Editorials of The Times

The latest dismaying detail comes from a report by Brian Rosenthal in The Times, which concludes that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs the subway system, spends far more to build tunnels and extend train lines than agencies doing comparable projects elsewhere. Its construction projects have more workers than those in other cities, and workers are kept on hand even when there is no need for them. Contractors add a premium to their bids, claiming it compensates them for dealing with the MTA’s bureaucracy. And some unions and contractors negotiate wages and work rules without any say from the authority.

Billions of dollars that could have gone to maintaining and improving the subways, which use a signaling system that dates to the 1930s, have been wasted on exorbitant costs. Projects have also been delayed by mismanagement.

Blame for these costs belongs to politically powerful construction companies and labor unions that drive up costs under the lax oversight of public officials who have no incentive to rouse sleeping legislative watchdogs.

Consider the following: The first phase of the Second Avenue subway, completed at the end of 2016, cost $2.5 billion per mile; and the extension of the No. 7 line to Hudson Yards, finished the year before, cost $1.5 billion per mile. By contrast, Paris, a dense and historic city with strong labor unions, is building a line extension similar to the Second Avenue project for just $450 million a mile, which is roughly comparable to the average cost for subway projects around the world. Several transit experts have pointed out these cost discrepancies in recent years.

The MTA chairman, Joe Lhota, acknowledged to The Times that excessive costs have “been a problem,” but he says New York has unique challenges, like aging utilities and high density, that contribute to high costs. That is not credible, since Paris and London are older than New York and have done a much better job improving and expanding their transit systems in recent years.

Still, Lhota, whom Gov. Andrew Cuomo appointed last year, says the MTA is working to bring down costs. To be successful, he will need help from Cuomo, who has been friendly with the labor unions whose members operate cranes and dig tunnels, and with the contractors doing the work. The unions and the construction companies are big campaign contributors and have a strong financial incentive to preserve the status quo.

Cuomo, in turn, will have to stir the Legislature, which has, regrettably, taken little interest in overseeing and improving the MTA. Besides annual hearings about the MTA’s budget, the state Assembly and the Senate conducted just two oversight hearings on the MTA between 2015 and last year, according to Reinvent Albany, a public interest group. Last year, as the subways were plagued by delays and derailments, the Assembly held just one oversight hearing, about the effect of the track work Amtrak was doing at Penn Station. The Senate did not bother with even that. By contrast, the New York City Council, which has little sway over the MTA, has held nine oversight hearings in the past three years.

It’s not as if the Legislature has no power. It held important hearings in 2016 about water contamination in Hoosick Falls and elsewhere. Those hearings helped shine a light on how a toxic chemical got into groundwater, and state officials were pressed to explain why they did not respond more quickly.

The state comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, audits the MTA and other state agencies. His office has examined construction costs for projects like East Side Access, which will bring the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal, but it has not compared MTA spending with the spending of agencies in other big cities. The comptroller could do more to expose waste.

Ultimately, Cuomo and the Legislature need to reform the MTA. Lawmakers could require that the authority use the “design-build” process, which puts design and construction teams together early and usually reduces the need for big changes later. The state should also make sure the MTA has a voice in negotiations between contractors and labor unions, to reduce the potential for featherbedding that exists when both sides can pass on costs to the government. If that doesn’t happen, no amount of revenue, whether it comes from higher fares, from a tax on millionaires as Mayor Bill de Blasio has proposed, or from congestion pricing as Cuomo has suggested, will be enough to fix the subways. Too many of those added dollars would be frittered away.

New Yorkers like to think their city is the best. But there is one superlative — most expensive subway line on Earth — no taxpayer or commuter would care to be associated with. The state’s leaders ought to feel the same way.

Jeff Sessions’ Endless War on Marijuana

The key to understanding the Trump administration’s approach to policy, it seems, is to look at what most Americans want and then imagine the opposite.

Consider the new guidance on marijuana that Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued last week, which reverses Obama-era policy and gives prosecutors more leeway to enforce federal laws against the drug in states where it is legal. Sessions has been on a lifelong crusade against the plant, which he considers the root of many of society’s ills.

And yet more than 6 in 10 Americans, and 7 in 10 of those younger than 30, believe marijuana should be legal, twice as many as in 2000. Three-quarters of the public believe the federal government should not prosecute the drug’s sale or use in states where it is legal.

In other words, the new policy is deeply unpopular. Many of its harshest critics are members of the president’s own party, who expressed outrage at the reversal of Trump’s campaign promise to leave the matter to the states.

Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., where legalized marijuana has spawned a $1 billion industry, threatened to block all nominees to the Justice Department until the new policy is dropped.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., laid the blame at the feet of Sessions, saying he “betrayed us on this.” A 2014 law co-sponsored by Rohrabacher prohibits the Justice Department from going after users, growers or sellers of medical marijuana in states where it is legal. The use of recreational marijuana became legal in California on Jan. 1.

Even Matt Gaetz, the Florida representative last seen trying to get the special counsel Robert Mueller fired, said the new policy showed Sessions’ “desire to pursue an antiquated, disproven dogma instead of the will of the American people."

None of this will bother the attorney general, a lifelong anti-drug crusader who runs the Justice Department like it’s 1988, when the war on drugs was at full throttle and the knee-jerk political response was to be as punitive as possible. Sessions has long held a particular enmity for pot, which he continues to demonize. “Good people don’t smoke marijuana,” he said in 2016.

This is wrongheaded for so many reasons. It’s out of step with current knowledge about the risks and benefits of marijuana, which the federal government classified as a Schedule I drug in 1970. By that definition, it has no accepted medical use and is more dangerous than cocaine. Obviously this is outdated, and Congress needs to do its part by removing marijuana from Schedule I. But nothing is stopping Sessions in the meantime from accepting scientific facts.

The new policy is also blind to the massive cultural shift toward legalization that has been happening at the state level in recent years, after decades of outrageously harsh punishments that have fallen disproportionately on the shoulders of people of color. Eight states have now legalized marijuana for recreational use. California is now the world’s largest legal market for pot. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia allow marijuana to be used for medical purposes. By the end of this year, it is estimated that legal marijuana will be a $9 billion industry.

Finally, to the extent the new policy redirects scarce government resources toward more marijuana prosecutions, it will undermine efforts to address more serious drug problems, like the opioid crisis, an actual public-health emergency that kills tens of thousands of people a year.

The full effect of the Sessions memo isn’t immediately clear. Federal prosecutors are overstretched, and only bring a small number of marijuana prosecutions as it is. But the memo has already created legal uncertainty in states that have partly or fully legalized marijuana, leaving users, growers and sellers to wonder whether their actions will be ignored or will land them behind bars.

Whatever its ultimate impact, the memo is yet another example of how the Justice Department under Jeff Sessions is turning back the clock on smart, evidence-based justice policy. His unwelcome revival of the war on drugs will last at least as long as the attorney general does. It is one of the reasons he has endured the continuing humiliations of working for Donald Trump.