Wow, Who Could Sean Duffy Possibly Want To Rename Penn Station For?
What’s in a name? To Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a lot.
The U.S. Department of Transportation secretary and noted Trump sycophant is calling on Congress to rename Penn Station as part of the multibillion plan to renovate the transit hub — and you get one guess what name is on his lips.
For now, Duffy’s not saying. In a letter to Republican and Democratic on key Senate committees on Tuesday, Duffy laid out the president’s priorities in the stalled surface transportation reauthorization bill also known as the Build America 250 Act — among them the current administration’s ongoing war on bike lanes.
But in a section on Penn Station specifically, Duffy asked for $1 billion for the Penn Station renovation, and for the Senate to include language from the House version of the bill that allows Amtrak to override local land use rules in order to steal local property tax money.
Duffy also asked the senators to include a provision to “Direct Amtrak to rename New York Penn Station.”
The letter — sent to the chair and the ranking Democrat on the committees on Environment and Public Works; Commerce, Science, and Transportation; and Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs — does not specifically ask for Penn Station to be named for President Trump, but it’s no secret that the president wants the station to bear his name.
Indeed, when renderings were first put out earlier this summer, Trump’s name was prominent:
And, of course, the logo for the Penn Transformation Partners doesn’t have a “P” as you’d expect, but a Trumpian “T”:
And lest we forget, earlier this year, when Trump was illegally holding up federal payments for the Gateway project and the Second Avenue subway, he told Sen. Chuck Schumer that he would release the funds if Schumer agreed to rename Penn Station and Dulles Airport after Trump.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt later confirmed that reporting, saying “It was something the president floated in his conversation with Chuck Schumer.”
Trump has been closely connected to the project ever since the federal government took over the renovation plans in a fit after New York refused to end congestion pricing. Late last year, Amtrak special adviser Andrew Byford bragged that if he ran into any trouble on the project, “My trump card is the Trump card,” and also said that the White House would sign off on Amtrak’s chosen developer (which ended up to be a company whose top executive, Peter Cipriano, worked in the first Trump White House).
Meanwhile, Madison Square Garden owner James Dolan is in line for a payout because the Penn renovation plan requires the purchase and demolition of the Infosys Theater from Dolan. A prior, pre-Amtrak plan from 2023 reportedly would have paid Dolan $500 million for the theater, but he may be angling for more.
Indeed, two weeks after Dolan invited Trump and Duffy to Game 3 of the NBA Finals (the only game that the Knicks lost), the White House put a $1-billion line item for the Penn Station renovation into a spending request that was mostly about funding the war on Iran.
That money never came through, so Duffy is trying again — and while he’s at it, he might as well get Congress to rubber-stamp his dream of a big, beautiful “President Donald J. Trump Station.”
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