Trump Threatens Investigation Into California’s High-Speed Rail Boondoggle
In response, the High Speed Rail Authority is telling everyone to “ignore the noise.”
Legal Insurrection readers with really long memories may recall that President Trump audited California’s high-speed rail project back in 2018, during his first term.
At that point, the project had blasted through its budget and now may cost close to $100 billion. The subsequent inspector general report uncovered much that was..problematic.
- The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) did not adequately oversee the $2.5-billion grant, increasing the risk of the California High-Speed Rail Authority not achieving the purpose of the agreements.
- The audit found deficiencies in 18 out of 30 random requests for reimbursement from the grant, including one request that lacked documentation for $8.28 million out of $8.32 million.
- The California High-Speed Rail Authority consistently failed to meet grant requirements, but the FRA did not take decisive actions, such as withholding funds, prior to May 2019.
- The audit asserted that the state had matched only $476 million of the $2.5-billion grant, while the rail authority claimed to have submitted $1.3 billion.
Still, the state politicians persisted. At this point, active construction is underway on a 119-mile stretch in California’s Central Valley. The Fargo Avenue overcrossing in Kings County was just completed, and initial track work is estimated to begin by Spring 2025.
Needless to say, Trump has many reasons to be troubled with how California is being run, especially after seeing its leadership up-close-and-personal as part of his Los Angeles wildfire disaster tour.
Given the success of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in uncovering the massive scale of waste, fraud, and abuse associated with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Trump is considering further investigation into what is happening with the project.
“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,” President Trump said. “It’s the worst managed project I think I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some of the worst.
President Trump said he read that every person who would ride the train could instead take a limousine back and forth, “and you’d have hundreds of billions of dollars left over.”
“It is the worst thing, and we’re going to start an investigation of that because it’s not possible. I built for a living and I built on time – on budget,” he said. “It’s impossible that something could cost that much.”
“They made it much shorter. So now it’s at little places way away from San Francisco and way away from Los Angeles. We’re going to start a big investigation on that because I’ve never seen anything like it. Nobody has ever seen anything like it,” he said.
The DOGE staff will really have their work cut out for them on this task.
The High Speed Rail Authority tells everyone to “ignore the noise“.
“Ignore the noise. We’re busy building,” the post said, highlighting the project’s environmental clearance for construction between Los Angeles and San Francisco, construction in the Central Valley and more than 14,000 jobs the project has provided.
An authority spokesperson said that of the roughly $13 billion that has been spent on the project, $10.5 billion has been funded through the state of California — “not hundreds of billions.”
“Every dollar of the project is accounted for and has been thoroughly reviewed by the independent Office of the Inspector General,” the spokesperson said. “Expenditures have created over $22 billion in economic impact.”
Ignore the noise. We’re busy building. 🚧
As we enter the track-laying phase, 171 miles are under active construction & we’ve already:
✅ COMPLETED 50 major structures
✅ COMPLETED 60 miles of guideway
✅ COMPLETED full enviro clearance from SF to LA
✅ CREATED 14,600 jobs pic.twitter.com/esbk0Gespb— CA High-Speed Rail 🚄💨 (@CaHSRA) February 4, 2025
However, many Californians are hoping that DOGE is unleashed on this monstrosity.
The grift is almost over. @doge is coming for CA’s High-Speed Rail money laundering scheme. pic.twitter.com/twkSUJ9Wto
— Rebecca G (@Smoke_and_Oakum) February 5, 2025
I am looking forward to reporting on their audit findings, once the young heroes have gone through the federal bureaucracy.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Cancel funding for all nationally nonessential projects. Resume selectively after a new, rigid process is put in place.
Translation!!!! We will be coming back for more of your money. There was no reason for the disrespectful: “Ignore the noise. We’re busy building,” It is unwise to use such flippant language in the face of a Federal Investigation.
“The High Speed Rail Authority tells everyone to “ignore the noise“.
“Pay no attention to the man behind the paymaster’s desk.”
First major earthquake of 6.8 or greater will lay waste to the track alignment and structural integrity. It’s always been a feverish pipe dream of these commiefonia liberals. Does anyone trust an audit run by Sacramento bureaucrats? No I didn’t think so. You can fly from Frisco to LA in less than 2 hrs. How much money was laundered back to demonrats as political donations? How much money was given as kickbacks to state and local officials? Send in the DOGE team!
