Trump administration threatens to withhold $50 million from Chicago Transit Authority, calling its plan to add police 'materially deficient'

Talia Soglin, Chicago Tribune on Dec 19, 2025

Published in News & Features

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CHICAGO — The Chicago Transit Authority’s plan to boost the number of police officers and K-9 guards on the city’s mass transit system is “materially deficient,” President Donald Trump’s administration said Friday as it threatened to cut the system off from up to $50 million in federal funding.

Trump’s Federal Transit Administration threatened Dec. 8 to withhold federal funding from the CTA if it did not comply with the demands of a “special directive,” including by upping security on the city’s buses and trains. In doing so, the administration invoked the apparently random attack against a 26-year-old woman who was doused in gasoline while riding a Blue Line train last month.

The FTA gave the CTA a tight timeline to comply with its special directive, telling it to submit a “security enhancement plan” within a week and implement it by Dec. 19.

The CTA announced Thursday it would boost security on the transit system starting Friday. The agency said it would increase the number of Chicago police officers in the “Voluntary Special Employment Program” on the transit system from an average of 77 per day to 120 per day. K-9 security staffing, for which the CTA contracts privately, will also increase from an average of 172 canine security guards per day to 188 per day.

But on Friday, Trump’s FTA said it wasn’t satisfied with the CTA’s plan.

In a letter to acting CTA President Nora Leerhsen, Trump’s federal transit administrator, Marcus Molinaro, said the plan “fails to meet the need for immediate, measurable corrective action to maintain a safe operating environment for workers and passengers.”

Specifically, Molinaro wrote, the CTA’s plan did not target decreases of major assaults against transit workers and customers for the first three months of 2026. “By proposing flat targets for the entire first quarter of the Dec. 15 Plan, CTA has failed to set targets showing reductions for ‘each’ month as ordered,” Molinaro wrote.

Molinaro also said the CTA’s plan “never targets a reduction of more than one assault per month in any given category, and in many categories and months, CTA targets zero reductions.”

In a news release, the federal transit administrator, or FTA, also implied the increase of Voluntary Special Employment Program officers was insufficient, writing that the “program is one small component of CTA’s overall security strategy that does not meaningfully contribute to an overall increase in security hours across CTA’s system.” Officers in the VESP program volunteer to work shifts on the CTA on their days off, and supplement the Chicago Police Department’s public transportation section and district police officers.

A spokesperson for the CTA said Friday that it had received the FTA’s letter and “will respond fully to the request within the allotted time frame to respond.”

The federal agency gave the CTA 90 days to submit a revised security plan or lose a quarter of the its federal funding under the Urbanized Area Formula program.

The FTA did not immediately respond to a question Friday about how withholding the agency’s federal funds would help make the CTA safer.

It’s not the first time the Trump administration, which has repeatedly used violence on public transit as a political cudgel against blue cities, has threatened to withhold money from the CTA.

In September, Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wrote a letter to the CTA asking it to lay out plans to reduce crime and fare evasion on the system or risk losing funding. The Trump administration has made similar threats to mass transit agencies in the Democratic-led cities of New York, Los Angeles, Boston and Washington, D.C.

Acting CTA President Leerhsen defended the agency’s safety practices in a response to Duffy at the time.

The Trump administration has also put more than $2 billion in federal dollars for the CTA’s planned Red Line Extension and Red and Purple Modernization project on ice, though it did so citing the agency’s diversity requirements for contractors, not safety.

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