The Trump administration announced on Wednesday that it stripped approximately $4 billion in unspent federal funds from California’s high-speed rail project following years of widespread criticism over the long-delayed effort.
President Donald Trump’s Department of Transportation (DOT) announced it won’t pour taxpayer money into the state’s project aimed at connecting major cities by bullet train after 16 years and “not one high-speed track” laid down.
“This is California’s fault. Governor [Gavin] Newsom and the complicit Democrats have enabled this waste for years,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a prepared statement. “Federal dollars are not a blank check — they come with a promise to deliver results.”
California state auditors and even Newsom called the rail plan too costly over the years, though Newsom quickly denounced the Trump administration’s decision Wednesday.
“Trump wants to hand China the future and abandon the Central Valley. We won’t let him … California is putting all options on the table to fight this illegal action.” Newsom said in a statement.
“Canceling these grants without cause isn’t just wrong — it’s illegal,” Ian Choudri, CEO of the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA), said in a prepared statement. “These are legally binding agreements, and the Authority has met every obligation, as confirmed by repeated federal reviews, as recently as February 2025.”
The CHSRA told the DCNF that its project has also received a wealth of state funding, citing expenditure reports.
The state began construction of the 800-mile project in 2015 and originally planned to finish by around 2020 for $33 billion. However, the state continually delayed its progress, telling the Trump administration in June that it may take 20 years to finish an “initial operating segment.”
Along the way, California spent hundreds of millions of dollars on climate-sensitive environmental goals for the rail plan, the DCNF previously reported. The regulatory constraints included other factors that hampered construction, which also involved cost overruns.
The state’s “flawed decision making and poor contract management have contributed to billions in cost overruns and delays in the system’s construction,” state auditors wrote as early as November 2018.
“Let’s level about the high-speed rail,” Newsom said in the year after. “Let’s be real, the current project as planned would cost too much and, respectfully, take too long. Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to [Los Angeles]. I wish there were.”
The DOT’s final decision came after a compliance review in June that alerted California it saw “no viable path” for the high-speed rail system and found the state to be violating the terms of federal grants.
“It’s time for this boondoggle to die,” Duffy said Wednesday.
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