Judge hands New York victory in court battle against Trump

New York won a temporary victory against president Donald Trump in a fight over Manhattan’s congestion pricing program.

The Trump administration has threatened to withhold funding and federal approval for the state's transportation projects as leverage to end New York City's tolls for driving in high-traffic zones.

But U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman granted a request Tuesday by the state's Metropolitan Transportation Authority to block the government's moves, reported Bloomberg.

"Liman’s ruling means the program — designed to reduce gridlock and pollution and raise money to modernize the city’s transit system — will almost certainly continue as the legal battle proceeds," the outlet reported. "It helps reduce uncertainty over how the nation’s largest public transportation system will pay to modernize a more than 100-year-old network."

The judge found the MTA had demonstrated that its claims would likely succeed, and he said it would suffer “irreparable harm” without a temporary restraining order because the government's attempt to revoke approval for the program had already hurt the value of MTA Bonds.

The MTA sued transportation secretary Sean Duffy when he announced Feb. 19 that he was reversing approval granted under president Joe Biden.

Trump claims the pricing plan will hurt the local economy and Duffy denounced it as “a slap in the face to working class Americans and small business owners," but Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul insists the program is needed and pointed to data to show that it's working as intended.

The tolls raised $159 million in the program's first three months and is on target to raise $500 million this year after expenses, according to MTA officials, and data shows that traffic declined on average by 11 percent daily between January and April.

Support for the tolls grew to 39 percent in mid-May, up from 29 percent in December.