up commutes into Manhattan and accelerating many trips within the borough, as well. Within a few weeks, travel times had fallen between 10 and 30 percent across the zone, the agency said, with even larger improvements on bridges and tunnels.

But this was also always a narrow way of measuring success, and frankly a weirdly car-centered one for what is, by far, America’s least car-centric city. In Manhattan, foot traffic is up, not down; public transportation traffic, too, is up; and there were perhaps a million fewer cars on the streets in the zone of Manhattan affected by the program, in January. Buses are traveling faster, and late arrivals of students’ school buses have fallen almost in half.

And support for the program is growing among those most affected, at least according to one Morning Consult poll, with six out of 10 New Yorkers saying it should continue; those regularly driving into the affected zone and paying its fee now support the program 66 percent to 32 percent. In short, by almost every metric you could imagine, the congestion zone has been a success. But for now at least it seems the only metric that matters is the depth of Donald Trump’s spite.

For years, congestion pricing has been, in addition to a technocratic dream, a cautionary tale about the obstacles to policy progress: about the way transportation authority is unfortunately shared, in New York, between boroughs and states and agencies; about the burdens of environmental reviews and the power of “vetocracy” on the left; about the venality and shortsightedness of politicians, even those theoretically inclined to support such programs.

But if Trump’s kill shot holds up in court — which it may not, like so many initiatives of the administration’s first 100 days — it will give a somewhat more unsettling lesson: that none of those arguments or the way you might resolve them ultimately matter very much, if you have the gleeful rage of the world’s most powerful man turned against you. “LONG LIVE THE KING,” Trump declared Wednesday on Truth Social. The White House quickly put the line on a mock-up of a magazine cover in the style of Time magazine and tweeted it out.

It’s important to pay attention to the language of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” and notice that three of the four words in the name are purposeful illusions. DOGE is not a department, and it is not focused on government efficiency.

Remember all the things the tech industry told us were true, but that were not true? Uber was for “sharing” rides, a pleasant notion — who can be against sharing — that lulled the media as well as regulators in states and cities across the country and the world into not noticing or caring that “ridesharing” created an on-demand taxi service that attempted, for years, to evade the many rules and regulations that had built up over the decades for good reason, whether to ensure rider safety or reduce traffic. Airbnb was for “hosting” people — “guests” — in your home, also lulling regulators into complacency while significant portions of global cities’ housing supply turned into de facto hotel rooms, again, without attendant regulations. Ingenious use and abuse of the English language has enabled many of Big Tech’s biggest successes.

Now, even people who oppose the actions of Musk’s “department” are falling into the same trap of using big tech’s words.

First, “department.” The word department seems an anodyne way to describe what Musk’s DOGE is. But the word “department” in Washington means something specific: a congressionally created entity of government, with its leader confirmed by the Senate after a public committee hearing. Donald Trump, or his legal advisers, know this; the executive order creating this “department” notes, in its fine print, that the department is really just a renaming of an existing agency, the United States Digital Service. This matters: Calling this service a “department” invests it with a weight it does not have.

Second, the notion of “government efficiency.” Just as with “sharing” a car ride or “hosting” a “guest” in your home, it’s hard to object to the notion. Efficiency is nonpartisan and neutral; who can object to doing something — anything — better and for less cost? But DOGE isn’t focused on efficiency; disrupting an entire agency created and funded by Congress — U.S.A.I.D. — is not the same as finding efficiencies within that agency.

Indeed, “disrupt” — a tech-industry favorite word — is the proper term to use for what DOGE has done to U.S.A.I.D., not “shut down,” or abolish. Trump cannot shut down or abolish U.S.A.I.D., or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Only Congress can do that.

DOGE’s early actions illustrate that Musk, or a legal team advising Musk, actually understands this reality, in the choices of U.S.A.I.D. and the C.F.P.B. Though authorized by Congress, both entities operate under exploitable contradictions that are artifacts of their creation: Congress’s definition of U.S.A.I.D. as both “independent” but within the State Department, and the C.F.P.B.’s odd funding method, under which it asks the Federal Reserve for money rather than relying on a congressional appropriation.

All of this wordplay and technicality matters, because Musk is cleverly using words to deflect political accountability, both from Trump and from Congress. The government still works the way it always has. Tech bros do not fund or defund the government, and do not create or abolish government departments or agencies. Only Congress does.

The real crisis is still what it was before: not Elon Musk or DOGE, but a Congress that remains in thrall to Trump and will not provide the normal checks and balances that our government needs.

