EMPLOYING THE same sense of urgency with which the region has addressed Metro’s daunting financial and governance problems — which is to say, not much urgency at all — state and local officials are plodding their way toward establishing a new safety oversight commission for the transit system. It has been a long time coming.

For years, complacency was the watchword when it came to maintenance and safety on the subway system, the result being a drumbeat of lapses, mishaps and lethal accidents. Alarm bells kept sounding, and officials kept ignoring them. “It’s almost like we are talking with someone who is tone-deaf,” the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, Deborah A.P. Hersman, said in 2010, a year after a Red Line crash left nine people dead and 80 injured. “They are not hearing it, they are not getting it, and they are not addressing the problems.”

Finally, in October 2015, the Federal Transit Administration took the unprecedented step of seizing Metro’s safety oversight function, displacing what had been a toothless, virtually inert local body called the Tri-State Oversight Committee. And even then, a sense of urgency was missing.

Rather than moving quickly to reestablish credible, muscular local oversight, lawmakers in Virginia, Maryland and the District dithered. Exasperated, then-Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx warned that federal funds would be withheld from the two states and the District unless they jointly created a permanent local oversight commission by February 2017.

That was inconvenient timing, especially for Maryland and Virginia, whose legislatures convene in January, meaning they’d have just weeks to enact legislation and stand up the new oversight body, which would require naming commissioners and hiring a director and staff — a legislative, administrative and logistical impossibility.

State officials cried foul, as did virtually every member of the two states’ congressional delegations. (Withholding the funds is “crude, punitive, and arbitrary,” as 11 Democratic lawmakers put it in a letter to Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao.) But the feds had heard enough, and the changeover from the Obama to the Trump administration brought no relief.

To date, the result has been nearly $9 million in federal funds withheld from the three jurisdictions — not only from Metro, but also from transit projects and programs as distant as Roanoke and Baltimore. And because it will take several months more to get the commission staffed and running, to the point where it can reclaim safety oversight from the FTA, a further $6 million in federal funds is expected to be withheld in the coming two months.

The federal money is likely to be restored at that time. But the entire sorry saga is the latest episode illustrating the scope of the challenge of coordinating a collective response among Metro’s four distinct governing entities — the two states, the District and the feds. If it has been this difficult to establish a functioning local safety oversight body, how will Metro’s stakeholders agree on reforms to provide the system with adequate funding or efficient governance? Complacency won’t get that job done.