Kudos to President Donald Trump for moving to cut off the spigot of federal funds for the California High-Speed Rail project during the first month of his second term.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Thursday that $4 billion in funding, slated for projects that are part of a promised bullet train from Merced to Bakersfield, will be reviewed. "For too long, taxpayers have subsidized the massively over-budget and delayed California High-Speed Rail project," Duffy explained.
Duffy also noted that if Californians really want a fast train from LA to San Francisco (the original plan) or Merced to Bakersfield (the placeholder scheme), they can have it. They just have to pay for it.
But who wants to pay for a project that already is more than a decade late and obscenely overbudget? Not Trump, I am happy to report.
How did we get here?
The HSR boondoggle started as a vanity project peddled by Democrats who argued that a fast train would help Golden State efforts to combat climate change.
But there never was a compelling need for a high-speed locomotive, not when planes can fly from LA to the Bay Area in around 90 minutes.
In 2008, California voters approved a bond measure that was supposed to raise funds for High-Speed Rail's expected $33 billion budget, a project that was supposed to be completed in 2020.
Two years after 2020, the cost estimate was $105 billion.
Seventeen years after 2008, there is no bullet train.
"I really wish we could take this back to the voters," GOP California Assemblywoman Alexandra Macedo told me.
It's a bridge too far to ask voters to endure watching their tax dollars get sucked into a project that probably won't be finished, ever. "I don't think there's even going to be a Merced to Bakersfield" line, Macedo offered, after she rattled off expenses — mortgages, rent, groceries — her squeezed San Joaquin Valley constituents are struggling to pay for.
By comparison, Macedo noted, the bullet train is a "luxury" item — a multibillion-dollar status symbol for politicians who wanted to showcase their environmental credentials.
And when their scheme started to fall apart, they still did not waver.
It tells you everything that in order to hold back the exploding price tag, enviro-friendly California politicians moved the line's points of origin to places with fewer people. Merced to Bakersfield? Former Rep. Michelle Steel, R-Calif., dismissed the truncated line as a train from "nowhere to nowhere."
How bad is it? In 2022, The New York Times ran an extensive story about the public transportation project under the headline "How California's Bullet Train Went Off the Rails."
Duffy also said Thursday that Brightline West's project to run high-speed rail from Rancho Cucamonga, California, to Las Vegas appears to be "going well." So the Trump administration is not against all high-speed rail, just projects that chew up billions of dollars with nothing to show for years on end.
California could have done good things with that money. But Sacramento wanted to plow those tax dollars into bragging-rights projects, not the humdrum work of infrastructure maintenance and upkeep.
Someone had to say that the scheme is over, it didn't work and it won't get another dime. Trump put it this way: "The train that's being built between Los Angeles and San Francisco is the worst managed project I think I've ever seen, and I've seen some of the worst."
In California, they call that cutting-edge.
Debra J. Saunders is a fellow with Discovery Institute's Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership. She has worked for more than 30 years covering politics as well as American culture, the media, the criminal justice system, and dubious trends in public schools and universities. Read Debra J. Saunders' Reports — More Here.