Longtime readers will remember the Texas vs. California updates I did for many years, until the bad news out of California became such a torrent that it took too long to compile them. One reoccurring feature in those posts were updates on the “high speed rail to nowhere”
Now comes word that the Trump Administration may have finally driven a stake through its heart.
President Donald Trump and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy canceled the $4 billion funding meant for California’s high-speed rail train….
The plan started 16 years ago. California has spent $15 billion but never built one high-speed track.
Duffy’s press release noted that the “$135 billion projected total cost of the project could buy every San Francisco and LA resident nearly 200 roundtrip flights between the cities.”
Trump wrote on Truth Social:
To the Law abiding, Tax paying, Hardworking Citizens of the United States of America, I am thrilled to announce that I have officially freed you from funding California’s disastrously overpriced, “HIGH SPEED TRAIN TO NOWHERE.” This boondoggle, led by the incompetent Governor of California, Gavin Newscum, has cost Taxpayers Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we have received NOTHING in return except Cost Overruns. The Railroad we were promised still does not exist, and never will. This project was Severely Overpriced, Overregulated, and NEVER DELIVERED. Thanks to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, not a SINGLE penny in Federal Dollars will go towards this Newscum SCAM ever again. This was an ill-conceived and unnecessary project, and a total waste of Taxpayer money — But no more!
Duffy started an investigation into the train in February, reviewing two grants:
$929 million Cooperative Agreement from 2010 $3.07 billion Cooperative Agreement from last year In June, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) told the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) that the review “identified a trail of project delays, mismanagement, waste, and skyrocketing costs.”
“This is California’s fault. Governor Newsom and the complicit Democrats have enabled this waste for years. Federal dollars are not a blank check – they come with a promise to deliver results. After over a decade of failures, CHSRA’s mismanagement and incompetence has proven it cannot build its train to nowhere on time or on budget,” declared Duffy. “It’s time for this boondoggle to die. President Trump and I will always fight to ensure your tax dollars only go to projects that accomplish great, big, beautiful things.”
It became very clear, very early on that California’s high speed rail would never be built, but the one party blue state insisted on pushing on in order to continue raking off the graft and featherbedding, as well as an unshakable belief in anthropocentric global warming and a desire to take the proles out of their hated cars and pickup trucks and cram them into trains so as to better control their movements. The project should have been killed a long, long time ago.
At least now, the only taxpayer money California’s government will be wasting is that of its own taxpayers.
Tags: California, California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA), Democrats, Donald Trump, Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), fraud, Gavin Newsom, high speed rail, Legal Insurrection, rail, railroads, Sean Duffy, Texas Department of Transportation, trains, waste
This was Gerry Brown’s baby, and when Gavin ran to succeed him, he promised to end it, but when he got in he forgot.
The project was funded as a statewide proposition promising faster than airlines from SF to LA, which it never going to do because physics, and has continued as a graft machine ever since. It’s final demise will add to the wailing and gnashing about DJT here in the Singed Formerly Golden State, but will impact none other than th army of consultants who will be cast out onto the job market.
I voted against the original bond measure in CA because I thought it was a stupid project. While Trump may have killed this solution in search of a problem to solve, the people of CA are still on the hook. I moved out to MO in 2014, so screw’em.
And the only reason that seemed the least bit reasonable to people was the backlash from the then-fledgling TSA. Not that there weren’t people debunking it, but they were clearly shills for the airlines and Big Oil, and therefore safely dismissed.
The bronze bust of Comrade Gavin in the workers utopia San Francisco is real.
voted against it
high speed rail is a money pit with zero value to society