New York
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Fifty years in the past this month, President Gerald Ford instructed New York City the federal authorities wouldn’t reserve it from monetary collapse. The New York Daily News summed up Ford’s speech in an infamous front-page headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”
Today, President Donald Trump is punishing American cities in ways in which make Ford’s refusal to bail out New York look amicable by comparability. (Ford later authorised federal loans to the town with strict circumstances connected.)
But cities lack the ability or assets to combat again.
They can’t cease Trump’s funding cuts, take away federal troops stationed on their streets or reverse damaging insurance policies past authorized challenges — regardless of being the financial engines of the United States. Last 12 months, metropolitan areas accounted for 90.8% of the nation’s financial output, employed 88.2% of Americans and housed 86.4% of the inhabitants. The earnings cities generate additionally helps rural areas and small cities.
There’s a protracted historical past of hostility towards cities within the United States, however “right now we’re at an apex of virulent anti-urbanism,” stated Richard Schragger, a regulation professor on the University of Virginia who focuses on native authorities and concrete coverage. “What Trump is doing is affirmatively attacking and occupying American cities. That’s a much more hostile attitude” than Ford.
Trump goes after cities each method he can. He recommended utilizing “some of these dangerous cities as training grounds” for US troops. He approved the National Guard to Los Angeles; Washington, DC; Memphis; Portland; and Chicago, and threatened the identical for New Orleans and New York City. The White House additionally lately canceled or delayed funding for important infrastructure, transit and clear power tasks in Democratic-run cities through the federal government shutdown. That’s on high of the cuts to Medicaid, SNAP and different federal packages that can blow a hole in native budgets.
Cities are practically powerless to cease Trump as a result of they’re thought-about “creatures of the state” in American regulation. They can’t increase taxes or borrow cash with out approval from states, and states usually create insurance policies that impose burdens on cities.
So if Republican Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee, for instance, encourages Trump to ship federal troops to Memphis over the objections of the town’s Democratic mayor, Paul Young, Memphis is powerless to cease it.
“It’s three tiers — federal, state, local — and we’re in the lowest tier,” stated Brett Smiley, the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, who can be on the US Conference of Mayors’ advisory board. “Each step you take down that rung limits your options and your authority.”
“We will never be able to backfill the scale of cuts, depending on what happens at the federal level,” Smiley added. “We also don’t have all of the legal tools necessary to resist some of these federal actions.”
The White House didn’t instantly reply to NCS’s request for remark.
Cities are by no means talked about within the Constitution and don’t have any official place within the US system of presidency. Over time, this has left their position open to interpretation.
“We don’t have a clear, rationally-planned system of designating what powers cities do and don’t have,” stated Clarissa Hayward, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis who research democratic idea and concrete politics. “It’s a system that evolved over time in circumstances that have nothing to do with the challenges cities are facing in 2025.”
Cities are nonetheless constrained by a authorized doctrine from the 1870s often known as Dillon’s Rule, named for a decide in Iowa, that stated states management cities. Most states adopted Dillion’s Rule within the nineteenth century, though a couple of like California, Oregon, and New York empower cities to set their very own legal guidelines and handle native affairs, a precept often known as house rule.
Many states exert tight affect over cities, nevertheless, even passing laws in recent times that preempt cities from adopting their very own insurance policies on points like immigration, homosexual rights and the surroundings. For instance, Texas handed a regulation in 2023 that prevented progressive cities from enacting laws that didn’t align with the conservative state legislature, dubbed the “Death Star” law by opponents.
Eighteen of the 20 largest US cities have Democratic mayors, and Trump has “figured out how to exploit this bizarre legal morass that we have,” Hayward stated. “One of these things that can be exploited is blue cities in red states.”
Cities are sometimes blamed for nationwide issues like homelessness and crime. But they don’t management federal funding for housing help or set nationwide gun legal guidelines.
Cities even have restricted capability to remedy these issues since they don’t have direct management over the assets wanted to sort out them. Roughly one-third of cities’ income comes from federal grants to states which are then doled out to cities.
“The problem is that cities have responsibilities but not power,” stated Richard Briffault, a regulation professor at Columbia University who research state and native authorities. “Cities have to absorb the costs of poverty. If a lot of people can’t pay their rent or access healthcare, the consequences will show up at the local doorstep.”
Providence Mayor Smiley stated the Trump administration’s insurance policies on commerce, immigration and power are already hurting his metropolis. Tariffs on lumber have elevated development prices, and immigration raids have harm native companies and brought about kids to keep house from college.
“Everything that happens at the federal level eventually trickles down to the street level,” Smiley stated.
Although Smiley is a Democrat in a blue metropolis, he stated needs to collaborate with the Trump administration to construct extra housing, enhance public security and different bipartisan points.
But the administration’s strategy is making a robust partnership tough, he stated.
“The thing that has been challenging at this time with the administration is the unpredictability,” he stated. “Things are being done to cities, not in partnership, but rather to us against our wishes.”