Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy threatened Wednesday to pull federal grants for California’s High-Speed Rail Authority after it spent nearly $7 billion in taxpayer funds over a decade and a half without laying a single foot of track.
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“This report exposes a cold, hard truth: CHSRA has no viable path to complete this project on time or on budget,” he said.
If this sounds familiar, it should. We have covered the California Counterfeit Choo-Choo story since at least 2008, warning at each step that it was a boondoggle that was not only unnecessary but totally unrealistic. Even normally friendly media in California, such as the LA Times and Sacramento Bee, sent up red flags over the fiscal claims and assumptions made for the high-speed rail project.
And, of course, we got essentially the same data two years ago, after fifteen years of futility. CNBC tried to put some lipstick on this pig at that time, but to little avail:
In 2008, California voted yes on a $9 billion bond authorization to build the nation’s first high-speed railway. The plan is to construct an electric train that will connect Los Angeles with the Central Valley and then San Francisco in two hours and 40 minutes.
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Despite the funding challenges, progress has been made on the project. In California’s Central Valley, 119 miles are under construction. The project recently celebrated its 10,000th construction worker on the job. The infrastructure design work is complete, and 422 out of 500 miles have been environmentally cleared, which is a monumental task in California.
“When we finish just the environmental clearing process, that cost is about $1.3 billion,” Kelly said. “And that’s for no steel in the ground or no cement.“
Well, whose fault is that? California had to spend $1.3 billion just to get environmental clearance for a supposedly high-priority project being subsidized by the federal government to the tune of $7 billion — so far. That’s a symptom of California’s over-regulation, a condition that afflicts private sector businesses and homeowners much more than it does the state government.
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And now they want even more money from the rest of the country to keep those wheels greased, rather than train wheels lubricated for a route that multiple airlines already service much more efficiently. Two years after that CNBC report, California probably hit 11,000 or 12,000 workers for its choo-choo by now, but is likely decades away from Passenger 1, if they even get any passengers at all for the full planned route between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Duffy erred in giving Gavin Newsom 37 days to respond to this report, however. After 17 years of robbing federal taxpayers blind, Duffy should have given Newsom 37 minutes, or perhaps just 37 seconds, before cutting off any more funding to the Newsom Express To Fiscal Ruin. If Californians want this train, let them pay for it themselves — and hold Newsom and the Democrats responsible for its failure.
* Original Article:
https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2025/06/04/stop-the-train-how-much-did-california-get-for-not-laying-any-tracks-n3803451