The Trump administration said it would pull roughly $4 billion in federal funding for California’s long-planned high-speed train, a project that has, over decades, become an avatar for the country’s declining ability to complete transformative new infrastructure.
In a report sent to the state’s high-speed rail authority on Wednesday, Drew Feeley, the acting head of the Federal Railroad Administration, wrote that the project has repeatedly blown past projected deadlines by years, and cost estimates by billions of dollars.
It gave California 30 days to respond to the findings of the review before what it said was a likely decision to revoke the funding.
“We don’t want to invest in boondoggles,” Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, told Fox News. “I want to see high-speed rail in America and why it can’t be built within, you know, time frames that work for the people that invest in these projects makes no sense to me.”
The scale of the high-speed train route has been chipped away since the federal government first gave its support to the idea in 2009, the report noted: Initially, the vision for the project was a rail line that would whisk riders from the Bay Area to Los Angeles in less than three hours on some of the fastest trains in the world.
In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that the state would instead first open a kind of starter segment of the train connecting two smaller cities in California’s agricultural Central Valley.
A spokesman for the state rail authority said the state intended to keep the project moving forward.
“We remain firmly committed to completing the nation’s first true high-speed rail system connecting the major population centers in the state,” the spokesman, Micah Flores, said in a statement. “While continued federal partnership is important to the project, the majority of our funding has been provided by the state.”
The agency, the statement added, will “fully address and correct the record in our formal response.”
On Wednesday, Daniel Villaseñor, a spokesman for the governor, referred questions about the report to the high-speed rail authority, and to the governor’s recent budget presentation, in which he proposed at least $1 billion per year in state spending over the next 20 years.
“Real tracks are being laid,” he said. “Our commitment is firm.”
The move was not unexpected; since his first administration, California’s high-speed rail plan has been a favorite target for President Trump, who has scarcely missed an opportunity to spar with leaders of the nation’s biggest, bluest state, and in particular, Mr. Newsom.
“That train is the worst cost overrun I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office this month, during a joint appearance with Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada.
Supporters, who blame factors like inflation and rising land values for making the project more expensive over time, say a major investment in high-speed rail is the only way to get Californians out of their gas-guzzling cars and off emissions-spewing planes. But critics say that the project has suffered from catastrophic mismanagement.
In February, federal transportation officials opened a compliance review of how the state is spending a $3.1 billion federal grant issued under the Biden administration. Federal authorities are also proposing to pull back about $929 million awarded during the 2010 fiscal year.
Wednesday’s report said that, based on the findings of that review, the federal government will end two funding agreements unless the California High-Speed Rail Authority can demonstrate that the report is wrong within the 30-day period.
Jill Cowan is a Times reporter based in Los Angeles, covering the forces shaping life in Southern California and throughout the state.
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