In the furor and confusion over the Trump administration’s move to kill congestion pricing in New York City, a major question remained unanswered: If the president had his way, when would the tolling program end?

Federal officials, it turned out, had a date in mind: March 21.

The battle over congestion pricing, which the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority is counting on to fund billions of dollars in mass transit repairs, is expected to play out in federal court in Manhattan. While many legal experts say that the March deadline is not binding, some question whether President Trump might resort to other tactics, including withholding federal funding for other state projects, to apply pressure.

In a letter last week to New York transportation leaders, Gloria M. Shepherd, the executive director of the Federal Highway Administration, said they “must cease the collection of tolls” by that date. The letter was included in court papers filed on Tuesday in a federal lawsuit brought by the State of New Jersey seeking to stop congestion pricing.

Ms. Shepherd requested that New York leaders work with her agency, which is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, “to provide the necessary details and updates” regarding the halting of toll operations.

In response,x777 casino the M.T.A., which operates buses, trains and commuter rail lines in New York and manages the tolling program, vowed to keep collecting the tolls unless a federal judge instructs it otherwise.

“We’re not turning them off,” Janno Lieber, the chief executive and chair of the M.T.A., said at a news conference on Wednesday. “In the meantime, everything is steady as she goes.”

Robinson’s history of comments that have been widely criticized as antisemitic and anti-gay made him a deeply polarizing figure in North Carolina long before his bid for governor was upended last week by a CNN report that he had called himself a “Black NAZI” and praised slavery while posting on a pornographic website between 2008 and 2012. Now, some of his allies are abandoning him. Most of his senior campaign staff members have resigned. The Republican Governors Association said that its pro-Robinson ads would expire tomorrow and that no new ones had been placed. And former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Robinson in the spring, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids,” did not mention him once during his rally in the state over the weekend.

Mr. Biden even held on to hope for the transformative peace deal for the Middle East that he thought was within grasp a year ago, believing it could survive even as the war between Hamas and Israel tore at its foundations.

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