Friday, on Fox News Channe’s “The Ingraham Angle,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy discussed the perils of mass transit in America’s cities.
Duffy noted the federal government spends a lot of money on mass transit, especially in New York City, where conditions are deteriorating.
He called on an Elon Musk-DOGE approach for the New York subway system.
“Mr. Secretary, thank you so much for joining us,” host Laura Ingraham said. “I know Mayor Adams; you’ve worked with him on this. He made this big show, the subway being safe, and he says crime is down, but I know from so many friends of mine, mostly women who are on the subway regularly, some on a daily basis, they’re still gripping their purses, carrying pepper spray whenever they ride it. What’s the truth?”
Duffy replied, “So the truth is, transit across America is dangerous, right? And these liberals, liberal mayors, they want everyone out of cars into trains, but they made the trains unsafe, so no one really wants to ride them. Listen, I know a lot of people in New York who they’re OK ride in 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. And so the mayor has indicated they’ve made some progress. I’ve got other stats that will 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, right?” he continued. “She’s someone who wants to invest more in the MTA, which is the transit system in New York, and she really doesn’t do anything to look at 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. They have homelessness and crazy people that live and reside inside of subways, and so it’s not acceptable.”
“And so we at the Department of Transportation, we actually partner with a lot of the transit systems around the country,” Duffy added. “We give them a lot of federal taxpayer money to help them run their systems. And 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. And again, they have a choice. I was telling the transit authority and the governor, Laura, 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.”
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