Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy appeared on Fox News Friday and said his department won’t invest in cities that “don’t clean up” their public transportation systems, specifically calling out Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul over the state’s failing subway network.
New York officials have attempted to crack down on subway crime by increasing their police presence as of April 2024, following a series of shootings and assaults in the transit system. On “The Ingraham Angle,” host Laura Ingraham asked Duffy what the “truth” was behind the issue after noting how Democratic Mayor Eric Adams said there was a decrease in crime.
“So the truth is, transit across America is dangerous, right? These liberal mayors, they want everyone out of cars and into trains. But they make the trains unsafe, so no one really wants to ride them,” Duffy said. “Listen, I know a lot of people in New York who, they’re OK riding transit or the subway during the day, but if it’s in the morning or if it’s at night, even big men don’t want to ride the subway at those times of night.”
“The mayor has indicated they’ve made some progress. I’ve got other stats that’ll say they haven’t, but the mayor has sent more law enforcement officers into the subway system. But this is really a failure of the governor of New York,” Duffy added.
On Friday, Adams took Duffy onto New York City’s public transportation system, with NYPD Transit Chief Joseph Gulotta saying that subway crime had hit historic lows thanks to the increased police presence, according to ABC7 NY.
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Duffy went on to say that Hochul has done nothing about “the bottom line of how they spend their money, how much of it goes to security, how much is to make it beautiful and safe,” despite her wanting to invest in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).
“They have homelessness and crazy people that live and reside inside of subways. So it’s unacceptable. We at the Department of Transportation, we actually partner with a lot of the transit systems around the country,” Duffy said. “We give them a lot of federal taxpayer money to help them run their systems.”
“Our position is, if you don’t clean up your act, we’re not going to invest in you. If you do it well and you have beautiful trains that are on time, that are safe, we’ll make those investments as taxpayers. But if you don’t, we’re going to pull the money and we’ll put it somewhere else,” Duffy added.
Hochul said in January that new initiatives would be added to protect subway riders and transit workers, including an estimated 750 New York Police Department officers stationed throughout the city and an additional 300 in train cars.
“Again, they have a choice. I was telling the transit authority and the governor that we need to send DOGE into the MTA and actually look at how they spend their money, look at the fraud, the waste and the abuse, pull it out and start to make these projects efficient and cost effective,” Duffy said.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/Fox News/”The Ingraham Angle”)
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