Paige Graves, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's general counsel, announced her resignation in a June 30 email, just weeks after the New York Post published an investigation into the agency's outsourcing of legal work to private firms at enormous taxpayer expense. Her last day is July 31.
Graves earned more than $344,000 in 2025, according to public records. That is nearly $100,000 more than New York Gov. Kathy Hochul's $250,000 annual salary. She led a legal team of 350 attorneys. And yet, under her watch, the MTA admitted paying more than $10 million to six private law firms in recent years, while refusing to tell the public exactly how much taxpayer money went out the door.
The departure raises sharp questions about accountability at an agency that has racked up hundreds of millions of dollars in personal injury verdicts while farming out legal work that its own in-house staff was equipped to handle.
Graves' farewell email, with the subject line "Farewell Announcement," went to roughly 50 recipients. It did not go agency-wide. A source inside the MTA's law department confirmed that rank-and-file attorneys had not been told their boss was leaving.
In the email, Graves wrote:
"After fourteen remarkable years with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, I have decided that the time has come for me to begin a new chapter."
That is the language of someone leaving on her own terms. But the circumstances tell a different story. No successor has been named. The MTA says it is conducting a "national search." And one insider with knowledge of how executive departures normally work at the agency offered a blunt assessment.
"It seems like she's been forced out," the source said, noting that a departure of this magnitude would typically be announced months ahead of time with a successor already in place.
MTA communications director Tim Minton pushed back after the Post's report was published. He denied Graves was being ousted and said she had given the agency advance notice:
"Paige Graves advised MTA leadership months ago of her plans to take on new opportunities outside the organization, agreeing to wrap up priority projects through the end of this month."
Minton called her five years as general counsel "momentous." But if leadership truly knew months in advance, the absence of a named successor, and the narrow distribution of her farewell email, is difficult to explain. Either the agency failed to plan for a foreseeable vacancy at its highest legal post, or the timeline Minton described does not match what happened internally.
In May, the New York Post published an investigation detailing how the MTA had outsourced significant legal work to private law firms beginning around 2022, the same year Graves took over as general counsel. Sources described by the Post as whistleblowers alleged that the reliance on outside counsel was unprecedented and led to "hugely inflated" personal injury judgments, despite the MTA having a fully staffed and experienced torts department capable of handling those cases.
The MTA acknowledged spending more than $10 million across six firms. It declined to reveal the exact total. For an agency that depends on public funding and fare revenue, that refusal is telling. Taxpayers are entitled to know where their money goes, particularly when the agency's own lawyers were already on the payroll.
The pattern of government agencies hemorrhaging public dollars while resisting transparency is hardly unique to the MTA. But the scale of what followed the outsourcing decision makes this case especially costly.
Under Graves' tenure, the MTA absorbed a series of staggering jury verdicts in personal injury cases, the very category of litigation that whistleblowers say was needlessly farmed out to private counsel.
In 2024 alone, juries returned verdicts including $90 million for a man who lost an arm and a leg in a train strike, later reduced by a judge to just under $40 million, and $72.5 million for a cancer patient left paralyzed after being hit by an MTA bus. A separate 2024 verdict awarded $82 million to a student tourist who lost an arm and a leg in a train strike. Another jury handed down a $53 million verdict for an off-duty NYCTA bus driver hit by a bus.
In 2025, the verdicts continued. A delivery worker who lost five toes in a train strike won a $22.75 million judgment.
These are real injuries to real people. No one disputes that victims deserve compensation. But the question the Post's reporting raised, and that Graves' departure now amplifies, is whether the MTA's decision to hand these cases to outside firms, rather than its own experienced torts team, contributed to worse outcomes for the agency and, by extension, for the riders and taxpayers who fund it.
When government agencies choose to spend public money on private contractors while capable employees sit idle, the incentives deserve scrutiny. The pattern recalls other recent cases of federal and state programs where waste and irregularities went unchecked until outside pressure forced a reckoning.
Graves' compensation placed her among the best-paid officials in New York government. At more than $344,000, she out-earned the governor by a wide margin. Only MTA CEO Janno Lieber, at nearly $470,000 in total pay, drew a higher salary within the agency's executive ranks.
For that sum, the MTA got a general counsel who oversaw a period of record legal losses, an outsourcing strategy that whistleblowers say was both unnecessary and damaging, and a departure so abrupt that most of her own attorneys did not know it was coming.
Graves' background is impressive on paper. A former Manhattan prosecutor, she attended the Wharton School and Hofstra Law School. She worked as a forensic litigation consultant at KPMG before joining the MTA, where she served as vice president and general counsel for MTA Bus Company and did a two-year stint at the Long Island Rail Road before ascending to the top legal post in 2022.
During her tenure, she navigated legal issues surrounding congestion pricing, federal funding for the Second Avenue Subway expansion, and a major accessibility settlement over the system's lack of elevators. Those are serious matters. But the outsourcing controversy and the avalanche of personal injury verdicts cast a long shadow.
The MTA says it is conducting a national search for Graves' successor. It has not offered a timeline. It has not explained what "priority projects" Graves was asked to wrap up before her July 31 departure. And it has not addressed the central question raised by the Post's May investigation: why an agency with 350 lawyers on staff needed to spend tens of millions on outside firms to handle routine tort litigation.
Accountability in government requires more than press releases about "new chapters." It requires answers. The MTA owes riders and taxpayers a clear accounting of how much was spent on outside legal work, which firms received the money, and whether the outsourcing strategy contributed to the record verdicts the agency now faces.
The broader issue extends well beyond one transit agency. Across government, public institutions face mounting scrutiny for policies that prioritize institutional convenience over public accountability. When officials leave under a cloud, the instinct is always to move on quickly. The public deserves better.
And when courts and legislatures weigh the consequences of bureaucratic decision-making, enforcement and accountability matter, not just at the federal level, but in every agency that spends public money.
A $344,000-a-year lawyer who presided over hundreds of millions in legal losses has cleaned out her desk. The MTA says it is looking for her replacement. Maybe it should spend less time on the national search and more time explaining to New York's riders why they were paying for two legal teams, one they hired, and one they apparently didn't need.