President Donald Trump could claw back $4.3 billion in unspent federal funds for California’s high-speed rail project, just as he froze $1 billion for the perpetually delayed and derailed project during his first term as president. [emphasis, links added]
The high-speed rail project was originally approved by California voters in a 2008 referendum, and championed by Gov. Jerry Brown (D), who took office after 2010, as a way of boosting the economy and fighting climate change.
As Breitbart News reported at the time, Trump stopped nearly $1 billion from going to California for the project after Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) canceled the original plan for the bullet train to link San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Newsom had told the legislature at the time that the project “would cost too much and, respectfully, would take too long.”
But he wanted to keep construction going between small towns in the rural Central Valley, despite the lack of demand.
Newsom was furious when Trump held back the $1 billion — and the president also tried to reclaim billions more that had been wasted on the project.
Trump reasoned that the federal taxpayer had invested in a high-speed rail link that would connect California’s two biggest cities; if that project was stopped, the federal taxpayer was owed the money.
Newsom appeared to believe that California should be able to claim the money regardless of the success of the project.
President Joe Biden restored the funding in 2021 and also added federal funding to a separate, private high-speed rail project that intends to link the Los Angeles area with Las Vegas (with a higher likelihood of commercial success).
On taking office, however, President Trump renewed his suspicions of California’s original high-speed rail project and vowed to investigate it, including into whether there had been corruption in public spending.
Now, the Fresno Bee reported Tuesday, Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) could have the ailing project in their sights:
[W]hile the first $2.5 billion in federal grants awarded by the Obama administration in 2009 under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has been fully spent — matched by an equal amount of state money — almost $4.3 billion remains unspent as of November 2024. Most of that was awarded by the Department of Transportation under the Biden administration. The unspent federal funds conceivably could be subject to cancellation by a hostile Trump administration.
…
The authority’s goal is to build out 171 miles of route and tracks between downtown Bakersfield to downtown Merced with trains operational and carrying passengers between 2030 and 2033.
Musk once had plans for high-speed travel in California: the so-called hyperloop, which would have connected San Francisco and Los Angeles either underground or along the existing right-of-way corresponding to Interstate 5.
The idea never proceeded beyond the conceptual stage.
Read more at Breitbart
