The Trump administration announced Thursday that New York will lose $73.5 million in highway funding after the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration found that the state had refused to revoke nearly 33,000 commercial driver’s licenses issued to immigrants whose legal status had expired, in the latest news of the Trump administration’s use of federal funding as a tool to tighten policy.
Summary
- Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the FMCSA reviewed 200 sample records and found that more than half contained serious problems, such as licenses that remain valid long after the operator’s authorization to stay in the country has expired.
- Governor Kathy Hochul’s office called the move an unwarranted attack on green states, noting that New York issues CDLs under state-issued rules and that an audit by the first Trump administration supports their practices.
- The DOT also warned that another $147 million in federal funding could be at risk if New York remains noncompliant, and threatened to block the state from issuing new CDLs if it doesn’t revoke the flagged licenses.
News from the Trump administration this week showed federal funding being used as a means of enforcement against the Democratic-led state. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Thursday that an FMCSA review found that New York had failed to issue driver’s licenses for eight years without considering the applicant’s immigration status or the expiration of their legal presence documents. The state has been ordered to review all such out-of-state CDLs for the past year and revoke any issued in violation of federal law. It didn’t do that, Duffy said, which led to the withholding of funds.
“I promised the American people that I would hold any national leader accountable for failing to keep them safe from unlicensed foreign drivers,” Duffy said in a press release Thursday. “My message to New York’s far-right leadership is clear: families must be put first on America’s streets.”
Governor Hochul’s office rejected the proposal outright. Spokesman Sean Butler said New York follows state-issued rules when issuing CDLs and that an audit completed during the Trump administration confirmed the state’s compliance. The state DMV previously said it verifies the legal status of every CDL applicant’s state-issued documents and accused Duffy of using the issue as a political platform.
“This continues Secretary Duffy’s annual pattern of threatening to withhold funds that keep our roads, subways, and other infrastructure safe for New Yorkers,” Butler said. “We’re going to bounce back, and we’re going to win again.”
The legal dispute is not new. The DOT first flagged December 2025, and California then decided to revoke 17,000 licenses after facing similar federal pressure. California’s compliance is in contrast to New York’s refusal, which Duffy cited as the reason for increasing the deduction from a warning to an implemented reduction.
Why This Pattern Matters Beyond Highways
The $73.5 million cut is the latest in a series of measures in which the Trump administration has used the withholding or threat of federal funding to extract compliance from state governments. Previous targets have included New York’s fare system, subway subsidies tied to crime metrics, and previous efforts to realign Amtrak and commuter rail subsidies. Courts have blocked several of those earlier attempts.
Trucking industry groups praised the DOT’s stance, arguing that unlicensed or improperly licensed commercial drivers pose a real risk to public safety. The August 2025 crash in Florida that killed three people, which Duffy cited as the cause of the national CDL audit, emphasizes legal public safety next to politics.
The pattern of government funding being used as a tool to align with blue states has become a structural feature of the current administration, with direct implications for the crypto revolution agenda and other mid-term pressure points that depend on Republican unity in Washington instead of the conflict of federalism that could complicate the legislative calendar heading into November.
