Since its inception, California’s multibillion-dollar effort to construct a high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco has been plagued by lawsuits, cost overruns and permitting challenges — all of which have helped to significantly delay the project.
But in just a few weeks, the state’s High-Speed Rail Authority will face yet another obstacle to its work: full Republican control of Washington.
On the heels of Donald Trump’s win, Republican lawmakers representing California once again see an opening to kill any federal funding for a high-speed rail in their state, telling NOTUS they even hope to claw back any unspent funds.
“We should not have any additional federal support for it,” Rep. Kevin Kiley said. “I think that there will be a lot of consensus around cutting that funding off and that California’s share of the federal resources should go towards real transportation.”
Many of his fellow California Republicans are in lockstep, with several saying the high-speed rail project should be abandoned entirely.
“It’s crap,” Rep. Darrell Issa told NOTUS. “They wasted huge amounts of money. A train from and to nowhere shouldn’t and won’t be the answer.”
“It’s been a boondoggle,” Rep. Doug LaMalfa said. “California is running a giant deficit. High-speed rail is kind of a luxury between two large cities.”
In 2008, California voters approved billions of dollars to fund the high-speed rail line with the hope it would be operational as early as 2020. Just over 16 years later, the project is less than a quarter completed. It has no concrete timeline for ridership. And it is still tens of billions short of what officials say is necessary to complete the line.
In spite of the delays, a 2022 Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll found that 56% of California voters support the project’s continuation.
The High-Speed Rail Authority has said it expects to net $848 billion over the first three decades of the L.A.-San Fransisco operation. In May, the authority said it hoped to use an additional $4.7 billion in federal funds to continue work — money that would need to be authorized by Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress.
In 2019, the Trump administration pulled nearly $1 billion in federal funding for the project, and the administration proposed budgets that substantially cut funding for rail projects both in California and nationwide in every year of his first term. Joe Biden’s administration restored that funding in 2021 and resisted GOP efforts in Congress to defund the program.
California Republicans have sought to steer federal dollars away from the project for more than a decade. In 2013, Rep. David Valadao and then-members Kevin McCarthy and Devin Nunes sought to block any support from Washington entirely. And with Republicans taking control of government now, several current Republican lawmakers shared their hopes that they could block money and retrofit railways into roadways instead.
“They built a few bridges and things, let them be usable for local traffic or something like that and give the land back to the people that they took it from,” LaMalfa said.
“Obviously, it’s one of the most disastrous public infrastructure failures in U.S. history,” Kiley told NOTUS. “It’s just pathetic. It’s embarrassing and, absolutely, if we could recover some of those funds, we should.”
Issa said there are “reuses that are clear.”
“Here’s a use of money that has proven not to be effective, has cost a lot of money and is nowhere close to happening,” he said. “Here are other projects that are truly shovel ready, and many of them go through the heart of Democrat districts that we should work together to reprogram or to make sure they get the funding.”
Kyle Simerly, a spokesperson for the California High-Speed Rail Authority, touted the “more than 14,000 construction jobs” that the program has produced thus far and said it is looking to find stable funding sources.
“California is the first in the nation to build a true high-speed rail system with speeds capable of reaching 220 mph and this project continues to make significant progress,” Simerly said in a statement to NOTUS. “The Authority remains committed and aggressive in moving this historic project forward while actively pursuing additional funding.”
“We continue to explore strategies aimed at stabilizing funding, potentially allowing the program to draw private financing and/or government loans,” Simerly continued.
While Republicans have been the primary opponent of the high-speed rail project in California, some Democrats have also criticized the project’s shortcomings.
“It’s an insult to taxpayers,” Rep. Scott Peters told NOTUS. “We can’t say anything other than this has been a failure because of the permitting process.”
He said he wasn’t sure about “clawing money back,” but he said he was for not “putting any more money in until we get our act together and figure out how to get this done.”
Fellow California Democrat Ami Bera said there should be an open debate over whether or not the program ought to continue.
“There’s already a lot of sunk costs,” Bera said. “What is it going to take to finish this project? Are folks actually going to use it? Are they going to hop on Southwest Airlines and fly the 45 minutes to get from Sacramento to L.A.? So, legitimate questions.”
But it’s not just lawmakers questioning high-speed rail in California. Elon Musk was among the program’s earliest critics, taking issue with the train’s max speed of 220 mph while rail in “Japan is 300 mph+.”
The project so irked Musk that it drove him to develop and release a 56-page blueprint for “Hyperloop Alpha,” his plan to connect California’s largest cities via underground tubes that ferry capsules and passengers around at 760 mph.
Hyperloop raised nearly half a billion dollars in its first year of development, only to shutter late last year after building only a small test track outside Las Vegas.
Still, high-speed rail has remained in Musk’s crosshairs as he prepares to take the reins of a new Department of Government Efficiency, which singled out the rail project as an example of the waste it has vowed to eliminate.
Last week, California Rep. Vince Fong urged incoming DOGE committee Chair Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to use her position to aid his colleagues’ opposition to the program.
“CHSRA … has become incredibly dependent on Federal funds to bail out the project given California’s state budget woes,” Fong wrote in a letter. “I ask that you work with me to make sure that no more federal funding goes to this project.”
Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, has said he is ready to work with Musk and DOGE to “slash waste” in the government. But Khanna told NOTUS he hopes to avoid the possibility of high-speed rail becoming a casualty of Musk’s cuts.
“We need high-speed rail, and the problem is it never was fully funded since Obama’s time,” Khanna said. “I’m committed to getting that funding and building our infrastructure.”
He said that getting funds for the project under Trump is “going to be a challenge” but that California Democrats are “committed to it.”
Sen. Alex Padilla said delaying further funding would only exacerbate the delays high-speed rail has suffered already.
“The project needs to continue,” Padilla said. “The longer it takes, the more expensive it’s gonna get. The sooner we complete it the sooner it goes into service.”
While Democrats are mostly defending high-speed rail programs, they may have one important ally: Trump.
In an interview with Musk ahead of the election, Trump lamented the lack of high-speed rail in the United States.
“I’ve seen some of the greatest trains, I find it fascinating,” Trump said. “Bullet trains they call them, I guess. And they go unbelievably fast.”
“We don’t have anything like that in our country,” Trump continued. “It doesn’t make sense that we don’t.”
—
Mark Alfred is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.