Banners posted at the Chicago Transit Authority’s 95th Street station promise: “Ready, set, soon! The Red Line Extension is coming.”
Anticipation for the rail project has been building since January when, just 10 days before President Donald Trump took office, the CTA locked down almost $2 billion in federal grant dollars to help extend the Red Line from 95th Street to 130th Street. The CTA’s president at the time, Dorval Carter, said the long-promised undertaking to bring CTA rail access to the Far South Side would “undo nearly 60 years of racial inequity in transit.”
But in October, the Trump administration froze the Red Line grant dollars, citing the transit agency’s diversity requirements for contractors.
Since then, the CTA has not been able to receive federal reimbursements for work on the project, which has also been criticized for its hefty $5.75 billion price tag.
The agency says it’s still on track to officially break ground next year and open the extension — and four brand-new train stations — in 2030. And over the last few months, workers have continued early site preparation on the Far South Side, testing soil and demolishing properties to make way for new train stations and track.
The CTA has also continued to pay for that work: As recently as Dec. 5, records show, it sent contractor Walsh-VINCI $23.5 million in one of more than a dozen payments it’s made since fall 2024. So far, the CTA has paid Walsh-VINCI — which directed all questions to the CTA — about $415 million out of a $2.9 billion contract.
But experts say the longer the freeze goes on, the more challenging it will be to keep the Red Line project chugging along.
The CTA can continue making payments on the project during the funding pause, but it can’t get reimbursed by the federal government for the money it spends.
According to staffers for a member of Illinois’ congressional delegation — who spoke with the Tribune on the condition of anonymity — the rubber could hit the road as soon as January if the feds don’t unfreeze the funds.
That’s when the CTA could reach a point where it is no longer able to make payments for the project — or would have to take extraordinary measures to do so, according to the source.
The CTA didn’t specifically address the suggestion that it could hit a wall on the project as soon as next month.
CTA spokesperson Tammy Chase said the project “remains on track” and that the agency was continuing to pay contractors “without interruption” during the funding freeze.
“The project is currently using a line of credit until CTA receives the next issuance of state project funds and issues CTA bonds, as planned,” she said.
Price tag could rise
Red Line service stops at 95th Street, but Chicago extends for dozens of city blocks.
At the 95th/Dan Ryan Red Line station in Roseland, passengers traveling farther south wait for bus connections to complete their trips home.
For many, the fact that North Siders can take the CTA’s rail system all the way to Evanston and Skokie but Far South Siders get left at the bus stop represents a historic injustice, one that transit officials, community leaders and politicians have vowed for decades to remedy.
“We’re all trying to get to work,” said Mariah Williams, a CTA rider who spoke with the Tribune at the 95th Street station this month.
But the project has also been criticized for its cost of about $1 billion per mile. Its total price tag has ballooned in recent years; as recently as 2024, the CTA was citing a cost of $3.6 billion, which later in the year jumped to $4.8 billion.
The funding freeze risks making the project even more expensive, experts said.
“The longer this goes on,” said Justin Marlowe, director of the Center for Municipal Finance at the University of Chicago, “the more costly it becomes.”
Some of that has to do with inflation, Marlowe said. But delays can be costly for other reasons, he added: For instance, if the CTA gets to a point where it can’t meet project timelines, it could have to rebid contracts — potentially at even greater cost than before.
Chase, the CTA spokesperson, attributed the project’s price tag increase to a “seismic economic change” in the construction industry since 2020.
“Costs have increased at an unprecedented rate (more than 50 percent according to federal industry data 2020-2023) for everything from construction materials, labor costs and general construction management costs,” she wrote in an email to the Tribune.
“We remain committed to moving ahead with RLE because of the enormous transit and economic development benefits it will provide to a severely disinvested part of our city,” Chase wrote. “But we also made sure to control costs and negotiate with our contractor to be as cost-efficient as possible.”
Whether or not the project is worth it at this point is “at least a master’s degree-level question,” said Joseph Schofer, a professor emeritus at Northwestern’s school of engineering who studies transportation infrastructure.
From a purely economic development perspective, “I think the answer is no,” said Marlowe, of the U. of C.
But, he said, “the Red Line extension has been about more than economic development in the strict sense of the word.” The project is also about community development, and about restoring a sense of fairness on the South Side, he said.
Schofer concurred. There’s an “equity increment,” he said. “That’s what we’re paying for.”
“An authoritarian move”
The Trump administration has repeatedly used the threat to withhold federal funding as a political weapon against blue cities and states. When it comes to funding for public transit, Trump’s Transportation Department has used crime specifically as a cudgel, most recently threatening to withhold up to $50 million in federal dollars from the CTA unless it beefs up a plan to add more police to its transit system.
Experts noted that the Red Line funding freeze appears to have absolutely nothing to do with an honest assessment of the project’s value.
“This is an authoritarian move to punish the city of Chicago” that has nothing to do with the costs and benefits of the project itself, Schofer said.
Elected officials across Illinois have similarly slammed the funding freeze, accusing the Trump administration of playing around with critical infrastructure dollars to score political points.
In October, Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth called the freeze “an illegal, anti-democratic attack on our state for daring not to vote for Donald Trump.”
“The South Side has fought for this for 50 years, and we have finally delivered it, and after 50 years of struggle to make sure that the South Side is prioritized, this president is now going to try to disrupt that? Not under my watch,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said in early October, while calling Trump “deranged.”
At the time, the mayor said the city was considering taking legal action in response to the funding freeze.
More recently, the mayor’s spokesperson, Cassio Mendoza, said it would be the CTA that would file such a lawsuit.
Chase, of the CTA, said the agency could not comment on any potential legal action.
Shortly before freezing the CTA’s Red Line funding, the feds issued an “interim final rule” barring race- and sex-based contracting requirements from federal grants.
“The American people don’t care what race or gender construction workers, pipefitters, or electricians are,” the Transportation Department said at the time. “They just want these massive projects finally built quickly and efficiently.”
The department said it was undertaking a review of the Red Line project, as well as the CTA’s Red and Purple Modernization project, from which it also froze federal dollars, “to ensure no additional federal dollars go towards discriminatory, illegal, and wasteful contracting practices.”
In response to questions about the status of the review and its timeline, the Transportation Department said it notified the CTA on Dec. 1 that it “had contracting practices that are inconsistent with Equal Protection principles of the U.S. Constitution.”
The CTA was “notified of steps” it would need to take to “eradicate these discriminatory practices, which will allow for Federal funds to resume for these important infrastructure projects,” the federal agency said.
The DOT did not answer a question about what “steps” it wanted the CTA to take. It also didn’t offer a response to criticism that the funding freeze was politically motivated.
Chase said only that the agency was “cooperating with USDOT and (the Federal Transit Administration) to ensure the review is completed as quickly as practicable.”
Marlowe said he believed the CTA would eventually get its grant money.
But the feds, he said, “want to extract some pound of flesh.”
Meanwhile, South Side riders are waiting for the train.
At the 95th Street Red Line station on a recent Monday, CTA rider Tae Williams — who was about to get on a bus to take her home from work — said she wished Trump would “stop freezing every damn thing.”
“You freeze funding, you freeze this, you freeze that,” Williams said. “Now the only people that’s freezing is us!”
