President Donald Trump has set his sights on California’s high-speed rail plan, calling it “the worst-managed project” with massive cost overruns that deserve to be investigated.
“They have hundreds of billions of dollars of cost overruns,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday, according to the Los Angeles Times. “It’s impossible that something could cost that much.”
A spokesperson for the California High-Speed Rail Authority declined to comment on the record, instead posting to X, “Ignore the noise. We’re busy building.”
The authority also sought to respond to Trump’s claims that “hundreds of billions of dollars” have been spent, noting that only $10.5 billion of $13 billion has been funded by the state of California. The project has 50 major structures, 60 guideways, and has created 14,600 jobs, according to the post on X.
Those stats are unlikely to matter much to Trump, who canceled $1 billion in federal funding in 2019 during his first term in office. The reason, according to the Federal Railroad Administration, was that the project “repeatedly failed to comply” with the agreement and “failed to make reasonable progress on the project.”
The Biden administration restored the funding in 2021 and later provided an additional $3.1 billion as part of an $8.2 billion investment in high-speed rail that also included funding for a separate privately owned route between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
Republicans have consistently attacked these projects as wasteful, especially the California project, which has become emblematic of the type of partisan fighting that hovers over high-cost infrastructure projects.
Republicans have consistently attacked these projects as wasteful
In 2008, California voters gave their blessing for a 500-mile project that promised to carry passengers between LA and San Francisco in under three hours on a fully electric train traveling at speeds of up to 220mph. By comparison, the fastest train in the US currently is the Acela, which runs along the Northeast Corridor and currently tops out at 160mph — but only for certain sections.
The project has faced ongoing challenges, including uncertainty around federal commitments. While some progress has been made, the project’s estimated completion has been moved back by nearly a decade, while cost estimates have grown by billions of dollars. Supporters have cited poor management, an overreliance on consultants, and steep challenges in land acquisition as among the most persistent problems.
Elon Musk, in particular, has become a fierce critic of high-speed rail. He pitched his plan for the hyperloop as an alternative — gleaming pods flinging through airless tubes at supersonic speeds — but one he never intended to build himself. He later told his biographer, Ashlee Vance, that he came up with the idea to distract state elected officials and others from the high-speed rail project, which was more cumbersome by comparison.
The hyperloop never materialized, with several of the companies that sought to realize Musk’s idea falling into bankruptcy. Meanwhile, California’s high-speed rail continued to plod along; the authority expects a 171-mile stretch between Merced and Bakersfield to be completed between 2030 and 2033.
Now that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has gained access to key levers of the federal government, including the Treasury Department’s payment systems, there’s a risk that the right-wing billionaire could simply turn off funding for the project.
“Time to end the waste”
DOGE certainly has high-speed rail in its crosshairs. Before DOGE co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy stepped down to pursue a run for governor of Ohio, he called high-speed rail “a wasteful vanity project, burning billions in taxpayer cash, with little prospect for completion in the next decade… Time to end the waste.”
The authority is planning for contingencies if Trump again seeks to terminate the federal government’s investment, with a state-appointed peer review group advising leaders to consider alternative plans for the project.
Of course, high-speed rail would be enormously beneficial to the environment and the effort to fight climate change, numerous studies have shown. By offering a viable, high-speed route along a popular corridor, the project could help get people out of their polluting cars and regional airplanes and onto a more environmentally friendly mode of transportation.
