The federal government handed $7 billion to California to build a high-speed rail line, but the Golden State never laid a single foot of track, according to a new report.
This prompted Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to threaten that he may remove federal grants to the state’s High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA).
The 310-page report states that there were numerous missed deadlines and budget overruns. Duffy handed the authority a deadline of July 11 to respond or risk losing approximately $4 billion in grants.
“I promised the American people we would be good stewards of their hard-earned tax dollars,” Duffy said in a statement. “This report exposes a cold, hard truth: CHSRA has no viable path to complete this project on time or on budget.”
“CHSRA is on notice — If they can’t deliver on their end of the deal, it could soon be time for these funds to flow to other projects that can achieve President Trump’s vision of building great, big, beautiful things again,” he added. “Our country deserves high-speed rail that makes us proud – not boondoogle [sic] trains to nowhere.”
The rail line was passed as a ballot initiative in 2008 and was supposed to run for 800 miles, connecting Sacramento and San Diego. The budget was $33 billion and the work was supposed to have been completed by 2020.
However, in 2019, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said there was nowhere to go after costs had reached $77.3 billion and the rail line had been restricted to run from Merced to Bakersfield.
Subsequently, officials with the CHSRA applied for grants totaling $8 billion from the funds passed in former President Joe Biden’s infrastructure legislation to finish that shorter rail line.
However, in a letter sent Wednesday, the Federal Railroad Administration's acting administrator, Drew Feeley, said that nine months after the first batch of funding was sent in September last year, the authority had crossed a deadline to buy rail cars.
Feeley went through other procurement problems and tallied up as much as $1.6 billion in misspent funding because of changed orders. In the end, it’s considered unlikely that the project will be finished by its new deadline of 2033.
“CHSRA relied on the false hope of an unending spigot of Federal taxpayer dollars,” Feeley wrote. “In essence, CHSRA has conned the taxpayer out of its $4 billion investment, with no viable plan to deliver even that partial segment on time.”
The California rail authority inspector general found in February that there was a budget shortfall of $7 billion. The federal government had handed the project $6.9 billion since 2010.
Speaking to reporters last month, Newsom noted that a high-speed rail project connecting Dallas and Houston had been abandoned.
“You can see the progress we’ve actually made,” he said at the time. “We’re now on the other side of the environmental reviews; we’re on the other side of the land acquisition.”
But a spokesperson for the rail authority said the findings of the four-month review were “misguided” and didn’t reflect the project.
“The Authority will fully address and correct the record in our formal response,” a spokesperson said, according to The Los Angeles Times. “We remain firmly committed to completing the nation’s first true high-speed rail system connecting the major population centers in the state.”
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