DOJ admits case against congestion pricing in NYC is weak in internal memo
The judge presiding over the case to end New York City congestion pricing is unlikely to side with President Trump's transportation secretary, according to an internal Department of Justice memo obtained by CBS News New York.
The Trump administration is seeking to end the Manhattan tolling program, while New York and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority have refused Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's repeated orders to stop collecting the tolls.
DOJ memo says there is "risk" in defending argument against congestion pricing
Two months ago, Duffy announced the administration pulled federal approval for congestion pricing and said the program will have to end. He recently gave the MTA until May 21 to comply, otherwise he said Department of Transportation will bring all nonessential construction projects in Manhattan to a halt.
The Trump administration's case to end congestion pricing for good has been playing out in federal court since Duffy's announcement.
In a recent letter to DOT's senior trial lawyer, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York said it did not appear likely their case would succeed. They wrote: "there is considerable litigation risk in defending the Secretary's February 19, 2025 decision against plaintiffs' claims under the Administrative Procedure Act, that the decision was contrary to law, pretextual, procedurally arbitrary and capricious, and violated due process ... it is unlikely that Judge Liman or further courts of review will accept the argument that the [New York City Central Business District Tolling Program] was not a statutorily authorized 'value pricing' pilot under the Value Pricing Pilot Program ... "
In response, a DOT spokesperson said in a statement to CBS News New York, "Are SDNY lawyers on this case incompetent or was this their attempt to RESIST? At the very least, it's legal malpractice. It's sad to see a premier legal organization continue to fall into such disgrace. SDNY's memo doesn't represent reality. Kathy Hochul's congestion pricing war against the working class was hastily approved by the Biden Administration after Donald Trump was elected. Taxpayers already financed the highways that Hochul is now shutting down to the driving public and there is no free alternative. This is unprecedented and illegal. If New York doesn't shut it down, the Department of Transportation is considering halting projects and funding for the state."
New York officials argue congestion pricing is legal and say they will not comply with the federal government's deadline. An agreement previously was reached to allow the tolls to continue into the fall.
The tolls led to a 13% reduction in traffic in the Manhattan Central Business District in March, according to the MTA. The agency reported it collected $51.9 million from the tolls in February, $3.3 million more than it did in January.
Last week, Judge Lewis Liman rejected arguments from groups fighting the congestion pricing tolls. He previously refused to halt the start of the tolls while cases played out in court.
Read the full memo
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
30 minutes ago
- Forbes
The Wiretap: Facial Recognition, Amazon Ring, And Surveillance Of The LA Protests
The Wiretap is your weekly digest of cybersecurity, internet privacy and surveillance news. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here. The protests in LA are being captured by all manner of surveillance devices. But federal and local police have different restrictions on what they can do with the footage (Photo by) 'I have all of you on camera. I'm going to come to your house.' Those were the words coming from an LAPD officer in a helicopter over LA protestors, according to the LA Times. The implicit threat, according to some privacy advocates, was that the cops would use facial recognition software to identify and locate those protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. It's not quite so easy to do that, though. A source close to the agency, who was not authorized to talk on record, told Forbes that LAPD will be going through camera footage - whether shot from a helicopter, surveillance cams or bodycams - and try to identify people. However, the LAPD can only search for matches from police-owned arrest records, namely, mugshots. Its own rules don't allow it to search for matches across other sources, such as social media. Federal agents, however, don't have the same restrictions. Any federal agent using Clearview or an alternative can take the same footage and run facial images to find matches across photos scraped from social sites. One of Clearview's best-known federal customers is ICE, which typically uses it in child exploitation cases. It's unclear how often the agency uses it for immigration enforcement. Neither ICE nor the LAPD had responded to requests for comment at the time of publication. Law enforcement has another potential source for protest footage: video from Amazon Ring cameras or its competitors. Though Amazon has stopped cops requesting information directly over the Ring Neighbours social platform, federal and local cops can demand data recorded by those devices with a court order. The video could then be used to identify protestors. While the source close to LAPD said they weren't aware of any specific uses of Ring around this week's events, they said it's certainly a capability that exists. Meanwhile, concerned citizens have also been using Neighbors to share footage of ICE raids and agents in the L.A. area, either to warn about them or to celebrate the actions. In footage from Monday, identified by a Forbes' reporter, a Ring user shared footage they claimed showed ICE targeting laborers at a local Home Depot. Another warned about ICE agents at a mall and a