“I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion,” wrote Hagan Scotten, the assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, to Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, in a resignation letter that became public on Friday. This made Scotten the seventh legal official in less than 24 hours to resign in response to Bove’s order that corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York be dropped.

By Friday evening, Bove clearly had found people who agreed to do the deed. In court filings on Friday evening, Edward Sullivan, along with Bove and Antoinette Bacon, asked a judge to withdraw the case. Reuters reported that Sullivan had volunteered in order “to spare other career staff from potentially being fired for refusing to do so.”

Sullivan came forward after Justice Department leadership called the entire public integrity section into a meeting in search of someone who would sign a court document to withdraw the charges — within one hour, according to The Times and the law professor and journalist Barbara McQuade.

In a column published last weekend, I mentioned the concept of collective hostage taking, pioneered by the Russian sociologist Yuri Levada. He spent decades trying to understand the methods of enforcement used by totalitarian regimes and the accommodations people make in response. He identified collective hostage taking as one of the most important totalitarian tools. It functions by enforcing collective responsibility and threatening collective punishment. In Stalin’s time, if people were arrested for a (usually invented) political crime, suspicion would also fall on their family members, their co-workers and their children’s schoolteachers and classmates. In later Soviet years, if dissidents were arrested, their colleagues would be scrutinized; some could lose their jobs or be demoted for “failing to exercise sufficient vigilance.” It is remarkable that Bove, if the reports are accurate, enacted collective hostage taking literally, by putting attorneys in a room and tasking them — over a video call — with finding at least one person to take the fall.

Levada had compassion for people who folded under conditions of collective hostage taking. Normal people confronted with abnormal demands will just try to survive, he wrote. Nothing prepares ordinary people for extraordinary times.

In fact, though, many life experiences do prepare us for times such as these. Most American schools, for example, practice collective punishment: If half of the class is unruly, the entire class may be docked recess. When I heard about lawyers being put in a room, I thought, “This has happened to my kids in New York City public schools.” In this way, U.S. schools are almost indistinguishable from the old Soviet ones.

The legal officials involved in the Adams debacle — the ones who quit, the one who folded and the ones who accepted Sullivan’s sacrifice — are only some of the first people to confront a choice most of us will face, if we choose to recognize it: Do you act like a schoolchild, who can survive and succeed only by conforming, or do you insist on your dignity and adult agency? Even in situations where the end seems preordained, as it certainly seemed to be in this case, will you be able to say, “I won’t be the one to do it”? If enough people withhold their cooperation, the end is no longer preordained.

It was easy to predict that a diktat from Donald Trump’s Justice Department would, at some point in his second term, prompt resignations from career prosecutors with conservative legal bona fides. Given Trump’s crude transactionalism and his administration’s determination to reshape the boundaries of executive power, it was always likely that we’d get some version of the conflict now pitting Trump’s acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove III, against Danielle Sassoon and the other prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.

It is extremely surprising, however, that the conflict would be sought and stoked just weeks into Trump’s four-year term, and for the sake of protecting Eric Adams, a Democratic mayor of a liberal city with just 11 months left in his term of office.

The Trump Department of Justice is picking a fight with its own lawyers, not for some longstanding desire of the president’s heart nor over some important point of constitutional interpretation, but to keep an official of the rival party, with no obvious political future, in office for a very short amount of time. And to the extent that there appears to be any quid pro quo at work, as the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman points out, all the Trump administration is getting from Adams is a promise to enforce existing immigration law — which given his myriad difficulties and limited tenure, is probably not worth very much.

The assumption inside the Trump administration, one supposes, is that it’s better to cull the potentially disloyal lawyers early, or to get them to prove their allegiance upfront, so that you won’t have to worry about dramatic resignations when you come to some much more important battle. Adams isn’t important in his own right; he’s just a useful test of obedience and discipline.

The difficulty with that approach is that long before administrations get to some immense high-stakes clash, it’s likely to have many, many smaller legal battles that it needs to have lawyered effectively. The Trump administration has picked a lot of those battles already, and quite a few of them — over the scope of the president’s control over the bureaucracy, especially — are fights it should be able to win. But only with good arguments and effective counsel, not with a cavalcade of hacks filing its briefs.

Thus the downside of enforcing absolute loyalty early, in a largely pointless battle, is that it signals to competent lawyers both inside and outside the administration that to work for Trump requires immediate subservience, not just cautious, careful service. And that signal tells the talented and principled, exactly the kind of lawyers Trump needs to win Supreme Court cases, that they’re better off sitting this administration out.

