A Wooden Stake Through the Heart of California High Speed Rail?

California high-speed rail is not dead, but modern Van Helsing Sean Duffy, Trump’s Transportation Secretary, is bringing out the wooden stake and hammer getting ready to pierce its heart. 

At least, I hope so. 

Over a decade and $16B of taxpayer dollars wasted with zero results on this rail project. If protestors want to shout at someone, they should direct their outrage at Governor Newsom and complicit Democrats who have enabled this fraud and waste for a train to nowhere. @USDOT will… pic.twitter.com/KsXKhYczll

— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) February 20, 2025

This project, like all modern American rail projects–be it light rail, Amtrak, or other high-speed rail boondoggles–is nothing but a money sink. They exist for no other purpose than to soak taxpayers and spread the money around. There are a few subway systems in the country that actually serve the purpose of providing public transportation–limited to older, very dense metropolitan areas like Boston and New York City–but anything that wasn’t built before World War II is likely a huge boondoggle. 

Today I joined U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy to announce an investigation into CA High-Speed Rail, which could claw back $4.3 billion in federal funds. Amusingly, a few protestors showed up in support of the boondoggle.

The High-Speed Rail disaster is the worst… pic.twitter.com/0sHYSVjCJc

— Kevin Kiley (@KevinKileyCA) February 20, 2025

California’s project is a particularly egregious example. Already decades in the making and costing many multiples of the initially estimated cost, there is no way in hell that the train line will ever get built. At most, section of the track from one city in the middle of nowhere will connect to another city in the middle of nowhere will be built, serving nobody but some buzzards and lizards in the middle of the desert. 

For us in the Central Valley, we have had a first hand front row seat to the mismanagement and failures of the California High Speed Rail Authority. What is happening now is not what was told to Californians in 2008. It’s a complete bait and switch. This failed project needs to… pic.twitter.com/ES1myO00pQ

— Vince Fong (@vfong) February 20, 2025

No sentient human being believes that this project will ever be completed, but that makes it absolutely perfect for the grifters. They eke out a billion here and a billion there to keep the project going and their consultants fed. It is a graft machine at a scale unthought-of before. It makes the building of the Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier look timely and efficient, and the Space Launch System look inexpensive. 

California’s high-speed rail has to be one of the worst infrastructure failures in US history.

The public was told it would cost $33 billion & be done in 2020. Today not a single segment is complete & the project’s CEO has said he needs another *$100 billion.* Wild. https://t.co/wbPllulOoO

— Billy Binion (@billybinion) February 20, 2025

Unlike the pyramids, which consumed enormous resources and produced no earthly goods, the rail project won’t even serve to bring in tourists. It will rot in the desert as a testament to the voracious appetite for other people’s dollars and the sheer selfishness of a California and national political class who show absolutely no respect for the taxpayers they serve. 

Duffy’s announcement of an investigation into the project is necessary because contracts have been signed, so he will likely have to show that requirements set forth in those contracts have not been met. 

That should be easy enough to do, and the hammer can finally fall.