California’s high-speed rail boondoggle may finally be running out of money. It’s bad news for Gov. Gavin Newsom, possibly good news for the people of California.
I’ve been opining about why the California bullet train will never succeed since I wrote my very first column as a young college pup. But even my accurate (though not difficult) prediction about its certain failure didn’t quite capture the sheer depth of the wasteful insanity this project has achieved.
There now may be a glimmer of hope, though a faint one, that the “project”—a word I use loosely in this case—may mercifully starve to death after fattening itself on taxpayer cash for nearly two decades.
The inspector general warned that the high-speed rail faces a $9.5 billion funding gap over the next five years and there is currently no plan to fill it.
Even more damning is the inspector general’s note that there are “significant concerns” regarding transparency and that completion projections have been a moving target.
The only reason the high-speed rail was even keeping close to its already massively bloated budget numbers was due to just lopping off parts of the planned line.
“Ultimately, the major cost savings observed in the Merced and Bakersfield extensions are not due to increased efficiency—which we define as delivering equivalent scope for less cost—but are instead the result of planning to build less,” the report explained.
The report noted that the Merced-to-Bakersfield line, the pitifully shortened and getting shorter segment of what was once sold as a connection between San Francisco and Los Angeles, now has a projected completion date of September 2034.
I’d love to go back in time to my college campus and tell students who bought into the fast, “green” train that was going to connect the whole state that what they were ultimately getting was a short line in the Central Valley that might finish construction closer to their retirement than graduation—if they are lucky.
On top of everything else, the inspector general wrote with seeming exasperation that the High-Speed Rail Authority tasked with overseeing the project “has obscured basic facts about the project, hindering lawmakers’ ability to provide effective oversight of the project.”
I’d argue that if the lawmakers and powers that be in the state cared about the high-speed rail’s viability, they would have taken action to shut it down and untangle the mess long ago.
A few lone voices, including Republican Rep. Vince Fong, have been pointing out red flag after red flag for years, but they’ve mostly been ignored. Fong, like poor Sisyphus, did so again after the IG report came out.
Fong is right. Not only should the California bullet train to nowhere be shut down, but taxpayers also deserve a full accounting of what went wrong here.
We don’t even know the depths of failure outside the shifting budget projections and the visible lack of evidence that a functioning train is likely to come online any time soon.
Every piece of information that drips out of the high-speed rail project is about delays, increased costs, deceptive practices, and total unaccountability.
Even basic things, like buying the trains, are behind schedule with no explanation.
Newsom and other California Democrats blamed President Donald Trump for the recent hiccups on the removal of $4 billion in federal funds.
What this means is that the high-speed rail project—which I’d argue has been operating as a slush fund for bureaucrats and fake jobs for some time—might truly be put on full pause soon.
The Trump administration isn’t going to hand them a penny now or ever again.
And without public subsidies that would have to be approved by voters, it’s hard to see where the money will come from to keep the thing rolling. Well, not rolling at all, actually.
It’s shameful that this charade has gone on for so long. I truly hope this report will be the beginning of the end of this long, expensive, pointless scam that the people of California have endured for too long.
