When President Trump’s Department of Transportation announced Thursday that it had cut off $929 million in federal money previously slated for California’s high-speed rail project, it marked the beginning of the end for an 11-year-old fraud, originally committed against Californians and later against federal taxpayers as well.
Although special interests in the Golden State have already pocketed billions since this scam began, Trump’s move will at least help stop the bleeding. Instead of resisting, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, should welcome an opportunity to scrap the project and move on to his own priorities as governor, freed of the previous administration’s albatross.
In 2008, by a narrow margin, California voters approved a ballot initiative allowing the state to borrow $10 billion for the planning and construction of a high-speed rail system connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles. They were conned. The rail project was sold to the voters as a straightforward one costing $33.6 billion. They were also promised a viable and economically self-sustaining transportation alternative.
From the beginning, this was all a lie.
In the time since, the project has floundered in every conceivable way and exactly as its opponents predicted. As they warned, construction costs spiraled out of control, thanks to deceptive minimization of expected costs during the original referendum, plus perfectly predictable overruns and legal and environmental obstacles that have made the project all but impossible to complete at any price. The latest projection, which would surely not have been the last, showed a projected $77 billion in construction costs.
And of course, the $77 billion figure did not account for the massive operating subsidies that the train was certain to incur, competing as it would against flights that take more than an hour less and cost as little as $49 one way.
Newsom, newly elected last fall, thought he was only partially throwing in the towel in January when he announced that only one isolated segment, the 119-mile “train to nowhere” leg between the obscure towns of Bakersfield and Merced, would actually be completed, at an eye-popping cost of $89 million per mile. But this arguably makes the project illegal (or at least the borrowing for it), for the ballot proposition from 2008 specified that the money had to go toward creating a rail link between San Francisco and L.A. that could move travelers between the two cities in two hours and 40 minutes.
Moreover, Newsom’s decision to stop there, though wise in cutting California’s losses, also violates the state’s 2010 agreement with the Obama administration, by which then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, obtained $3.5 billion in federal money for the project as part of a nationwide push for high-speed rail. This agreement also specified a 2022 completion date, which is inconsistent with the newly announced date of never.
Newsom has so far reacted angrily to the lifeline Trump has given him. His priority seems to be saving face. He should instead save his state’s taxpayers from further losses on the rail project they were conned into voting for 11 years ago.
