Dive Brief:
- The California High-Speed Rail Authority faces a $6.5 billion funding gap to complete the initial 171-mile segment between Bakersfield and Merced, California, the state’s Office of the Inspector General said in a Feb. 3 report.
- The OIG report also said it is “increasingly unlikely” that the authority will be able to finish that segment by its target date of 2033.
- The California project could also face a federal investigation, which President Donald Trump said Tuesday he would begin. “The train that's being built between Los Angeles and San Francisco is the worst-managed project I think I've ever seen,” he told reporters.
Dive Insight:
California’s ambitious project to link Los Angeles and San Francisco by high-speed rail kicked off in 2008 with voter approval of a bond measure to help finance it. According to a California High-Speed Rail Authority spokesperson, 171 miles of the high-speed rail project are under design and active construction. “Of approximately $13 billion spent on the project, $10.5 billion have been funded exclusively by the State of California,” the spokesperson said in an email. The authority estimated the total cost of building the 171-mile line at between $28.5 billion and $35.3 billion in its 2024 business plan.
The authority committed about two years ago to beginning service along the Merced-Bakersville line between 2030 and 2033. The OIG report notes that project schedule changes “have already used a third of the excess time” allowed in the plan.
Anticipated federal funding for the project during the Biden administration fell short of expectations, the authority explained in its written response to the OIG report. The authority’s goal was to obtain $8 billion from the 2021 infrastructure law, but it was awarded a total of $3.3 billion. The authority said Congress did not fully fund authorized levels of grant programs it planned to rely on.
Trump’s first term as president, from 2017 to 2021, was not kind to the California project. In 2019, the Trump administration canceled a $929 million federal grant and sought to take back nearly $2.5 billion in federal funds that the rail authority had already received.
Some Republican members of Congress have expressed support for other high-speed rail projects, such as the proposed Texas Central project to connect Dallas and Houston and Brightline West’s Las Vegas-Southern California line, which is under construction. But Amtrak and high-speed rail projects may suffer in the cost-cutting fervor of the current administration and Congress, according to transportation and public policy experts at law firm Holland & Knight.
The California High-Speed Rail Authority shrugged off Trump’s latest comments in a Feb. 4 post on X: “Ignore the noise. We’re busy building.”