I’m in Munich for a big annual meeting of military officials and industry insiders, and I’m hearing two reactions to President Trump’s announcement that he is negotiating an end to the Ukraine-Russia war, over the heads of Ukrainians and NATO allies.

The first is blind fury. “Trump just lost the war,” a former military official from an Eastern European country told me, one of several who spoke to me on condition of anonymity out of fear of attracting the attention of the U.S. administration, at a meeting on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, which begins Friday. Why would a man who had built his reputation on “the art of the deal” give in to virtually all of Vladimir Putin’s demands before even sitting down at the table?

That has mystified many Europeans who traveled to Munich hoping that the American president had a better idea about how to bring an end to the bloody conflict. The city hosting the conference has a dark history, with the notorious Munich Agreement of 1938, in which Britain, France and Italy allowed Hitler to annex part of Czechoslovakia. On Thursday a managing partner of a venture capital fund for tech start-ups that defend democracies told the assembled audience that she was in mourning: “I dressed in all black for a reason.”

But I also heard something else: appreciation that Americans were finally being honest about their limitations. Ana Miguel dos Santos, a former member of the European Parliament from Portugal who participated in a NATO-Ukraine working group, told me that she welcomed Trump’s stark statements because they will force Europe to finally wake up and figure out how to protect itself.

“I’m very tired of poetic speeches,” she said, noting that Portugal — like the rest of Europe — was ill prepared for war. “We don’t have troops.”

“I am kind of relieved,” a Polish member of a tech fund told me. Now we know that it’s our job to defend ourselves, he said, “rather than living in a fantasy that we might be defended by somebody else.”

The meeting I attended, which was put together by the U.S. military’s Defense Innovation Unit and Resilience Media, a publication for military tech professionals, was meant to inject a sense of urgency into a defense industry that moves far too slowly. Both Europe and the United States have a lot of work to do — hopefully together — to defend against looming threats.

Even without Trump, a “new trans-Atlantic deal was necessary anyway,” Mircea Geoana, a former Romanian official who recently served as deputy secretary general of NATO, told the assembled audience. The United States can’t fight wars to protect its allies in three theaters — Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. It needs NATO allies to step up.

So yes, it is shocking that Trump seems willing to send the bravest and most battle-tested army in Europe back into the arms of an authoritarian state. But it is also shocking that war has been at Europe’s door for three years — or a decade, depending on how you count — and so many European leaders are still walking around in a daydream. If Russia is the dire threat that European leaders say they know it is, they need to start acting like it.

Mayor Eric Adams paid a few genuflective visits to Palm Beach and Washington this winter. It’s no surprise that the first president convicted on felony charges and the first New York mayor indicted on felony charges would hit it off.

On Monday, President Trump’s Justice Department ordered prosecutors to drop federal bribery charges against his honor. The judge overseeing the case will have to review the dismissal and, since the department said its decision was largely based on the April trial date’s proximity to the June mayoral primary, the dismissal could be re-evaluated after the November election.

But it seems that to two ethically handicapped, transactional men, what was once a source of shame is merely an inconvenience to be skirted. What once was determined by a jury’s deliberation is seemingly being resolved by back-scratching.

With polls showing that only about 10 percent of New Yorkers would vote for Adams in the primary, it’s likely that his major concern was not re-election but his future freedom.

For New Yorkers, the concern is if there’s a quid for the quo. Will Adams’s decisions be based on their interests or his? (And by holding out the possibility of his Justice Department renewing the prosecution, Trump has more to hold over Adams’s head.)

No matter how Adams responds to Trump’s immigration crackdown, for instance, it should be based on his best judgment, not his worst instincts. (The Justice Department memorandum released Monday evening noted that “Mayor Adams criticized the prior administration’s immigration policies before the charges were filed.”)

Adams’s decision to avoid criticizing Trump, his request that his staff do the same and the memo from city lawyers seeming to permit some warrantless searches by federal immigration agents, may be the sort of anticipatory obedience that some officials and institutions hope will stave off Trump’s wrath. Adams reportedly told city officials that criticism could jeopardize federal funds for the city.

But hovering over all of this, over all his decisions as mayor, will be the question of when is he acting as an elected official, and when is he acting as a prospective criminal defendant looking for a way out.

Letting a mayor avoid trial on charges of contaminating his office may be small potatoes compared with pardoning people who engaged in an insurrection that left police officers dead. Besides, city officials and Manhattan prosecutors are still investigating the Adams administration, and charges beyond the reach of the president are not out of the question.

Indeed, the most pertinent reaction to this outcome may not be outrage, but disgust. How did this city elect this guy?

