It has been a month since the political saga surrounding the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority’s (SEPTA’s) budget deficit, access to state funding, and proposed service cuts was resolved, and it seems like a good time to take stock of the dramatic past few months. We should consider not only what such a spectacle reveals about the internal dynamics of Pennsylvania politics but also, more broadly, the way politics works across the country. Of course, to say that this drama has been “resolved” would certainly be a mischaracterization of the result of the summer’s deliberations over SEPTA’s funding. This saga (possibly because of the increasingly charged national political moment or simply because the issue so tangibly and immediately affects so many in the Philadelphia metro area) has been one of the more high profile, confusing, and divisive fights in the recent history of Pennsylvania politics. Despite this, the funding conflict’s resolution was notably anti-climactic and provided no long-term certainty about the future of SEPTA’s budget.
Over the summer, one of the strongest points of conflict between Republicans and Democrats in the divided state legislature was over how to fund SEPTA. The Republican-controlled Senate proposed a bill which would temporarily maintain SEPTA’s service by using funds from the state’s Public Transportation Trust Fund (PTTF), a fund of over a billion dollars intended to cover sustained capital projects. The Democrats, meanwhile, hoped for a more long-term, consistent funding solution, for which they wanted to dedicate an increased share of the state’s sales tax revenue.
In response to this impasse, SEPTA threatened and eventually enacted massive cuts in August. Less than two weeks later, a judge ruled that the cuts were illegally discriminatory against low-income and minority riders, and that full service must be restored immediately. While SEPTA scrambled to comply, the question of its budget deficit still loomed.
Ten days after the court decision, Governor Josh Shapiro allowed SEPTA to draw the money needed from the very same capital fund, PTTF, which he and fellow Democrats had refused to tap into in the preceding weeks. This is merely a “temporary ‘band-aid’ fix,” however, and only guarantees SEPTA funding for two years. Governor Shapiro confirmed that there would be no further legislative discussions regarding SEPTA’s funding this year, but his “solution” clearly sets up the exact same political conflict two years from now that we saw arise this past summer.
In fact, this kind of uncertainty is not unfamiliar for SEPTA, which was founded as a response to the collapse of several private railroad companies in the mid-1960s. Since its inception, SEPTA has often had to petition the state and/or federal government for temporary funding, and there has rarely been a time when its funding wasn’t contingent on the immediate legislative cycle. As a result, SEPTA has also frequently been in the crossfire of political debates in the Pennsylvania legislature. Just last year, the transportation authority was facing the same post-COVID budget deficit as it was this past year, and Governor Shapiro stepped in with a temporary fix by patching SEPTA’s budget that year with federal highway capital funds. The first sentence of an article written on Nov. 22, 2024 sounds eerily familiar: “Gov. Josh Shapiro will intervene to save SEPTA from a potentially devastating set of fare hikes and service cuts.” While the immediate budget deficit has been attributed to the drastic decline in ridership during COVID and the expiration of federal aid, SEPTA clearly has a history of needing more money than they have; the response to this ongoing deficit has often been as noncommittal as possible.
Despite the long precedent of political division over SEPTA’s budget, this year’s funding crisis felt different. This was due, at least in part, to the fact that next summer threatens (or promises) to be one of Philadelphia’s more hectic (exciting) in a long time, with the FIFA World Cup, MLB All-Star game, and celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It seemed like this year should have been the culmination, and ideally the real resolution, of the past attempts to come to an agreement around how to deal with and support SEPTA.
The saga surrounding SEPTA funding was also at the center of the city’s political discourse. For a few weeks in late August, nearly every front page headline of the Philadelphia Inquirer had to do with the drama around SEPTA’s funding (or lack thereof). It was front-of-mind for many students on campus at Swarthmore too since, under SEPTA’s proposed cuts, the Media/Wawa line would stop running after 9 p.m.
