President Trump and his new transportation secretary, Sean P. Duffy, made it sound as if their power to pull the plug on New York City’s six-week-old congestion pricing program was absolute.
Mr. Duffy, who has been on the job for less than a month, wrote to New York’s governor on Wednesday that “I have concluded” that the tolling program, implemented after a grueling, yearslong process, was not “eligible” under the federal statute used to enact it.
Mr. Trump’s explanation was even less complex: He hit the caps-lock button and invoked his authority as “king.”
“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD, Manhattan,” the president wrote on social media, “and all of New York is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”
The law, however, is far more nuanced. And legal experts say that in this case, it does not appear to be in the president’s favor.
“Declaring ‘I’m the king’ is not sufficient grounds for reversing” the program, said Robert L. Glicksman, a professor of environmental and administrative law at George Washington University Law School.
“If the facts on the ground have not changed, then you have an extra high burden of justifying a reversal of position,” Professor Glicksman added. “They can’t just say: ‘Sorry. We changed our mind.’ They have to explain why.”
The federal government granted final approval to the program, the first of its kind in the United States, on Nov. 21 — after Mr. Trump had been elected for his second term but before his inauguration.
And on Jan. 5, New York City began charging most drivers a fee of $9 to enter streets south of 60th Street in Manhattan. The program is designed to generate needed revenue for mass transit improvements, reduce congestion on the city’s traffic-choked streets and curb climate-warming vehicle emissions.
While running for president, Mr. Trump said that he planned to halt the tolling program if elected, and it was clear that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had anticipated his effort to shut it down. The M.T.A., which runs the city’s subways and buses, filed a 51-page legal challenge minutes after Mr. Duffy’s letter became public.
“I think our commuters are the road kill on his revenge tour,” New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, said of Mr. Trump soon after the M.T.A. had filed its request for a declaratory judgment from a federal judge.
The M.T.A.’s filing includes a half-dozen legal arguments, many of which hinge on whether Mr. Duffy’s effort to reverse course is “arbitrary and capricious” under the law. The filing also implies that aborting a program that has resulted in decreased traffic in Manhattan would require the federal government to first assess whether shutting it down would cause harm to the environment.
State officials said they had no intention of halting the tolls.
“Until a judge rules, these cameras are staying on,” Ms. Hochul’s legal counsel, Brian K. Mahanna, said. “And we expect a judge to rule in our favor.”
Mr. Duffy argued in Wednesday’s letter that the federal statute that authorized the new tolling program — the Value Pricing Pilot Program, or V.P.P.P. — did not permit a situation where the toll was “inescapable” and where the primary reason for it was to upgrade transit, not roads.
But David A. Super, a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, said that Mr. Duffy’s interpretation of the law was largely irrelevant because the statute itself does not grant him the authority to negate the program.
“There is really nothing in the statute that gives the secretary authority to stop these things,” Professor Super said.
Some statutes, he said, grant federal officials the power to cancel authorized programs after providing a certain period of notice.
“But if you look at the text of this statute, there is no authority for this cancellation,” he said.
John Reichman, a lawyer who supports congestion pricing and opposed New Jersey’s unsuccessful attempts to block implementation of the new tolling program, likened Wednesday’s effort by Mr. Trump to breaking a contract.
“You can’t unilaterally decide to void a contract that the other party has relied on — and spent millions of dollars implementing,” Mr. Reichman said.
The M.T.A. noted in its filing that the Federal Highway Administration, which Mr. Duffy controls as transportation secretary, had relied on the same statute to implement tolling programs in Texas and Florida, without similar objections.
The agency “has never attempted to unilaterally rescind tolling authority for any V.P.P.P. program or project,” lawyers for the M.T.A. wrote.
Doing so, they wrote, would “create uncertainty” any time there was a change in agency leadership or in the White House — “uncertainty that may make it difficult to issue bonds for other projects and would clearly undermine the purposes of the V.P.P.P.”
Professor Super said the proper venue for seeking a change to the tolling program would be Congress..
“If he’s right about his policy concerns,” he said of Mr. Duffy, “Congress has already said what to do about that: Study it and return to Congress.”