CA and other States with a cavalier attitude towards size and cost of gov’t as well as more than few Municipal gov’t with similar issues may finally be reaching the end of the fiscal road. Tough to kick the can when the road ends. Hopefully more thorough audits and prosecution of criminal acts including negligence/failure to meet duty of oversight will stop the worst of it. Probably better to end all federal support for local/regional rail, bus, trolley, subway projects. Those municipalities and States can pay for these with user fees or if uneconomic forgo them.
lock em up ….
So they’ve completed 60 miles, working on 171, and it is (by car) 381 miles between LA and SF, but they are planning on 494 miles of track.
So they’ve been at this for about 10 years, and like Boston’s Big Dig, the costs are spiraling out of control.
I wonder if anyone alive today will ever see this HSR completed? It seems like Commufornica can’t do ANYTHING correctly, unless the goal is to destroy western civilization.
Maybe they should stop electing socialists…
I assume the extra miles’ worth of track are for pocket tracks along the line.
But this is a boondoggle, and I have visions of the rail line opening with much fanfare and packed trains, followed not long thereafter by “Where did all the passengers go?”
“Where did all the passengers go?”
:Sir, its 2052; everyone travels by personal air car now.”
By then, transmats.
They completed the easiest 60 miles. They started out with the hardest, going up the mountains out of the San Gabriel Valley into the high desert, and they gave up. If they manage to connect SF with Victorville, but they can’t get down the mountains, it’s a failure.
I-15 goes thru those mountains, but a car can handle more grade and more turns than a train can. They gave up building the Southern Pennsylvania Railroad across Pennsylvania and so they repurposed the tunnels they had already built and voila, we had the Pennsylvania Turnpike!
Cue Elon Musk and his Boring Company.
Make. It. Happen.
Then do Governor Brylcreem next.
Trump: I think we’ll investigate a few things in California.
Newsom: Wait, wait, wait. I haven’t finished Trump-proofing.
Trump: What do you mean “Trump-proofing”?
Newsom: Covering my butt.
Yeah. If CA has $50 million available to fund Trump Proof actions, tens of $ million for boondoggles and anti liberty, anti common sense policies…. then they have no need of extra Federal taxpayer funding. Until these wokiesta leftist big gov’t goons reorder their priorities they should be left to sink or swim on their own.
It’s cost more and taken longer than the transcendental. This like every other cash grab needs to justify its existence.
Anyone interested in the CA high speed rail (HSR) project should view the following video. CA senate hearing in 2008.
https://youtu.be/SS0RD6dqpKY?si=o2rlV6UuoAllVFpA
Joseph Vranich literally wrote the book on HSR. He claims to be a big booster for HSR projects, but not the CA HSR. His testimony before the CA senate in 2008 (17 years ago) was both devastating and prescient. Everything he predicted came true. He called the project “science fiction.” He backed up all his statements with charts and data. All the assumptions behind the project were obvious falsehoods. When he finished his testimony one of the CA senators said: “tell us what you really think.” They laughed at him. Wow what a display of arrogance.
The CA government is throughly dishonest and just plain stupid. Of course the voters in CA are pretty stupid too, or the elections are rigged. I voted against the project, but most people I talked to supported it.
Let the shredding begin!
Some additional thoughts on railroads and high speed rail. Sobering fact: The US built a transcontinental railroad between 1863 and 1869 connecting Oakland CA and Council Bluffs Iowa. Railroads need to go through mountains and obstacles so tunnels need to be dug through rock. They used black powder and pick axes to penetrate as dynamite wasn’t invented until 1867. Today, with all our technology, we can’t seem to finish railroad projects as illustrated by the failure of the CA HSR. We tried an HSR in Texas and that failed too. What’s the problem?
The best is the enemy of the good. A functioning railroad, even a slow one, is way better than a non-functioning futuristic one. We want that “World of Tomorrow” as exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens New York. Before my time, but I knew people who saw it. Alas we are not smart enough to accomplish the future we expected. Contemporary engineers are way worse than the engineers from my youth. We can’t do what NASA did in 1969.
