Editorial: Will California pols rethink their rail boondoggle?

Las Vegas Review-Journal, Las Vegas Review-Journal on Apr 20, 2025

Published in Op Eds

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Is the end nigh for the nation’s most embarrassing infrastructure boondoggle? Taxpayers can only hope.

California’s high-speed rail line from hell — intended to connect Los Angeles with San Francisco — remains buried in cost overruns, bureaucratic inertia and wishful thinking. Sold to state voters in 2008 as the transportation of a green future, the project was supposed to cost $33 billion and take a decade to build. Seventeen years later, the price tag has swelled to $125 billion and even the initial stretch of track, from Bakersfield to Merced, sits unfinished.

The Trump administration has the project in its sights. The Transportation Department launched an investigation into $4.1 billion in grants awarded under the Biden White House, and Secretary Sean Duffy recently told Fox Business that his intention is “to pull the funding.” Elon Musk and his DOGE committee have singled out the train as a bottomless money pit.

Yet a more immediate threat might reside in Sacramento. Politico reported that some Democrats in the Legislature have wised up to the reality that burning billions of more dollars on this monument to Golden State dysfunction will leave them with less money to spend on other pet projects.

“Is it at the top of my priority list?” one Assembly Democrat told the website. “I’ll give you a hard ‘no’ on that.” A Republican in the state Senate told Politico, “We can build water infrastructure, provide water for our farmers, create jobs in our Central Valley. There’s a lot of things that we could be spending taxpayer dollars on, and this is not one of them.”

The majority of the money for the rail line comes from California’s cap-and-trade program, which has generated $32 billion for the project over the past 12 years. That program is up for reauthorization in Sacramento this year, and some Democrats would prefer to direct the cash to other endeavors.

Not surprisingly, the most vocal supporters of the sunken-cost fallacy are the union leaders feeding at the trough who see the rail line as a perpetual jobs project. “We believe it’s worked extremely well,” Chris Hannan, president of the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California, told Politico. We assume he had trouble keeping a straight face.

“California’s high-speed rail fiasco is no longer just a state embarrassment; it is a national cautionary tale,” noted Citizens Against Government Waste.

Given the pressure from Big Labor, the odds remain high that California lawmakers will act wisely. At a minimum, however, the White House should quickly remove taxpayers in the other 49 states from the equation.