Costco. Amazon Ring didn't comment on record, though a spokesperson pointed Forbes to guidelines that prohibit users posting on 'topics that cause inevitable frictions like politics and election information,' as well as 'highly debated social issues.' Its moderators might be busier than normal this week. Got a tip on surveillance or cybercrime? Get me on Signal at +1 929-512-7964. DOGE pre-Elon Musk's departure and break up with President Trump. (Photo by) The Supreme Court has given a green light to the Department of Government Efficiency to access Social Security Administration data. The decision came after the Trump administration had filed an emergency application to lift an injunction from a federal judge in Maryland. In its decision, the Supreme Court said DOGE staff needed the access to do their job. While the White House cheered the decision as a victory for fighting fraud and waste in federal agencies, opponents said the ruling 'will enable President Trump and DOGE's affiliates to steal Americans' private and personal data.' A cyber researcher found a way to identify phone numbers linked to any Google account. Google has since fixed the issue, which may have exposed users to SIM swapping scams. The DOJ has launched an offensive on the dark web marketplace BidenCash, where users buy and sell stolen credit card and personal information. The agency has taken down 145 domains across both the standard web and the darknet associated with the bazaar. The service has so far generated over $17 million in revenue, according to Justice officials. A man who controls much of the infrastructure that underpins Telegram also controls other companies with links to Russian intelligence agency FSB, according to an investigation by the Organized Crimes and Corruption Reporting Project's Russian partner, Important Stories. Telegram has not responded to the allegations. The Guardian has launched a new way to tip its reporters securely with an app simply called 'Secure Messaging.' It sounds pretty neat: 'The technology behind Secure Messaging conceals the fact that messaging is taking place at all by making the communication indistinguishable from other data sent to and from the app by our millions of regular users. By using the Guardian app, other users are effectively providing 'cover' and helping us to protect sources.' President Trump has been unsurprisingly careless with his personal iPhone, taking calls from numbers he doesn't recognize. That's despite repeatedly being warned about the heightened risks of foreign surveillance and interception that come with using a device with a 'broadly circulated number,' according to a report in The Atlantic.
Yahoo
30 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Dimon says Trump tariffs may make 'the soft landing a little bit softer' instead of making the 'ship go down'
JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon sounds a little more optimistic about the effect tariffs may have on the US economy over the next several months. 'Maybe in July, August, September, October, you'll start to see 'did it have an effect?'' Dimon said of tariffs while speaking Tuesday afternoon at a Morgan Stanley conference in New York. 'My guess is it did, hopefully not dramatic. May just make the soft landing a little bit softer as opposed to the ship go down." His guess is that the effect of tariffs will cause employment to 'come down, or come down a little bit,' while 'inflation will go up a little bit.' Read more: What Trump's tariffs mean for the economy and your wallet Dimon wasn't the only big bank executive who offered his views Tuesday about how the tariff picture may play out in the near future. Clients of Citigroup's (C) global investment bank are looking at a 10% 'floor' on tariff levels and are currently evaluating a baseline of between 10% and 20%, Viswas Raghavan, Citigroup's head of banking, said while speaking earlier Tuesday at the same conference. 'Look, there is a lot of anxiety,' Raghavan said when referring to the impact of the looming tariffs on corporate boardrooms considering new deals. Citigroup expects its second quarter investment banking fees to be up in the 'mid-single digits' compared to the same period last year. In overall trading, revenue is expected to rise in the 'mid- to high-single digits' from the prior year, according to Raghavan. However, Raghavan did say that Citi expects its firmwide credit costs to rise by 'a few 100 million dollars' compared to the $2.7 billion it reported in the first quarter. Morgan Stanley (MS) CEO Ted Pick said the second quarter did start 'slow, really pausing in a big way,' after the Trump administration's early April 'Liberation Day' tariff announcements. But 'now it has picked up and I think we'll see how the last couple weeks go, but looks like it's going to finish strong.' In this current period, 'I do think investment banking, specifically, is a tale of two quarters.' Bankers also hailed a push by the Trump administration to reconsider some capital rules that require them to set aside certain buffers in the event of bad times. "We actually are relevant in not just powering the real economy, but to be helpful when there is a wobble ... And that's why I think it is opportune for a repositioning of some of the regulatory framework," Pick said Tuesday. Michelle Bowman, Federal Reserve vice chair for supervision, said in a speech last Friday that the central bank plans to host a conference next month meant to bring together bankers, academics, and other experts to examine whether the numerous capital requirements for large banks make sense. "I would like to be part of fixing the system and making it safer and helping the smaller banks," Dimon said. David Hollerith is a senior reporter for Yahoo Finance covering banking, crypto, and other areas in finance. Click here for in-depth analysis of the latest stock market news and events moving stock prices Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
