On November 18, 2017, "The New York Times" published an investigation into the problems underlying the MTA. It found that politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties, at the mayoral and gubernatorial levels, had gradually removed $1.5 billion of MTA funding. Other actions by city and state politicians, according to the "Times", included overspending; overpaying unions and interest groups; advertising superficial improvement projects while ignoring more important infrastructure; and agreeing to high-interest loans that would have been unnecessary without their other interventions. The "Times" stressed that no single event directly caused the crisis; rather, it was an accumulation of small cutbacks and maintenance deferments. The MTA funds were described as a "piggy bank" for the state, with the issuance of MTA bonds benefiting the state at the MTA's expense. By 2017, a sixth of the MTA's budget was allocated to paying off debt, a threefold increase from the proportion in 1997. The city's $250 million annual contribution to the MTA budget in 2017 was a quarter of the contribution in 1990. David L. Gunn, who helped end a transit crisis when he led the NYCTA in the mid-1980s, described the 2017 crisis as "heartbreaking".