As the Trump administration continues to threaten federal funding for a wide array of departments, programs and projects across the country, local officials and transit experts are on alert to understand how or if Metro will be affected, as the city waits for millions of allocated dollars to expand the rail lines, as well as an answer to a multibillion dollar request for the 2028 Olympics.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority relies significantly on federal funding for everyday transit operations and for major projects including construction of the Purple Line extension project, that will lengthen the route from Koreatown through the Miracle Mile, and the East San Fernando Valley line, which was awarded nearly $900 million in grant funds under the Biden administration last year.
Metro is continuing to assess how much federal funding that has been promised is still vulnerable.
“We’ve not had any disruption to the flow of our federal funding at this point,” said Michael Turner, Metro’s executive officer of government affairs. “For decades here, we’ve worked with our congressional delegation, we’ve worked with Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington to advance our program, and we’re going to continue to do that here.”
A question that looms is how the Trump administration will respond to last year’s request for $3.2 billion to fund transportation projects for the Olympics. A bulk of the request was for $2 billion to lease nearly 3,000 buses as part of the city’s push to expand its transit network for the games across the county.
“We’re going forward with our plans as if we are fully funded. And we really have no indication that they won’t fund our projects and our Olympic aspirations,” said County Supervisor Janice Hahn, who chairs the Metro board. “So we’re going under the assumption that we’re going to work with them.”
The Department of Transportation released a memo earlier this year stating that funding would be prioritized for areas with high marriage and birth rates and where vaccines were not mandated. Hahn said it read like a “veiled threat” that funds would be steered from blue states toward red states, and prompted concern over what decisions could follow.
“I hope that’s not true, but think that’s why we became just a little bit aware that there might be different criteria for funding our projects other than just the significance and the benefits that projects would deliver to Californians,” she said.
While Hahn said that the first Trump administration worked well with Metro, there may be broader needs from the state this time around if the Department of Transportation makes major changes to its policies.
Assemblymember Nick Schultz (D-Burbank) recently introduced a bill that would ask voters in 2026 to approve a $20 billion bond to fund transportation projects throughout California. The bill has been supported by Metro.
Eli Lipmen, the executive director of transit advocacy group Move L.A., said that voters have supported sales tax measures in the past, making Los Angeles “less dependent on who’s in Congress or who’s in the White House.” But concerns remain over how the current administration could affect mega projects with regard to public transit.
So far, the Department of Transportation’s main focus in California has been the state’s high-speed rail project, which is currently undergoing a compliance review that could affect its future federal funding. During a recent news conference at Union Station, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy called the train a “crappy project” and said that the state must be held accountable for its spending. The project, which has faced ongoing challenges over its budget and timeline, has spent more than $13 billion. No stretch of the route has been completed and the authority estimates the budget is more than $100 billion more than originally proposed.
Transit experts have said that a decision to pull federal dollars from the high-speed rail project could cause a ripple effect across other major projects in the state.
Tariffs could also present an obstacle for infrastructure projects if the cost of construction materials, such as steel, lumber and concrete, continues to rise.
“These tariff threats are directly at odds with the goal of reducing costs for ordinary Americans, but they’re also at odds with reducing costs for large projects that I believe we need to be making in this nation,” Rep. Laura Friedman (D-Glendale) said.
Friedman, who sits on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, recently stressed California’s status as a donor state to make a case for why it should continue to receive federal funding.
“California sends a lot more money to the federal government that gets dispersed all around the nation than we get back,” she said during a recent tour of the nearly completed Wilshire/La Brea Metro subway station, part of the Purple D-Line extension project.
“We’re not asking for other states to send us money — we’re asking just to keep some of our money in our time of need, when we’re recovering from fires, when we’re hosting the Olympics for the whole United States.”
Times staff writer Ian James contributed to this report.
