Pres. Trump to Investigate California’s High-Speed Rail Scheme: ‘Worst Managed Project I’ve Seen’

With President Donald Trump’s announcement Tuesday that he will be launching an investigation into the high cost of California High Speed Rail fulfilling a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) promise made late last year, many are celebrating.

Not the Fresno Bee with this absurd headline: Trump pledges to investigate California high speed rail. Is it actually over budget?

Let me count the ways.

Originally estimated to cost $33 billion in 2008 with a San Francisco to Los Angeles line  to open by 2028, the California high speed rail system has since ballooned to $128 billion, and $135 billion+, with an estimated partial completion somewhere in the late 2030’s. And last year, the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHRSA) actually confirmed that the system still needed $100 billion to link up San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Even while Jerry Brown was still governor, the true cost of High Speed Rail was estimated to be closer to $350 billion… if it ever actually gets built.

Over budget much Fresno Bee?

Yet, the Los Angeles Times in January reported that “state leaders touted its progress to eventually connect Los Angeles to the Bay Area while linking to a high-speed line between Southern California and Las Vegas.”

Apparently Los Angeles Times reporters don’t read their own newspaper… in 2020 the Los Angeles Times reported employees at the lead consulting firm for the California High Speed Rail project were told to suppress bad news, to “shut up” and threatened with termination if they talked about the disastrous train project.

Tuesday, President Trump addressed the absurdity of the high cost of the plan and said it was mind-boggling, echoing decades of criticisms within California that the project has been nothing more than a boondoggle, the Globe reported.

“The train that’s being built between Los Angeles and San Francisco is the worst managed project I think I’ve ever seen,” Trump said. “It’s the worst managed project I think I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some of the worst. I read that every person who would ride the train could instead take a limousine back and forth, and you’d have hundreds of billions of dollars left over. It is the worst overrun that there has ever been in the history of our country.”

When questioned on Trump’s comments on Tuesday, the high speed rail authority responded on X, pointing out their progress – defending the indefensible.

“Ignore the noise. We’re busy building,” read the post. “As we enter the track-laying phase, 171 miles are under active construction & we’ve already:  COMPLETED 50 major structures  COMPLETED 60 miles of guideway  COMPLETED full enviro clearance from SF to LA  CREATED 14,600 jobs.”

“We can’t go back. We just have to accept the responsibility of where we are, and that’s exactly what we are doing, said Arthur Sohikian, the High Speed Rail’s executive director.

Governor Gavin Newsom also pointed to the thousands of jobs the project has provided in the Central Valley.

We’ve always said that California’s High Speed Rail is nothing more than a jobs program – especially with no tracks and no train cars, 16 years after Prop. 1A, the bond creating it was passed.

In 2012, after covering California’s High Speed Rail boondoggle for several years, I wrote:

It is important to remember that high-speed rail is not really about achieving sexy world-class transportation for the purpose of serious people moving. It’s just a pipeline project for grabbing big money. Because of the illegitimacy of the project’s intent, the mole could be permanently whacked, and leave California taxpayers holding the bill.

The biggest problem was that the High Speed Rail Authority was already violating important mandates in the 2008 law and most lawmakers looked the other way.

Proposition 1A, $9 billion in bonds for high-speed rail, included numerous mandates, none of which can be legally bypassed on the way to building the massive train system.

Top on the list is that the rail system must be high-speed. “Electric trains that are capable of sustained maximum revenue operating speeds of no less than 200 miles per hour,” the law states. However, much of the first segment between Fresno and Bakersfield is not high-speed; nor will high-speed be attainable in dense cities.

The other glaring issue was the rail authority’s announcement of its 2012 revised business plan, in which the cost of the project was magically reduced to $68 billion from $98.6 billion involving a shared track scheme with Amtrak, which is not high-speed. 40MPH is not high speed…

By 2014, the funding scheme was to shift $250 million in cap-and-trade funds to high-speed rail via the state budget. California’s cap-and-trade program places a “cap” on aggregate greenhouse gas emissions from businesses and utilities deemed “polluters” by the California Air Resources Board, which the CARB says are responsible for most of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. The CARB devised the cap-and-trade system whereby it holds a quarterly auction program requiring selected California employers to bid significant amounts of money for the privilege of continuing to operate in the state and “pollute” — or be faced with closing their doors.

“This budget will outrageously rip off millions of dollars in cap-and-trade funds to build high-speed rail, throwing good money after bad,” said state Sen. Andy Vidak (R-Hanford), in 2014 in response to the cap-and-trade funding scheme.

Vidak did a “whistle-stop-the-train” press campaign.

One of the Prop 1A mandates is that the California High-Speed Rail Authority must have all of the funding ahead of time, before any construction starts on a new segment.

Oops.

And, another mandate of Prop 1A:

The high-speed train system must operate on its own entirely, and in the black. That means operating profitably, and includes caveats of no government subsidy. The plan relies heavily on a projection of 100 million users by 2030, a notion that was created with manipulated data, and is absurd.

The demands for electricity for the high speed train were estimated at 1 percent to 5 percent of the state’s total energy usage in 2012. Even Cal ISO didn’t have any estimates for the cost. Where will the power come from, especially as the governor has mandated an all-electric state?

But there is quiet talk about electrifying only some of the track, and using pre-existing Amtrack rails. “Instead of building costly new raised viaducts and underground tunnels, the high-speed trains would run where possible on existing lines, such as Caltrain’s Peninsula infrastructure,” the San Francisco Examiner reported. But existing track cannot accommodate the 200 mph. The new business plan makes this just a train, not high-speed rail as was required by Proposition 1A, the 2008 ballot initiative authorizing the train.

