President Donald Trump ripped California’s high-speed rail project on Tuesday during impromptu remarks to journalists in the Oval Office, saying that he intended to order an investigation into the long-delayed train. [emphasis, links added]
Trump made his remarks in responding to a question about Elon Musk’s efforts to root out waste in government.
He added:
I’d like to see what the kickbacks [in USAID] are. How much money has been kicked back? Who would spend that kind of money to some of the things that you read about, and I read about, and I see every night on the news, and every morning when I read the papers? I would say this: the people that got all that money, are they kicking it back to the people that gave it, from government? No, that’s to me, very, very corrupt. The real question is how much of a kickback has there been.
And one of the things I want to investigate rapidly, because I’ve never seen anything to this extent, the train that’s being built between Los Angeles and San Francisco, is the worst-managed project I think I have ever seen. And I’ve seen some of the worst. Billions and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars over budget. In fact, I read where you could take every single person that was going to go on the train and get the finest limousine service in the world, and take them back and forth in limousines, and have hundreds of billions of dollars left over. It is the worst thing — and we are going to start an investigation in that, because it’s not possible. I built for a living, and I built on time, on budget. It’s impossible that something could cost that much.
And now it’s not even going to San Francisco, and it’s not going to Los Angeles. They made it much shorter. So now it’s at little places, way away from San Francisco, and way away from Los Angeles. No — we are going to start a big investigation in that, because I’ve never seen anything like it. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. The worst overruns that there have been in the history of our country.
And it wasn’t even necessary. I would have said you don’t mind — you take an airplane and it costs you $2, it costs you knowing. You take an airplane. But this got started. And if you have to, you drive. You can drive. They have hundreds of billions of dollars of cost overruns. And it’s not even the same project. It’s much shorter. It’s way outside of San Francisco and way outside of Los Angeles. So we will be looking into that.
Asked whether Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would investigate California’s high-speed rail project, Trump replied: “No, I’ll be doing that myself.”
Trump’s remarks put him on track for another fight with California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D).
Newsom canceled the San Francisco and Los Angeles legs of the train in 2019, admitting it would “cost too much” and “take too long.” But he tried to retain the rural portion of the train.
Trump, then in his first term, promptly blocked $1 billion for the project from reaching California and tried to claw back federal money that had already been spent.
President Joe Biden restored the funding, but there was very little progress on the project.
Newsom and Biden later threw their weight behind a different high-speed rail project, which will connect Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and which has private funding as well.
Trump did not mention that project.
Read more at Breitbart
