President Trump intends to revoke federal approval of New York City’s congestion pricing program, fulfilling a campaign promise to reverse the policy that tolls drivers who enter Manhattan’s busiest streets to finance repairs to mass transit.
In a letter to Gov. Kathy Hochul on Wednesday, the president’s transportation secretary outlined Mr. Trump’s objections to the program, the first of its kind in the United States, and said that federal officials would contact the state to “discuss the orderly cessation of toll operations.”
The letter, from Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, cited the cost to working-class motorists, the use of revenue from the tolls for transit upgrades rather than roads and the scope of the plan compared with the federal legislation that authorized it as reasons for the decision.
Mr. Duffy did not indicate a specific date by which the federal government intended to end the program.
The order was immediately challenged in federal court by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which manages the tolls.
In a statement, Janno Lieber, the M.T.A.’s chair and chief executive, said that the program had already had positive effects on the region, including reduced traffic and faster travel times. Mr. Lieber said the tolling would “continue notwithstanding this baseless effort to snatch those benefits away from the millions of mass transit users, pedestrians and, especially, the drivers who come to the Manhattan Central Business District.”
Michael Gerrard, a Columbia Law School professor who supports congestion pricing, said he did not believe the federal government had the legal authority to halt the tolling program. The program was working well, he added, and there was no clear justification for trying to shut it down.
“It is certainly not dead by any means,” he said. “Secretary Duffy has issued an order of questionable legality.”
The program started on Jan. 5 and charged most drivers $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street, an area that includes some of the city’s most famous destinations like Times Square and the Empire State Building.
The plan aimed to discourage drivers from entering the congestion zone. It also hoped to clear pollution from Manhattan’s core while helping to raise $15 billion for the M.T.A.
But Mr. Trump has said that he would end the tolls because he claimed that they were drawing visitors and businesses away from Manhattan. Observers have speculated that he would try to withdraw federal approval for the plan or threaten to withhold federal funding.
Early data has suggested that gridlock lessened during the program’s initial weeks as fewer drivers piled into the tolled area.
In the first week of February, weekday traffic inside the tolling zone was down 9 percent compared to the same time last year, with an average of 561,678 vehicles entering the area, down from 617,000, according to the M.T.A.
And foot traffic, a measure of business activity, has improved since the tolls took effect, according to the city’s Economic Development Corporation. Through Jan. 31, 35.8 million pedestrians entered major business districts in the tolling zone, nearly 5 percent more than in the same period last year.
But the toll had been challenged by many powerful opponents, including Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey, who wrote a letter to Mr. Trump on Jan. 20 — the day of his inauguration — urging him to stop the tolls. New Jersey had fought hard to prevent the program from taking effect, filing a lawsuit that had been widely considered to be its most formidable threat. Days before the scheduled start of congestion pricing, Judge Leo M. Gordon of U.S. District Court in New Jersey ruled in favor of the program’s supporters, and the plan moved forward.
“The current congestion pricing scheme is a disaster for working- and middle-class New Jersey commuters and residents who need or want to visit Lower Manhattan and now need to pay a big fee on top of the bridge and tunnel tolls they already pay,” Mr. Murphy wrote in the letter.
Ms. Hochul had already stopped the plan once in June, weeks before it was initially supposed to go into effect. She had also cited concerns about the cost of the tolls, which at the time would have charged most drivers a peak fare of $15 to enter the zone. Ms. Hochul revived the plan shortly after the November election with the reduced $9 fee.
The potential demise of congestion pricing would force the state to come up with another way to raise $1 billion a year to fund the M.T.A.’s capital plan, and would leave the state with little way to recoup the half-billion dollars spent to prepare the city for the program. Already transit agencies are borrowing against the toll revenue, according to the authority’s lawsuit.
The New York Post was the first to report the existence of the letter from Mr. Duffy to Ms. Hochul revoking certain federal permissions necessary for the tolling program to go into effect.
As of early Wednesday, Ms. Hochul’s office had not yet received the letter, according to three sources familiar with the matter. The governor has spoken to Mr. Trump multiple times in recent weeks about the tolling program seeking to convince him of its benefits.
Ms. Hochul had previously been scheduled to travel to Washington this week for a meeting of governors and expected to meet with federal officials while in town.
“There’s a lot of positive attributes, I want to collect data. The president is data driven,” Ms. Hochul said last week.
“He knows the city. He knows that congestion in front of Trump Tower is not good, and I’m going to be able to point to some very positive benefits of it,” she said.
Local Republicans were quick to rejoice at the demise of a program they had long decried, citing the strain it was putting on suburban commuters.
Representative Nicole Malliotakis of Staten Island said that in her conversations with Mr. Trump in recent months she had emphasized the negative effects of the program on her constituents. In those talks, he had told her he would end congestion pricing, she said — adding that she was grateful he kept his “promise.”
“Today’s actions are a victory for hardworking, taxpaying commuters who have been unfairly burdened by this toll,” she said.
Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican from Rockland County, echoed this view.
“I feel great. President Trump followed through on this word and helped end a program I have been fighting for years,” he said.
Maggie Haberman and Benjamin Oreskes contributed reporting.