In 2012, then-Senator Mark DeSaulnier (D) warned:

the debt service will start somewhere at $350 to $380 million. It is said that the first year it will come out from a dedicated source, the weight fee, which is a little bit under a billion dollars right now but will be exhausted within two years and then it will come out of the General Fund. And just this last year we borrowed $400 million from that dedicated source. That source normally goes to the repair and operation of our existing infrastructure.

That is why California has crappy roads and highways – the money was diverted to High Speed Rail.

Senator Andy Vidak wrote to constituents in 2015:

In my continued effort to protect Valley residents from the fallout of the High-Speed Rail project, I’ve sent a letter to the Joint Legislative Audit Committee (JLAC) requesting an audit of the California High-Speed Rail’s use of high-pressure tactics and “flash appraisals” to get property at lowball prices.

A flash appraisal is where the Authority establishes the value of private property without any input from the property owner. Then the property owner is pressured into accepting the undervalued offer — sometimes 30 percent lower the real value — or condemnation proceedings via eminent domain.

Regardless of what we personally think about High-Speed Rail, if the state is going to require Californians to surrender their private property and damage their livelihoods for this project, the state should properly pay the fair-market value, instead of trying to lowball them.

In 2016 Sen. Vidak requested an independent review by the State Auditor was following a LA Times article that revealed that the HSR Authority kept secret for two years a report that showed costs overruns in the billions of dollars, Sierra Sun Times reported. But his request was denied  by Democrats on a party-line vote of the California’s Joint Legislative Audit Committee.

In 2017, Assemblyman Jim Patterson (R-Fresno) requested an emergency audit of the high speed rail project – and it was denied by Assembly Democrat and Chairman of the Legislative Audit Committee, Al Murasutchi. But Patterson didn’t give up and eventually got his audit.

Then, in 2018 Senator Vidak “Rips High Speed Rail in Written Testimony to U.S. House Subcommittee” to California Rep. Jeff Denham:

The Honorable Jeff Denham, Chairman
U.S. House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials
2165 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C.  20515

Dear Chairman Denham:

Thank you for this opportunity to present testimony to your subcommittee and thank you for investigating California’s proposed so-called High Speed Rail Project.

As you know, the leadership of the California High Speed Rail Authority has for years played a shell game with revenue projections and estimated costs.  The ever-changing, so-called “business plans” are little more than slick public relation pamphlets – long on rhetoric and short on details.

One of your own House colleagues – then-Democrat State Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Mark DeSauliner – saw through the High Speed Rail propaganda and voted against this hare-brained scheme five years ago.

DeSaulinier stated the true cost of High Speed Rail, if it ever even gets built, will probably be closer to $350 billion rather than the $90 billion fantasy estimate from Governor Brown’s public relations shop.

The High Speed Rail Authority has also continually pitted community against community in bidding wars to secure the so-called “maintenance hub.”

They have dangled this stale carrot up and down the Valley from Castle Field in Merced County, to the BNSF facility in Fresno and down to Bakersfield in Kern County.

Is the location for the maintenance hub finally and officially set yet?  No, of course not.

How could the maintenance hub be set with the final route of High Speed Rail still up in the air?

In fact, the leadership of High Speed Rail can’t even tell the public how they will get their train over the Tehachapi range or how much that will cost.

Just saying “I think I can, I think I can” may work in cartoons but NOT when you’re playing with billions of dollars in taxpayers’ money.

They are even still promising to get from San Francisco through the Central Valley all the way to LA in 2 hours and 40 minutes.  Now that is one for the storybooks!

Putting up a couple of overpasses and trestles in the flat lands of the Central Valley is the easy part and they are already being referred to locally as the “Stonehenge of Fresno” because they most likely will just sit there as is for the ages.

So let’s see:  no realistic business plans, no private funding, no more federal funding, no maintenance hub location set, no determination of final routes, and no idea how to get the train over the Tehachapi’s.

Not exactly a plan coming together, is it?

Frankly, the best thing that could happen when Governor Brown is finally forced out of office next year would be to shut down the High Speed Rail Authority, turn over all the equipment and completed work to Amtrak and let them use it to improve existing rail service in the Valley.

At least that would plug the money drain and perhaps something useful could come from this after all.

In 2016, Senator Vidak authored legislation to give previous owners of property, once thought to be in one of the many proposed paths of High-Speed Rail, the opportunity to buy it back if the state is selling it, ABC30 reported.

“High-Speed Rail Authority is trying to take farms, land, businesses and homes, many of which have been in the same family for generations,” said Vidak. “Folks deserve the opportunity to get back what belonged to them if the state plans to sell property it bought or seized to supposedly complete the High-Speed Rail project.”

In 2019, the Globe reported Assemblyman Jim Patterson says it took almost three years to get approval for an audit of the California High Speed Rail Authority… and what an audit it was. “The ruling Party really pushed it off,” said Patterson, a Republican from Fresno. “But whistleblowers inside the High Speed Rail Authority, and good journalism made it happen,” he added.

The title of the audit speaks for itself: “California High‑Speed Rail Authority: Its Flawed Decision Making and Poor Contract Management Have Contributed to Billions in Cost Overruns and Delays in the System’s Construction.”

Patterson said California State Auditor Elaine Howle’s audit uncovered rail employees, contractors and consultants with conflicts of interest – and HSR Deputy Chief Operating Officer Roy Hill was suspended as a result of the investigation request. Hill held between $100,000 and $1 million of stock in Jacobs Engineering, the company which benefitted from a $51 million high speed rail change order. According to the Times, Jacobs Engineering is the Texas-based firm which provided engineering and design services to the specific project in Kings County. Mr. Hill did not disclose when he purchased the stock, the Globe reported.