Railroad engineering is a field in itself. The Bay Area Rapid Transit system was designed and built by an aerospace company, and it’s junk. They knew little to nothing about building a rail system, ignoring the basic principles of railroad engineering. The trains communicate using the tracks. No. Low bandwidth approach. Dumb engineering. Initially the train operators had to control the train through the on-board computer. No manual override. So after trans bay service started in 1975, a train crashed into the one ahead of it, killing people. A crystal oscillator in the computer failed, and the train operator could not brake to avoid collision. No wonder the CA HSR has failed and will never connect LA to SF on the promised schedule at a reasonable fare.
We always rode BART from Hayward to Oakland for A’s games. It was the best way to avoid Nimitz traffic and stadium parking cost-hassles. The problem with BART was that it didn’t serve the peninsula to complete the service loop of the Bay Area – and changing from CalTrain to BART was an unmitigated hassle.
The reason BART didn’t serve the peninsula was wealthy residents of Hillsborough, Menlo Atherton etc. didn’t want to give criminals easy access to their homes – at least that’s how the argument was framed.
“Today, with all our technology, we can’t seem to finish railroad projects as illustrated by the failure of the CA HSR. What’s the problem?”
The Union Pacific didn’t have to work to OSHA rules, worry about employee healthcare, or obsess about avoiding the sacred habitat of Lugweiler’s Prairie Chicken… or, for that matter, the Plains Indians.
Everything in California has exorbitant costs, much of which is do outrageous fees& woke mandates. There is a tiny home there where the building permits exceeded $75.000.
Other Americans should not be forced to pay for California’s idiocy. The train, their self inflicted fires, and the mud slides which are about be unleashed by heavy rainfall there now. Make them institute serious reforms before giving them more of our money.
I left California in 2013 when they voted to fund this monstrosity instead of putting the money towards something useful for its citizens. Let’s look into the details of “The train to and from Nowhere!”
To Oden,
A company named Brightline built a “higher speed” train here in Florida using private money.
It goes from Miami to Orlando.
Works fine.
It has killed a bunch of people who can’t puzzle out that it goes fast and soon as you can see it, it crosses in front of you.
I’ve taken it From West Palm to Miami and it does avoid hour on the freeway and is a nice train.
The problem is they have metal detectors and forbid firearms.
I’m not going to Miami without my pistol!
So I still take my car
(Ex-)Governor Brown’s Toy Train Set, as I referred to it back in the day.
If I remember correctly, this boondoggle was originally sold to CA voters with price tag of $10B. It was to supposed connect SD to LA to SF, and be powered by wind turbines?
1.5 years after it was approved, the cost was revised to $100B. It is being built out in small towns in Central Valley that make it look more like a local train making stops at every small town along the way, negating the high speed benefit of it. Nobody talks about wind turbines any more.
CA high speed boondoggle is such a fraud. This is money that could be put to better use such as: forest management, fire fighting equipment, disaster recovery. CA should not be asking for federal assistance with their misplaced priorities.
A single order of magnitude?
I guess if you want serious overruns (100,000% higher), you have to push the leftists’ gun buttons.
(The registry cited above was scrapped in 2012 as ineffective after wasting >$2B.)
Most of the scam has already milked the vast majority of money out of the project. Every chunk of ground purchased has been purchased by one shell company or another and shuffled around until California wrote the bloated check (and the shell companies track back to politicians including Pelosi) There had to be ‘surveys’ and ‘evaluations’ done of the entire route, some legit, most just paper mill creations that urged more evaluations be done by the same companies (once again, track the money back to the politicians).
171 miles completed? Is Governor Dippity Doo going to install a sign saying “Los Angeles” at one end of the 171 miles and at the other end “San Francisco” to be able to say he did it?
Federal tax paid by state…
Texas: $275,485,613
Florida: $209,757,676
Total: $485,243,289
California: $467,417,992
If I lived in Cali instead of FL, I’d tell y’all to KMA.
Just ignore the huge population differences, there’s a good statistician.
For every $1 a Florida citizen pays, a California citizen pays $1.21.
I can’t get bent out of shape by that.
If Florida had a goldmine like Silicon Valley (or Wall Street), I bet they’d be nearer par. (Luckily, the effect of “theme parks” should be a wash.)
Oh, by the way — when you compare Federal funds incoming to each state,,, for every $1 a Florida citizen gets, a California citizen gets $1.51.
Ooooooo. Looks like secession would still be a net gain.