The State of California sued the Trump administration Thursday over President Donald Trump’s decision to claw back $4 billion in federal funds for the state’s troubled and delayed high-speed rail project.
As Breitbart News reported this week, the “bullet train” has been a debacle. Originally scheduled for 2020, it will now only be completed in 2040 — at four times the price, and without linking San Francisco and L.A. as designed.
Trump cut the funding after Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy ordered an audit, which in turn concluded that the project was not viable.
Newsom, however, is suing to keep the money. He said in a statement:
Trump’s termination of federal grants for California high-speed rail reeks of politics. It’s yet another political stunt to punish California.
In reality, this is just a heartless attack on the Central Valley that will put real jobs and livelihoods on the line. We’re suing to stop Trump from derailing America’s only high-speed rail actively under construction.
The Central Valley is a rural area that is the only part of California that will be served by the high-speed rail. Newsom himself canceled the urban portions of the project when he took office in 2019, citing costs and delays.
The Los Angeles Times added:
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California by state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, comes one day after the Federal Railroad Administration pulled $4 billion from the project that was intended for construction in the Central Valley. The suit seeks declaratory and injunctive relief and challenges the legality of the decision.
The lawsuit calls the administration’s actions “arbitrary and capricious, an abuse of discretion, and contrary to law, and threatens to wreak significant economic damage on the Central Valley, the State, and the Nation.” It names Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and acting FRA Administrator Drew Feeley as defendants and details President Trump’s “personal animus” toward the project and long-standing criticism of it. Trump previously pulled funding from the train during his first term.
The suit calls the president’s past statements over the project’s budget as untrue. The project is about $100 billion over budget from its original proposal of $33 billion. Trump previously said it was “hundreds of billions of dollars” more.
Under Newsom, California has roughly 20 active lawsuits against the Trump administration — even as the governor asks for $40 billion in aid money to help with the damage caused by wildfires earlier this year.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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