Almost since Amtrak’s creation in 1971, the 21,000-mile U.S. intercity passenger rail service has been fighting calls that it should be privatized.
Now it may have met one of its most aggressive and powerful skeptics yet.
Speaking at a tech conference on Wednesday, Elon Musk added Amtrak to the list of government-funded services on his chopping board, calling the federally owned railroad “embarrassing” and saying that privatization was the only way to fix it.
“If you go to China, you get epic bullet train rides,” said Mr. Musk, the billionaire who is working to dismantle the federal bureaucracy under the Trump administration. “They’re amazing.”
China’s trains, which are subsidized by the communist government and have produced large public debts, link every large Chinese city and run at speeds of at least 186 miles per hour. Amtrak’s northeastern Acela, the fastest American passenger train, tops out at about 150 m.p.h.
“And you come back to America, and you’re like, ‘Amtrak is a sad situation,’” Mr. Musk said at the conference, which was organized by the bank Morgan Stanley. “If you’re coming from another country, please don’t use our national rail. It’s going to leave you with a very bad impression of America.”
Mr. Musk, who has criticized an ambitious effort to build a high-speed rail system in California, has also called for the privatization of the U.S. Postal Service, a concept that President Trump has floated. The president has not called for privatizing Amtrak, and the White House did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Thursday.
Amtrak has always lost money, uses antiquated technology — some of it a century old or more — and frustrates its riders with chronic delays on its brittle tracks. In one evening last spring, delays on Amtrak’s lines into New York City produced a domino effect that sent ride-hail service prices soaring. On another day, Amtrak delays snarled New Jersey Transit commuter trains and halted train travel as far away as Boston.
But Amtrak is also a vital cog in the U.S. travel system that keeps people off roads and out of airports, and that connects rural towns and small cities across the nation at affordable prices. Congress would have to approve any move to privatize Amtrak, which operates like a for-profit company.
Amtrak responded to Mr. Musk by saying that its “business performance is strong” and that it looked forward to working with Mr. Trump to create a “world-class passenger rail system.” Amtrak said it expected to make a profit for the first time under Mr. Trump.
Demand for Amtrak is up. In the last fiscal year, it served a record 32.8 million customers and invested more than $4 billion in improvements to its creaky infrastructure and aging fleet, according to the rail service.
On Wednesday, the railroad published a white paper arguing against privatization, saying, “It is not clear what problem Amtrak privatization proposals are intended to solve.”
Ridership in the Northeast Corridor has soared since the Covid pandemic, it said, and the Acela is expected to introduce new trains that will travel 160 m.p.h. this year. In the 2024 fiscal year, Amtrak reported record revenue.
The white paper dismissed arguments that privatization would improve service, noting that the British government is taking control of its passenger rail system after three “disastrous decades of privatization.”
Amtrak has long been under scrutiny from Republican presidents. President George W. Bush’s administration contemplated privatizing it. President Ronald Reagan went so far as to directly ask Congress to sell it. And in his first term, Mr. Trump proposed deep cuts.
Congress has stood by Amtrak. During the administration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a champion of the railroad after years of commuting from Delaware to the nation’s capital, lawmakers authorized more than $20 billion in spending for modernization.
Tad DeHaven, a policy analyst with the conservative Cato Institute and a sharp critic of Amtrak’s spending, said he had long expected Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative to target the railroad.
Still, Mr. DeHaven said Mr. Musk would need to overcome the “political whims” of lawmakers — including Republicans from rural areas — who support money-losing, long-distance routes even as the popular northeastern lines net profits.
“It simply makes more economic sense to use roads, flying or even the emergence of intercity bus travel,” Mr. DeHaven said, adding, “Now the question is: How serious is the administration about it? And if they are serious, how serious are they with working with Congress to do something about it?”
Spokeswomen for Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the Republican majority leader, and Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Louis Thompson, a member of the Transportation Department team that developed Amtrak and who later supervised its budget, said Mr. Musk’s proposal was “not possible.”
He said Americans did not expect subways or buses to make money, and they should not expect anything more from Amtrak. Achieving a profit has not been one of the rail system’s stated goals.
Amtrak provides a service that is “inherently not profitable,” Mr. Thompson said, adding that “this is the uniform model for most rail passenger service worldwide.”
If it isn’t profitable, Mr. Thompson said, “you can’t privatize it.”
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