Five Los Angeles-area members of Congress urged the Trump administration Wednesday to speed up $2 billion in transportation funding that the lawmakers said is critical to assuring that athletes, officials and fans can move easily around Southern California during the 2028 Olympic Games.

The call came at an informal hearing by House members in West Hollywood, where local transportation officials said the money is needed to deploy 1,700 extra buses and to create high-speed lanes on streets and freeways during the Summer Games.

“We are certainly insisting that the federal government provide the resources that Los Angeles needs to make these Games a success,” said Rep. Laura Friedman (D-Glendale). “We know we need $2 billion to give the seamless, wonderful experience that everybody expects when they come for these Games. And so far, the federal government [has not] released anything really.”

The statements by the House members came on the same day that L.A. City Controller Kenneth Mejia demanded that LA28, the private nonprofit overseeing the Games, provide more detailed reports on its finances.

LA28 has complied fully with only two of nine requirements of a contract with the city known as the Games Agreement, Mejia said in a news release. Missing documents include comparisons of revenue from sources including ticket sales and sponsorship deals against financial projections, bank statements, schedules and budgets for venues and the identity of contractors and the dollar value and purpose of contracts.

Mejia said the city had been ill-advised to agree to be the financial backstop, should the Games lose money. Olympic officials have insisted that will not happen. But Mejia said he needs more than promises.

“We all want a successful 2028 Olympic Games,” Mejia said in a statement, “but its success cannot be at the cost of transparency and accountability to L.A. taxpayers.”

LA28 officials declined to comment on the controller’s statement.

The meeting at West Hollywood City Hall by the five lawmakers — all Democrats — is just the latest effort by local officials to coax financial support out of President Trump and Republicans, who control the House and Senate.

Though omnibus legislation approved last year promised $1 billion in security funding to make the 2028 Games secure, none of that money has arrived in Los Angeles.

Without federal support, the Games won’t be the showcase event for Los Angeles, California and America that most people are expecting, said Friedman and the four other Democrats she called together for the panel.

A White House official rejected claims that Trump’s team isn’t doing enough to support the 2028 Games.

“The White House has been proactively working and meeting with local LA Officials, Members of Congress, and the Organizing Committee at the highest levels to discuss these issues,” the official said, adding that, although the talks were “in the early stages, the Administration is actively doing its part to ensure the resources needed are secured to ensure this is the greatest Olympics in history.”

Officials at LA28, the nonprofit overseeing what will be L.A.’s third Summer Games, have pursued a less confrontational approach in trying to secure cooperation, and funding, from Republicans in Washington.

“The president and the administration have been supportive of LA28 every step of the way,” Marisa McGrath Liston, the group’s top spokesperson, said in a statement late Wednesday. “We look forward to our continued partnership as we look to welcome athletes and visitors to the greatest city in the world.”

Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Los Angeles) said this summer’s World Cup soccer matches in L.A. held out the promise the city can successfully mount world-class sporting events.

Kamlager-Dove, who represents the district that includes the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and other venues, noted that she and more than three dozen elected officials previously wrote to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy demanding more federal support.

“I have to reiterate Los Angeles may be the physical host of the Olympics, but it is the United States of America that is in fact hosting this Olympics,” she said. “We shouldn’t have to wait this dang long waiting for this money that we deserve.”

Officials at L.A. Metro, who operate the region’s biggest bus and rail lines, previously told the board overseeing their agency that neither Washington nor the Democrat-ruled state Capitol in Sacramento has come through with transportation funding. They said the funds are needed as soon as possible for priorities like securing an additional 1,700 buses to augment the 2,100 already in the system and beginning work on special road and freeway lanes designed to assure that competitors and officials make it to venues on time.

The Metro officials said the Republican-controlled House had “kicked the can down the road,” rather than approve an initial $875-million outlay for 2028 Olympic transportation. When California legislators approved their 2026-27 budget this summer, it did not include another $379 million L.A. Metro had requested for infrastructure improvements.

The transit agency said that if delays continued much longer, it would endanger their ability to get L.A. and neighboring communities ready in time. Kamlager-Dove’s letter to Duffy said that the fiscal year that begins Sept. 1 would be the last chance to get the money in place soon enough to be useful.

Jennifer Vides, chief customer experience officer for L.A. Metro, said the World Cup proved L.A. can be “more than a car-centric metropolis,” adding: “We are a transit city, and we are ready for the global stage. “

She said that ridership on L.A. Metro trains and buses increased by 4.4 million in June and July, compared to the same months in 2025. And more than 70% of riders surveyed about their experience deemed themselves “very satisfied.” That bodes well for use of transit, rather than cars, when the Games arrive in July of 2028, Vides said.

But several of the House members said the agency and others providing bus service need to make sure that there is enough parking, shade, water and other necessities so that customers are willing to ditch their cars.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) praised the cleanliness, efficiency and low cost of a bus he rode from Torrance to SoFi Stadium for a World Cup Game, but not the 15-minute walk he said it took from the drop-off point to the stadium.

Lieu expressed concern that security perimeters would be so large during the Games that drop-off points would be even more distant, necessitating walks of up to half an hour, discouraging fans from taking buses.

Bill Scott, chief of Metro’s in-house police force, said security perimeters have not yet been set for SoFi and other 2028 venues. “There are a lot of security concerns that we’re still hashing out, but the goal is the shorter of those options that you present,” Scott said.

Rep Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), whose district includes Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium, said she is concerned that businesses will be displaced by some of the transit and parking plans. Like other local lawmakers, she said she also wants to see more done to assure that jobs and other economic benefits from the Games help her constituents. A similar view was expressed by Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park), who represents a San Gabriel Valley district.

