Trump’s ‘Beautiful’ Bill Kills Lovely QueensWay Park (Plus Many Efforts to Erase ‘Racist’ Highways)

Here’s another reason for Mayor Adams to have buyer’s remorse over his bromance with President Trump.

The president’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” clawed back more than $100 million in grants that were promised to New York City to build a linear park on an abandoned transit right of way in Queens — a project championed by the mayor.

Back in April, Streetsblog raised the specter that the Neighborhood Access and Equity grant was one of more than a dozen that House Republicans had put in the crosshairs. But the clawback of $111.9 million in unspent money out of an initial grant of $117.7 million for the 1.3-mile QueensWay became official when President Trump signed the bill earlier this month, as reported by the Eno Center for Transportation.

Though some residents of Queens want the abandoned Rockaway Beach Branch of the Long Island Rail Road to be restored for transit, Mayor Adams backed the park plan — and praising then-President Biden for providing “the largest competitive federal infrastructure grant” that the Adams administration ever won.

The grant — now canceled by Adams’s friend President Trump, would have funded construction to connect the rail-to-park project to Forest Park and Victory Field, along with bleachers for nearby baseball fields.

The city had already committed $35 million to building one piece of the park to the south of Forest Park. That project was contentious though, since proponents of a competing plan to reactivate the rail line and put public space next to it, a plan they call the QueensLink, said that building the park on the right of way guaranteed rail service would never come back.

The clawback provisions in the Congressional spending bill are different from the much more radical impoundment powers the Trump administration has claimed, according to the Eno Center. Impoundment is an illegal effort to seize money that Congress has already authorized spending, recision simply disappeared any money that hadn’t gotten out the door yet.

“For those agencies lucky enough to have negotiated and signed their grant agreements before the deadline, they are legally entitled to spend the money under the terms of their grant agreement,” the organization wrote. “For those who did not get their agreements signed, the money is no longer there. This is not another kind of Trump impoundment shenanigan where the grant awardee can go to court and try to get the money anyway – the money no longer exists.”

Other projects that had their funding evaporated follow a pattern of President Trump disavowing his predecessor’s effort to undo some of the racially biased planning of the prior decades that cleaved Black and poor communities, leaving them with a legacy of environmental and health problems, including:

• More than $400 million from a project to build caps over I-5 in Portland, Ore.
• More than $350 million from a project to reconfigure I-90 in Boston to create new pedestrian connections, a waterfront park, and a new local street grid.
• Roughly $150 million to construct a public park on a cap over the Vine Street Expressway in Philadelphia.
• All $157.6 million in funding to cap parts of I-75 and I-85 in Atlanta.
• All $147 million in funding to reconnect several disadvantaged communities in Jacksonville that were separated by I-95.
• All $42.6 million to reconnect historic East Knoxville from downtown after the Business Loop severed the neighborhood in the 1960s.

A spokesperson for Mayor Adams said that the Trump administration has not officially informed the city that grant was officially canceled, and said the city was still looking at ways of keeping the project alive.

“The Adams administration remains committed to building more greenways throughout the five boroughs,” said spokesperson Will Fowler.