Not surprisingly, Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom blamed President Donald Trump for a $4 billion cut to California’s troubled high-speed train project. Instead, records show the state never bought the trains required to get the money.
That is the conclusion of an extensive CBS News investigation published Sunday about the California High Speed Rail Authority repeatedly missing federal grant deadlines to buy the trains, which turned out to be one of the key failures the Trump administration cited for legally pulling the funding a year ago.
Now, more than 18 months after the original deadline, the Authority still cannot say when it expects to award the train contract, CBS reported, with the state calling that date “TBD,” otherwise known as “to be determined.”
Approved by voters in 2008, the project was originally designed to link San Francisco and Los Angeles in less than three hours with electric trains able to reach speeds of 220 miles per hour.
Currently, there is no direct train service between the two major cities, and if someone wanted to try it by existing conventional lines, the trip could take up to 12 hours.
It looks as if it would still be a tedious trip even with the Golden State’s proposed high-speed rail plan.
The original plan to link the two major cities has been revised, with construction now limited to the middle section of the route, a flat 170-mile stretch between Merced and Bakersfield in the Central Valley.
Service for that section is projected to begin by 2033.
However, if that proposed line came into existence, it would mean a traveler would have to drive a couple hours by car up the busy I-5 from L.A. to Bakersfield to board the high-speed train. It would then drop the traveler off nearly 130 miles from downtown San Francisco, requiring another two-hour car trip on good traffic day.
That revised trip from L.A. to San Francisco could be made by car on the existing interstates in less or equal time and with less hassle.
Neither that plan nor the progress on the project made much sense to the Trump administration, certainly not at its projected $126 billion price tag.
In July of last year, it withdrew $4 billion in federal support for the project, also citing “the state’s failure to lay any tracks after spending $15 billion over 16 years,” CBS reported.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said “federal dollars are not a blank check — they come with a promise to deliver results.”
According to the network:
Purchasing the trains was a key milestone. Federal officials concluded there was “no viable path” to completing the segment on time. And California had promised to connect “major metropolitan cities” but could now deliver only a substantially reduced system that “may connect two random endpoints.”
Newsom called stopping the billions a “political stunt” to punish the state. State Attorney General Rob Bonta sued, also claiming the withdrawal was a “politically motivated attack.”
However, six months later the state dropped the federal complaint, with the rail authority offering “no explanation” but adding it hoped to work with a future administration as the Trump administration was “not a reliable partner.”
The CBS investigation found what appeared to be the real reason for ending the suit.
The network concluded, “It was the California High-Speed Rail Authority that repeatedly failed to meet its own deadlines to buy the trains — a key requirement in the federal grant agreement — then quietly dropped its lawsuit weeks after missing the new deadline it promised a federal judge it would meet.”
Breitbart News contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of the Los Angeles crime novel Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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