Trump Administration to Pull $4 billion in Funding for California High-Speed Rail

New York Times

2 days ago

The Trump administration said it would pull roughly $4 billion in federal funding for California's long-planned high-speed train, a project that has, over decades, become an avatar for the country's declining ability to complete transformative new infrastructure.
In a report sent to the state's high-speed rail authority on Wednesday, Drew Feeley, the acting head of the Federal Railroad Administration, wrote that the project has repeatedly blown past projected deadlines by years, and cost estimates by billions of dollars.
It gave California 30 days to respond to the findings of the review before what it said was a likely decision to revoke the funding.
'We don't want to invest in boondoggles,' Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, told Fox News. 'I want to see high-speed rail in America and why it can't be built within, you know, time frames that work for the people that invest in these projects makes no sense to me.'
The scale of the high-speed train route has been chipped away since the federal government first gave its support to the idea in 2009, the report noted: Initially, the vision for the project was a rail line that would whisk riders from the Bay Area to Los Angeles in less than three hours on some of the fastest trains in the world.
In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that the state would instead first open a kind of starter segment of the train connecting two smaller cities in California's agricultural Central Valley.
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