By Sri Taylor, Bloomberg
President Donald Trump’s administration said it withdrew more than $175 million in federal funding from projects related to California’s high-speed rail, in the latest move to kneecap the long-delayed plan to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco via train.
The Federal Railroad Administration moved to block four projects related to the high-speed rail, according to a Tuesday statement from the US Department of Transportation, citing waste and lack of progress in what it called a “failed experiment.” It said the cost was projected to total $135 billion, more than quadrupling from the original estimate.
Trump and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy have long been strong critics of the project that has been marred with cost overruns and constant delays, arguing that the effort has wasted taxpayers’ dollars.
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“In twenty years, California has not been able to lay a single track of high-speed rail,” Duffy said in a statement. “Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg didn’t care about these failures and dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the state’s wish list of related fantasy projects. The waste ends here.”
The slashed projects include the Le Grand Overcrossing Project on the Merced Extension totaling $89.6 million in federal commitments, and the $7.5 million earmarked for the Southern San Jose Grade Separations.
The FRA is also moving to pull back the $24.6 million in aid for the DTX Final Design for Track and Rail Systems project, and the $54.5 million earmarked for the Madera High-Speed Rail Station project, according to the Tuesday release.
In June, the Trump administration moved to slash roughly $4 billion of federal funding that California had received in the form of grants — $3.1 billion from the Biden administration and about $900 million in 2011.
At the time, the California High-Speed Rail Authority rejected the administration’s assessment, saying that the state had provided most of the funding and remained committed to the project. CHSRA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
The California project was approved in 2008, with a plan to zip riders from San Francisco to Los Angeles in under three hours. But the state has struggled to raise enough funds to complete an initial segment through California’s Central Valley, as costs have ballooned from an original budget of $33 billion.
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