The Trump administration is launching an audit of California’s high-speed rail project, which is a decade late and is expected to run $100 billion over budget without connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles, as originally intended.
As Breitbart News has reported, President Donald Trump warned that the federal government could claw back over $4 billion in spending on the project, just as he blocked $1 billion for the ailing project during his first administration.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy drew protesters in an appearance in Los Angeles to announce the audit:
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said Thursday he would launch a compliance review of the $4 billion in federal funds allocated to California’s high-speed rail project — the ambitious, long-delayed plan to send bullet trains from Los Angeles to downtown San Francisco.
The review would “help determine” whether the money should “remain committed” to the railway’s first segment between Merced and Bakersfield in the Central Valley, spokespeople for the U.S. Department of Transportation said in a news release, casting the future of the project in jeopardy.
“If California wants to continue to invest, that’s fine, but we in the Trump administration are going to take a look at whether this project is worthy of continual investment,” Duffy said Thursday morning, addressing reporters at Union Station in Los Angeles. Protesters gathered in the background to boo and loudly chant, “Build the rail!”
The protesters are not known to represent any real constituency; the high-speed rail project is unpopular even in California, outside of some areas of the Central Valley.
A separate high-speed rail project, running between the L.A. area and Las Vegas, is viewed more positively because it began with private funding and has a prospect of success — more as a form of entertainment than convenience.
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 The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. 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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