To drive home their appeal for funds from Washington, the lawmakers displayed a board that showed the amount of money sent by the federal government to support previous games. It showed $1.82 billion went to Atlanta for the 1996 Summer Olympics and $2.61 billion to Salt Lake City to host the 2002 Winter Olympics.

Another sign, behind the panelists, highlighted a comment by Duffy to Congress in July of 2025: “I stand willing and ready to partner with you to make sure this goes well and we showcase this great country.”

Laura Rubio-Cornejo, general manager of the L.A. city Department of Transportation, said the federal funding would also help assure that the Olympic transit push doesn’t take away from buses and trains that get everyday Angelenos to work, schools and other destinations.

“The less federal funding there is to support that program, it puts a strain on our local roads and freeway system,” Rubio-Conejo said, “and then we’ll be looking to other municipal operators to really pitch in at a greater level, and thereby sacrificing the services to everyday Angelenos, who still need to get to work and school. And so that I think is the risk that we’re seeing.”

Understanding the formation and evolution of galactic centers is a major challenge facing astrophysicists. For some time, astronomers have known that the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the centers of galaxies and the densely packed nuclear star clusters that surround them play a major role in star formation and other processes. Alas, scientists were still missing some of the pieces of this particular puzzle. By understanding the mechanics that govern galactic centers, scientists will be able to track how the Universe itself has evolved since the first galaxies emerged.

Using a state-of-the-art galaxy simulation, a team led by researchers from Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) has gained new insights into these processes. Their results, described in a study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, indicate that nuclear star clusters and stellar discs found in the inner core are not independent processes, as previously thought. These findings are bridging the gap between theory and observation, improving our understanding of how galaxies evolve.

The research was led by SungWon Kwak, a postdoctoral researcher from the AIP. He and his colleagues were joined by researchers from the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur (OCA), the SNU Astronomy Research Center, the Università di Bologna, the Osservatorio di Astrofisica e Scienza dello Spazio di Bologna, the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at MIT, the University of California, Riverside, Tsinghua University, and the Institut für Physik und Astronomie at the Universität Potsdam.

The diffraction spike in the center of NGC 1365 is a telescope artifact caused by an enormous amount of light in a compact region. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (Oxford), PHANGS Team

The team hoped to learn more about the physical processes that led to the formation of two features that surround the SMBHs at the centers of most galaxies in the Universe: nuclear star clusters and nuclear stellar discs. Such features have been observed for only about a decade in the Milky Way and other galaxies, and were thought to be products of separate formation processes. However, observational surveys found no clear correlation between their masses and sizes, and simulations could not realistically reproduce the processes.

Resolving this mystery is the purpose of the Stellar Feedback in Galaxies and its Effects, or SMUGGLE-Ring, project, an advanced physics framework used in astrophysical simulations to model how stars and stellar feedback shape galaxies. Through their high-resolution hydrodynamical simulation, the team demonstrated that a barred galaxy (like the Milky Way) could naturally form both nuclear star clusters and nuclear stellar discs together, while simulating their growth over billions of years.

For the first time, the simulation directly reveals an evolutionary link between their formation, showing that they grow together. The simulation also shows that the galaxy’s stellar bar plays a central role in this process, funneling gas inward toward the center. As gas accumulates in the center of a galaxy, where the supernovae of dying stars generate shock waves that repeatedly trigger the formation of new stars. Over several billion years, hundreds of millions of solar masses’ worth of stars form in the galactic center.

“Our simulation achieves this by showing how the galactic bar acts like a cosmic conveyor belt, channeling gas inward to feed both structures simultaneously from the exact same reservoir,” explains SungWon Kwak. The results also explain why previous observations failed to find a clear connection between nuclear star clusters and nuclear stellar disks. “The apparent disconnection does not mean that the stars themselves differ fundamentally in age, chemical composition, or motion,” added Dr. Cristina Chiappini, also a scientist from AIP and co-author of the study.

In addition, the simulation showed that the structural relationship between the two processes naturally evolves. During periods of sustained growth, the relative masses and sizes of the cluster and disk begin to differentiate. Despite the shared underlying growth mechanism, the clusters and stellar disks appeared remarkably different when observed at different stages in their evolution. However, the results proved that the dynamics of this co-evolution are even more complex than all that.

Barred spiral galaxy known as NGC 1300 viewed nearly face-on. It’s thought the Milky Way is a barred spiral like this (Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage)

At one point in their simulations, a star cluster of 30 million solar masses spiraled into the galactic center and merged with the nuclear star cluster. This was particularly fascinating, since recent observations of NGC 1365 revealed a massive star cluster inside the galaxy’s bar. This cluster is expected to spiral into the galaxy’s center and merge with its nuclear star cluster, causing it to grow in size and mass. This could also affect the mass of the SMBH inside the nuclear star cluster over time.

A key advantage of these types of astronomical simulations is how it allows researchers to observe processes that cannot be seen directly. In addition, simulations allow scientists to monitor the evolution of galaxies over billions of years. From this, they can observe the formation of a galaxy’s stellar bar, trace the inward flow of gas, witness the birth of new stars, and see how the nuclear stellar disk gradually grows outward from the center.

Another interesting part of the team’s simulation was the way they included dark matter, which played a crucial role in the results. As co-author Dr. Ivan Minchev said:

Previous studies rely on fixed background potentials for the galactic bar and dark matter halo, but the realistic dynamical treatment between stars and the dark matter halo using live particles in our model allows us to form a realistic bar that evolves in time and then naturally forms nuclear structures. Furthermore, our model also exhibits a ‘dark gap’ around the bar region, which is found in many observations and is known as evidence of the interaction between stars and dark matter by the rotation of the stellar bar.

These findings could expand our understanding of the connection between galactic components, helping astronomers interpret future observations.

Further Reading: AIP, Astronomy & Astrophysics