Lawyers for the federal government briefly published internal correspondence on Wednesday evening detailing a laundry list of flaws in the U.S. Department of Transportation’s legal strategy to shut down the MTA’s congestion pricing tolls.
The document, dated April 11, was mistakenly posted on the docket of the MTA’s federal lawsuit challenging U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s effort to kill the tolls by revoking federal approval. The internal 11-page letter, sent from attorneys in the Southern District of New York to a lawyer for the federal transportation department, was taken down less than an hour after it was erroneously put online. By Thursday afternoon, the attorneys were taken off the case while a transportation department spokesperson speculated they published the document as an act of sabatoge.
It marked a new, bizarre wrinkle in the legal back-and-forth between New York state and the Trump administration over the future of the Manhattan tolls — and sparked yet another round of recrimination within President Donald Trump's justice department.
Three assistant U.S. attorneys wrote in the internal letter that Duffy’s current argument to shut down the tolls isn’t likely to hold up in court. The program was approved under former President Joe Biden through a U.S. DOT pilot program – the Value Pricing Pilot Program – that allows local governments to impose tolls on federally funded roads. Duffy has argued he has the authority to rescind that approval, but the government attorneys were skeptical.
“It is unlikely that Judge [Lewis] Liman or further courts of review will accept the argument that [congestion pricing] was not a statutorily authorized ‘value pricing’ pilot” by the federal government, the letter states. “We have been unable to identify a compelling legal argument to support this position."