The Department of Labor had been trying to block $12 billion in federal money earmarked for local transit agencies.

By: Hillel Aron

A federal judge handed California another win Wednesday in the state’s long-running dispute with the U.S. Department of Labor over federal transit money.

In 2021, President Joe Biden — famously a longtime lover of trains — signed into law a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that included what he called a “historic” investment into public transit, mostly via grants given to local transit agencies. What followed got less attention: a decision by the Department of Labor to block $12 billion — about $2.5 billion from an emergency Covid relief package, the rest from the infrastructure bill — in federal money earmarked for California’s transit agencies.

“Withholding billions of dollars in crucial funding on the basis of a nine-year-old state law, while California wrestles with the Covid-19 pandemic, does great harm and injustice to the people of California,” Governor Gavin Newsom wrote in a stern letter to the U.S. Secretary of Labor.

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