By Jon Coupal
Everything we predicted about California’s High Speed Rail project (HSR) has come to rotten fruition.
Frequent readers of this column know that, for over 20 years, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association has been a top critic of HSR. While examples of government waste by California politicians and bureaucrats are legion, nothing beats
HSR for wasting billions for a project that wasn’t even half-baked at inception.
Just a few weeks ago, I wrote about the study we commissioned even before the original bond vote in 2008. In conjunction with transportation experts at the Reason Foundation, the study confirmed our worst fears: “The CHSRA [California High-Speed Rail Authority] plans as currently proposed are likely to have very little relationship to what would eventually be built due to questionable ridership projections and cost assumptions, overly optimistic projections of ridership diversion from other modes of transport, insufficient attention to potential speed restrictions and safety issues and discounting of potential community or political opposition. Further, the system’s environmental benefits have been grossly exaggerated, especially with respect to reduction of greenhouse gas emissions that have been associated with climate change.”
While much of the criticism of HSR has come from inside California, the project’s horrible reputation is gaining national attention. During the first half of President Donald Trump’s first term, when Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, federal funding of the project was suspended. But with President Joe Biden’s election in 2020, the money spigot opened like a gusher.
It is now more than likely that federal funding for California’s rail project will be severely restricted if not shut off entirely. My previous column noted that HSR was garnering the attention of the DOGE project. Recent reporting in the last couple of weeks has more than confirmed that DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, has indeed put the high-speed rail project very high on its list of programs to eliminate to save taxpayer dollars.
To make matters worse, a report issued just last week by the Office of Inspector General for California High-Speed Rail concluded that even more delays are likely. The report was titled, “Merced to Bakersfield Segment: The Authority is Unlikely to Complete the Segment as Currently Envisioned within Its Planned Schedule.” Other critiques in the report include the fact that, “The Authority has not maintained the procurement timeline it established to meet the M-B schedule.”
Also last week, the IG report was cited by nationally recognized legal commentator, Jonathan Turley, who reported that “it now looks like one of the most wasteful, runaway public works projects in the country could be on the chopping block: California’s high-speed rail project. The project to build a bullet train from Los Angeles to Sacramento is an outrageous example of a public work that lacked any fiscal responsibility or oversight from the state government. Nevertheless, Democrats continue to push for billions more from the federal government as well as California taxpayers.”
Turley notes that unspent funds would be an easy target for a federal claw-back: “There is currently $4.3 billion in unspent federal funds for California’s high-speed rail project, and Trump should seek to claw back the money in light of the gross negligence shown by the California authorities.”
The national attention focused on HSR, the DOGE effort, and congressional hostility led by California’s own Congressman Kevin Kiley, increasingly suggest that the federal funds keeping HSR alive may finally be turned off. While that day can’t come soon enough, will it be enough to kill the project?
California taxpayers will be watching to see if HSR’s special interest supporters try to repurpose other state funds to keep the high-speed rail project on life support. At a minimum, continued funding from any source should be subject to a statewide vote. But because we can all predict what the outcome of that vote would be, we are unlikely to ever get the opportunity.
Jon Coupal is president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.
