Capitol Hill Roundup: Feb. 6th Edition

by Sean Jeans-Gail | VP of Gov't Affairs + Policy

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It’s been an eventful week for passenger rail in Washington, D.C. Your Association has been tracking all the news on behalf of America’s train passengers.

Hudson River Tunnel Standoff Finds New Focus: Trump Station?

The largest passenger rail construction project in the country—and one of the largest construction projects of any kind—was forced to initiate a work drawdown yesterday in the face of a decision by the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) to freeze disbursement of previously approved infrastructure funding for the Hudson Tunnel Project (HTP).

Now, Punchbowl News and CNN are reporting that the President Donald Trump has offered Senate Minority Leader a deal: rename Penn Station in New York City and Washington’s Dulles International Airport in Northern Virginia after Trump, and the USDOT will unfreeze funding for the HTP.

Neither Senator Schumer’s office nor the White House have responded publicly to the story.

[Take Action: Ask your member of Congress to restore funding for this vital passenger rail program!]

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If true, it would be a shocking rationale for putting 1,000 workers out of a job, endangering 95,000 jobs in total, and halting a project critical to the stability of the national rail network—and, indeed, the entire U.S. economy. (As we first reported in October, even the nominal reason offered by the USDOT is insufficient to halt a project of this magnitude.)

In the meantime, the Gateway Development Commission (GDC) has launched a lawsuit against the federal government for breach of contract.

“ Today is a setback,” GDC CEO Tom Prendergast said yesterday. “The Gateway Development Commission has expended every resource to prevent any interruption to the construction, but we've gone as far as we can go.”

The construction delay will be a costly one. Not only did 1,000 workers lose their job this week, putting construction on hiatus will cost an estimated $15 to $20 million each month.

Government Shutdown Mercifully Brief

The partial US government shutdown ended Tuesday after only four days after a bipartisan compromise that split funding for the Department of Homeland Security off from the rest of the five funding bills.

The FY26 transportation bill appropriates $2.4 billion for Amtrak, including $1.6 billion for the National Network (NN) and $850 million for the Northeast Corridor (NEC).

It also includes $65 million for the Federal State Partnership for Intercity Rail Program—$10 million below FY25 levels, but $65 million above what was included in the House GOP proposal in the summer.

You can read our full analysis of the bill here.

Coalition of House Republicans Wants to See Clear Benefits Before UP and NS Merger Approved

A coalition of 46 House Republicans wrote a letter to the Surface Transportation Board (STB) this week, asking the regulator to “conduct a rigorous and comprehensive review of the proposed merger between Union Pacific Railroad (UP) and Norfolk Southern Railway (NS) to ensure it enhances competition and is clearly in the public interest.”

The letter highlighted the needs of domestic manufacturers, farmers, the energy sector, and American consumers in asking the STB, while also pointing to service disruptions and degradations that resulted from prior mergers:

As representatives of states and congressional districts that rely on competitive and reliable rail service to move goods essential to the U.S. economy, we have a strong interest in ensuring transactions that could concentrate market power, reduce competition, or degrade service are carefully scrutinized. Also, and consistent with the Trump Administration’s pro-growth economic agenda, we remain keenly focused on ensuring government decision-making does not result in the costs of goods and services going up for American businesses and consumers.

Some of us are already hearing initial concerns about the UP-NS application and its lack of serious and meaningful commitments to enhance competition and protect against service meltdowns. In light of this, the Board must consider with extreme care the potential risks posed by this transaction to determine whether it meets the public interest test.

For more, read Rail Passengers’ Jim Mathews latest analysis of where the proposed UP and NS merger stands.