Philadelphia residents and activists protested vehemently, even marching in front of City Hall, and there was common acknowledgement from people across the city that the services provided by SEPTA were vital to commuters, schoolchildren, tourists, and Philly residents in general. What was striking to me was how such a spectacle surrounding important political actors, but also throughout the city’s common discourse, could have such a disappointing and inconclusive (and yet somehow entirely predictable) conclusion.
The problem in the case of this recent funding saga seems to be an issue of political theatrics, of promising, posturing, and calculated maneuvering that is certainly not unique to the Pennsylvania state legislature or the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority. This political game comes at the expense of the people who bear the immediate consequences of political actors’ decisions and uses to its advantage genuine popular political will and desire for change.
The answer to this particular issue regarding SEPTA’s funding might initially seem obvious: the Democrats have it right that SEPTA is economically valuable and badly in need of money, and the state legislature should commit to funding them long-term, no questions asked. But Democrats are clearly players in this political game as well and are frequently motivated by strategic moves, rather than civic goals. Often, the primary goal is winning. A clip of John Oliver interviewing the former Senator Harry Reid’s (D – NV) communications director, Jim Manly, sticks with me because it is so revealing. Oliver asks him what the measure of success is for a politician and, without skipping a beat, Manly responds, “getting re-elected by his or her constituents.”
Republicans will be quick to point out that, despite the impact of COVID, SEPTA needing millions in state funding to balance their budget is not a particularly new phenomenon. One of the Republicans’ justifications for why funding the agency was only temporary was that this would allow time to thoroughly investigate how SEPTA spends its money. A Republican state legislator who proposed drawing money from the PTTF instead of from sales tax revenue argued that there would be more than enough money left in the fund for capital transportation projects across the state. He also put forward a proposal to “increase SEPTA accountability,” claiming that there were legitimate questions as to the agency’s allocation of resources and level of transparency.
Are the Republicans lying or acting in bad faith? Most likely. SEPTA is one of the most efficient major urban public transportation networks in the country. But it is also worth acknowledging that SEPTA has undertaken seemingly expensive and ill-advised projects whose budgets balloon far beyond expectations.
SEPTA, clearly, is a player in this political game as well. The pressure they exerted by warning of 40% service cuts increased the tension of this situation and likely impacted Shapiro’s decision to allocate capital funds to cover SEPTA’s deficit last month and “save SEPTA.” Shapiro, of course, is up for re-election next November, and he would rather not deal with the baggage of a city with debilitated transit. This is not to say that SEPTA’s need for funding is not real (although some critics do claim this). Rather, it is merely to point out that there is a political calculation that conditions, at least to some degree, their decisions. In this case, that decision was to slash services for the Philadelphians that need them most.
One might respond that this is simply how politics works — that to be politically effective you must be strategic and calculated in your posturing. You must use the tools at your disposal — including public unrest and anger — to your advantage. You may have to abandon the desires of the people you claim to champion or even lie about representing them in the first place, but this is how you must play the game in order to have any chance of winning, of achieving anything. The thing is, I’m not sure I really disagree. That is how politics works right now, and there is something deeply flawed about that.
The most vicious result of this political game is how people with sincere criticisms and genuine desire for change are used to gain the political upper-hand. So often, it seems, social unrest and political movements which advocate for substantive, transformative change become tools in such a game as soon as they take sides; whether it’s Republicans who use people’s skepticism of SEPTA to legitimate their arguments, Democrats who have their own claims to popular support, or SEPTA itself which claims they represent the needs of school-children and commuters in Philadelphia. The drama this summer over SEPTA funding, and its characteristically uninspiring resolution, reveals how genuine possibility for change can so-often be captured and co-opted by the game of politics.
The SEPTA saga is reminiscent of more significant nationwide movements such as Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street which suffered a similar fate. Of course, the conflict, discourse, and political unrest around SEPTA funding is not at all the same as these. If the Democrats happened to control the State Senate, then their bill likely would have passed easily (and questions of agency accountability might have been forgone for the time being). Even so, the broader point remains: the theatrics and calculated posturing which define politics right now are detrimental to the possibility for transformative political creativity and imagination.
