The Trump administration is now threatening federal funding for Boston’s transportation system — giving officials a two-week deadline to share data on crime.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent a letter Thursday to Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) General Manager Phillip Eng.
“ … We’re not waiting for the next Iryna [referring to the stabbing death of a woman on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina]. Chicago and Boston are on notice to take actions that enhance safety and reduce the crime affecting their riders and transit workers — or risk federal support,“ a statement on the letter from Duffy read.
The letter said the MBTA must maintain a safe, clean and secure environment, and while those facts are “true across the MBTA system, particular focus must be on key transportation and intermodal hubs such as South Station.”
Authorities also cited recent events on the MBTA — such as a woman pushed off a bus in Roxbury last week and a man who attacked someone with his belt on a bus in Cambridge — for the push.
The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) directed the MBTA to send a written report on the agency’s “practices and expenditures” within the next 14 days.
The information will detail the MBTA’s “plans to reduce crime, vagrancy and fare evasion,” including data on “fare evasion trends” and past actions. The FTA is also seeking safety plans for passengers “through South Station and other major transit facilities.”
Additionally, the FTA wants to know where the MBTA’s funding for “all sources” of public safety on the transit system, through the MBTA fiscal year 2025 budgeted and fiscal year 2026 planned funds to “reduce crime, the homeless population, and fare evasion.”
Just last week, the MBTA launched a new effort to crack down on fare evasion, committing to ticketing riders who avoid fare gates.
Eng said the MBTA values its partnership with the USDOT and FTA, and they share a common goal of rider safety. He’d already communicated earlier in the week with FTA Administrator Marc Molinaro, he said, and the two “are in agreement” on providing safe commutes.
The MBTA “is a safe, dependable system riders can rely on,” he added, and it has seen “ridership returns to the system” through “investments in modernization, technology, accessibility, infrastructure, and more.”
“As the MBTA and its Transit Police Department continue to work together with our federal, state, and local law enforcement partners, I want to assure the public that safety is at the heart of everything we do at the T,” he said.
“We look forward to providing the requested information and we’ll continue to demonstrate the significant progress that we’ve made working with the FTA,” Eng said.
This demand comes after Molinaro pressured officials at a national public transit conference on Monday to crack down on fare evasion, harassment and assaults on public buses and trains — the type of behavior he said escalated into more serious and dangerous crime.
In recent weeks, federal officials have criticized local officials in Charlotte, North Carolina, for failing to prevent the fatal stabbing of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, on a public bus last month.
Her suspected killer had a history of mental illness and arrests, and attacked Zarutska without any apparent interaction or provocation, investigators said. As gruesome surveillance footage of the incident swept the internet, it prompted questions about why the man was released without bail after his latest run-in with the law.
“Assaults, robberies, open drug use, violent crimes on transit systems, fare evasion, all of it — none of it can be normalized,“ Molinaro had said. “Families should not have to come to accept whether or not their child will be safe on their way to school, or whether a spouse will come home from work unscathed. We can’t have it continue to happen.”
Molinaro did not cite data on crimes in cities or on public transit networks in his speech Monday afternoon, and instead suggested that some officials were manipulating crime figures to mask public safety threats.