OAN Staff Blake Wolf
12:04 PM – Wednesday, February 5, 2025
President Donald Trump revealed on Tuesday that he plans to investigate California’s lengthy and costly “High-Speed Rail Project” due to the exorbitant amount of taxpayer money spent — with little progress to show for.
“The train that’s being built between Los Angeles and San Francisco is the worst managed project I think I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some of the worst,” Trump stated.
“Billions and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars over budget,” Trump continued. “We’re going to start a big investigation of that, because I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Trump announced that Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), would not be leading the investigation.
California has spent over $10 billion on the project, and it has been estimated that the project is expected to cost up to $128 billion, with no expected completion date in sight — according to a press release by the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
The project was approved by voters in 2008 and was initially expected to cost around $33 billion total, though it has now seen exponential increases in cost and significant delays, without much explanation backing the updates to the plan.
“Voters were promised that the California High-Speed Rail project would cost the state $33 billion and be completed by 2020. Fifteen years later, the California High-Speed Rail project has become one of the most troubled ‘megaprojects’ in the nation,” the Senate release continued.
Despite exponentially increasing costs along with significant delays, a spokesperson for the California High-Speed Rail Authority issued a statement, directly avoiding Trump’s personal criticism.
“To date, 171 miles of the high-speed rail project are under design and active construction, more than 14,600 high-quality jobs have been created, and more than 880 small businesses are engaged on the project,” the spokesperson stated. “Of approximately $13 billion spent on the project, $10.5 billion have been funded exclusively by the state of California – not ‘hundreds of billions’ – and those expenditures have created over $22 billion in economic impact, largely in California’s Central Valley communities.”
Additionally, Trump also criticized the project for failing to have an adequate development proposal, with the objective being that the train will travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The agency has yet to find the additional funding to extend the rail to major cities.
“Now it’s not even going to San Francisco and it’s not going to Los Angeles. They made it much shorter,” Trump added. “So now it’s at little places way away from San Francisco and way away from Los Angeles.”
At this point of time, the project only has a concrete plan to continue construction between Bakersfield and Merced, as California’s regulations continue to plague the project.
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