The Chicago Transit Authority will increase the number of police officers patrolling city’s public transit system Friday following a threat from President Donald Trump’s administration that the mass transit agency could lose federal funding if it did not take certain steps to address violent crime.
The Federal Transit Administration threatened last week to withhold federal funding from the CTA if it did not comply with the demands of a “special directive,” including by upping security on the city’s bus and rail systems. In unveiling the special directive, the Trump administration invoked the November attack on 26-year-old Bethany MaGee, who was doused with gasoline and lit on fire in an apparently random attack while riding on the CTA Blue Line.
President Donald Trump’s administration threatens CTA funding over safety issues
The FTA gave the CTA a tight timeline to comply with the demands of the Dec. 8 directive, saying it had to submit a “security enhancement plan” within a week and implement it by Dec. 19, which is Friday.
In a news release Thursday, the CTA and the Chicago Police Department said they would boost the number of police participating in the “Voluntary Special Employment Program” on the CTA from an average of 77 per day to 120 per day. Participants in that program are CPD officers who sign up to patrol the CTA on their days off, the agencies said. They supplement CPD’s public transportation section and district police officers.
K-9 security staffing, for which the CTA contracts privately, will also see an increase from an average of 172 canine security guards per day to 188 per day.
CTA and CPD will work together to “strategically deploy” the additional security “based on combined crime data and CTA system information,” the CTA said.
“We expect the additional police and K-9 presence on our system to further increase security visibility,” the transit agency’s acting president, Nora Leerhsen, said in a statement.
“CPD and CTA work closely together every day to keep CTA riders safe, and this surge is an extension of that effort,” police Superintendent Larry Snelling said, also in a statement.
CTA spokesperson Catherine Hosinski said the surge was anticipated to cost about $3.5 million over the year — money she said was covered by the agency’s 2026 budget.
The FTA did not immediately respond to a question about whether the security plan would satisfy officials and prevent the CTA from losing federal funding. Last week’s directive was not the first time the Trump administration, which has repeatedly used violence on public transit as a political cudgel against blue cities, had threatened to withhold funds from the CTA.
Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wrote a letter in September to the CTA asking it to lay out plans to reduce crime and fare evasion on the system or risk losing funding. The Trump administration has made similar threats to mass transit agencies in the Democratic-led cities of New York, Los Angeles, Boston and Washington, D.C.
Leerhsen defended the agency’s safety practices in a response to Duffy at the time.
The Trump administration has also frozen $2.1 billion for the CTA’s planned Red Line Extension and its Red and Purple modernization project, although it did so citing the agency’s diversity practices in contracting, not safety issues.