31 minutes ago
- Yahoo
How Chinese imports are skirting Trump's tariffs
There's a huge drop underway in Chinese imports entering the US — from China. But Chinese goods are arriving anyway, via other Asian nations such as Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia. That may be good news for shoppers, because it means cheap Chinese goods are still making it to US stores despite the higher costs imposed by President Trump's new import taxes. But shifting trade patterns will surely get Trump's attention, and the tariff-happy president could easily put a stop to it by raising import taxes on what are turning out to be loophole countries. Trump's aggressive tariff regime is meant to make most imported products more expensive to encourage more domestic production. But Trump's uneven approach has created opportunities for a kind of trade arbitrage that was all but inevitable. As things stand now, Trump has imposed new import taxes of 30% on most goods from China but only 10% on imports from most other nations. That 20% differential is a big advantage for the less-tariffed countries. Sure enough, trade data shows that Chinese exporters are almost certainly "transshipping" goods to the US by passing them through neighboring countries. Chinese data shows that exports to the US dropped 35% in May compared with a year earlier. But during the same period, Chinese exports to six other Asian nations jumped 15%, including a 22% increase in exports to Vietnam and Thailand, a 12% jump in exports to Singapore, and an 11% rise in shipments to Indonesia. "[China's] direct exports to the US are down sharply, but its exports to all kinds of places across Asia are up massively," economist Robin Brooks of the Brookings Institution posted on social media on June 9. "These are obviously transshipments to the US via third countries."The US Department of Commerce hasn't yet published trade data for May, but data for April shows the mirror image of the Chinese data. Imports from China fell 20% from 2024 levels, while there was a 48% jump in Vietnamese imports, a 32% jump in shipments from Thailand, and a 16% increase in goods from Malaysia. Trade experts have been predicting this shift since Trump began imposing new import taxes in February, because it's the same thing that happened during the trade wars Trump waged during his first presidential term. Vietnam, in particular, was a big beneficiary of Trump's tariffs on Chinese imports in 2018 and 2019. While imports from China fell by 11% from 2017 to 2019, imports from Vietnam boomed by 43%. Read more: What Trump's tariffs mean for the economy and your wallet Since Trump's first trade war, many Asian producers and their US customers have carefully diversified so they're not overdependent on China. The US now imports less clothing from China, as one example, and more from Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, and India. Transshipment can mean that some products are fully assembled in China and simply make a brief stopover in another country before heading to the US so that their country of origin isn't China. Governments tend to discourage that, however, because those countries gain little from merely serving as a way station for Chinese products headed to the US. Plus, it may attract unwanted attention from Trump. Chinese companies are also increasingly building their own production facilities outside of China. "There are two ways to transship," Jason Judd, executive director of the Global Labor Institute at Cornell University, told Yahoo Finance. "In one, you're just cheating. In the other, you disassemble your product in China and send the inputs and the know-how to a new place." In Cambodia, for example, most of the companies making goods that go to the US have Chinese ownership. Trump's "reciprocal" tariffs — on ice for the moment — are meant, in part, to target countries that are way stations for Chinese products. When Trump announced those nation-by-nation tariffs on April 2, Asian trade partners other than China got hit with some of the highest rates. The new tariff on Chinese imports was 34%. For Cambodia, the new tariff rate was 49%. Vietnam: 46%. Thailand: 36%. Indonesia: 32%. Malaysia: 24%. Those rates weren't based specifically on transshipment of Chinese products but on the size of the trade deficit in goods each country has with the US. The larger the deficit, the higher the tariff. Read more: 5 ways to tariff-proof your finances Trump suspended those tariffs on April 9, following a week of mayhem in financial markets. That eventually left the tariff rates at 30% on most imports from China and 10% on most imports from every other country. But Trump said the reciprocal tariffs could go back into effect if nations don't make trade deals with him one by one by a July 9 deadline. By then, a boom in imports from Asian nations other than China will give Trump plenty of justification for more reciprocal tariffs. But he may choose to overlook it. Trump seems to have a much bigger trade beef with China than he does with other nations. His advisers are also telling him that high tariffs across the board could mean shocking price increases on clothing, electronics, appliances, and many other things just as Americans start their back-to-school shopping this summer. After that will come a Christmas season possibly starring Trump as the Grinch. So Trump might end up talking tough on China and looking the other way as the country's products enter the side door. That would make stealthy Chinese imports an unintended innovation triggered by Trump's trade war. Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Bluesky and X: @rickjnewman. Click here for political news related to business and money policies that will shape tomorrow's stock prices.