As President Trump suspends a large share of foreign aid, the winner of my annual win-a-trip contest is reflecting on her reporting with me in Africa. The winner, Trisha Mukherjee, has written guest columns about menstruation as an impediment to education and about breastfeeding to save babies’ lives.

As I’ve written, the gutting of U.S.A.I.D. and the uncertainty around foreign aid seems to me a terrible mistake, deriving from a misperception that aid does no good. So I asked Trisha to recount the malnutrition we saw as well as the solutions that ease it. Here’s what Trisha wrote:

In a one-room clinic in rural Madagascar, a wide-eyed baby boy named Mercia watched as his mother tore open a packet of something that looked like peanut butter. Mercia devoured the paste, leaving traces all over his cheeks.

Malnutrition isn’t always something we think much about, but every year it’s a factor in the deaths of two million children under 5 worldwide. One-fifth of all children in that age group are stunted from malnutrition. But these packets — which public health workers call “small quantity lipid-based nutrient supplements” — prevent that malnutrition, for just $36 for a year’s supply. Mercia’s yummy morning treat could save his life.

While reporting with Nick, I saw wrenching scenes of children starving, of families with nothing to eat, of kids reduced to surviving off wild plants because drought had caused crops to fail. But I also found that preventing stunting and starvation is not just possible but logistically feasible and cost-effective.

“It may be the single most powerful investment you’ve never really heard of,” said Shawn Baker, chief program officer of Helen Keller Intl, which works to end global malnutrition.

In Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital, Tantely Raharinirina hauled two hefty buckets of a nutritious porridge between tin lean-tos and over open sewers. Mothers and children emerged to buy a serving — fortified with essential nutrients — for the equivalent of 10 cents. Nutri’zaza, the social enterprise that provides the porridge, shows that lifesaving food doesn’t have to be expensive.

In a factory in Nairobi, Kenya, I saw another solution, this one for children already suffering from severe malnutrition. A father-daughter team, Dhiren and Nikita Chandaria, produce therapeutic foods to stabilize even dangerously ill children — and the course of treatment costs about $50. Malnutrition, I saw on this trip, is a vast and under-addressed problem — but also one that we can solve if we commit to it.

Where to begin with President Trump’s proposal to move Palestinians out of Gaza and for the United States to take it over and redevelop it?

It would be a blatant violation of international law. The forced transfer of populations is barred by the Geneva Conventions and was termed a war crime by the Nuremberg Tribunal that the United States established after World War II to try war criminals.

On Wednesday, administration officials attempted to walk back parts of what Trump said, but the truth is Trump’s proposal on Tuesday night would amount to ethnic cleansing of more than two million Palestinians in Gaza.

In any case, even if Trump could move all Palestinians out of Gaza, it would not become an American territory. The U.S. or Israel couldn’t legally absorb Gaza any more than Russia could legally seize parts of Ukraine.

Still, it won’t happen. It’s another of the bizarre assertions by Trump that are utterly impractical and simply damage America’s reputation worldwide. Does he imagine dispatching troops to force Gaza’s civilians at gunpoint into the Sinai Desert? And if he balks at spending $40 billion to fund the United States Agency for International Development annually for its lifesaving work around the world, where does he intend to find the many hundreds of billions of dollars needed to accommodate two million people?

Egypt and Jordan, which Trump may think are the obvious candidates to take people from Gaza, would be loath to accept them, and the Arab world is understandably outraged at the idea of such a forced transfer and certainly wouldn’t pay for it. The Palestinian turmoil today is seen in the Arab world through the prism of 1948, when some 800,000 Arabs were expelled or fled as Israel was established. There is deep suspicion that another mass displacement is in the works to drive Palestinians from their land in the West Bank, Gaza or both.

Trump is right, of course, that conditions in Gaza are hellish. The enclave now has more child amputees per capita than any place in the world, the United Nations says. If Trump offered to house them in Mar-a-Lago for a year on a voluntary basis, that would be a nice gesture, since many of them presumably lost their limbs to American weapons. To force them to flee their homeland would not be charity but a crime against humanity.

Partly because this massive displacement won’t happen, it’s a distraction from the need to implement the cease-fire in Gaza and continue the release of both Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners. The far bigger risk is that there won’t be a smooth transition to the next phases of the agreement and the Gaza war will resume in some form.

So what Trump needs to do is spend less time conjuring grandiose visions of ethnic cleansing and more time twisting arms to keep the Gaza cease-fire on track and prevent an explosion in the West Bank.