Jon Levine and Chris Nesi at the New York Post report that Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy is revoking federal approval of New York’s hated congestion pricing plan, which Governor Kathy Hochul rammed through at the eleventh hour of the Biden Administration in order to get approval from Pete Buttigieg.

The US Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration will terminate the approval of the controversial program, according to a letter Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is set to send to Hochul on Wednesday afternoon…“Now the toll program leaves drivers without any free highway alternative, and instead, takes more money from working people to pay for a transit system and not highways. It’s backwards and unfair,” [Duffy] said, blasting the program as harmful to small businesses in the Big Apple that depend on customers from New Jersey and Connecticut…“To be sure, the termination of the program may deprive the transit system of funding, but any reliance on that funding stream was not reasonable given that [Federal Highway Administration] approved only a ‘pilot project.’”

This is good policy and good politics. It’s more controversial as constitutional civics that a state’s purely internal toll system (even one that extends to people crossing the border onto the state’s local roads) should be subject to federal approval or disapproval. Duffy notes that “ever since the enactment of the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, Congress has required that roads constructed with Federal-aid highway funds be free from tolls of all kinds,” an exemption from which was later created for “congestion pricing pilot projects.”

So, if you object to states being forced to dance on federal strings on local tolls, thank the president who signed that bill in 1916: Woodrow Wilson. That being said, eliminating barriers to free commerce and travel across state lines has been a core federal goal since the Constitutional Convention and the Washington Administration. The Supreme Court ruled as far back as 1824 that the federal government could veto a New York state monopoly on running steamboats on the Hudson River. Hence, the interest that Duffy is vindicating in policing those barriers on behalf of interstate commuters and truckers is one of very longstanding federal concern.