Chris Bray writes for the Federalist about lessons Americans should learn from a high-profile, high-dollar California government boondoggle.
After decades of effort and $15 billion in spending, California’s plan to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco with a high-speed rail line is falling apart. A pair of documents from the state’s High-Speed Rail Authority reveal an urgent effort to keep the project alive by making it much more modest in scope and effect, violating state law and undermining every promise made at its conception. And most of what passes for the news is badly misrepresenting the latest developments, celebrating retreat as rebirth.
There are two lessons from California’s stillborn bullet train. First, Gavin Newsom can never become president, which would inject the appalling failure of blue state political culture into the national bloodstream. Second, the decision of the Trump administration to withdraw $4 billion in federal funds from the project is proof of competence, and a policy win for Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
Newsom’s bullet train has failed the way Hemingway’s protagonist went bankrupt: suddenly, and then all at once. There have been hints about the growing disaster, but they became very public on Monday at a long legislative hearing in Sacramento. To borrow a bit of phrasing from the legacy media, critics of the project pounced and seized on the open discussion of the emerging failure. …
… California is hoping to pay for initial construction that ends in 2033 by borrowing against money that they hope to get through 2045, and analysts warn that the money may not actually turn out to exist. …
… Both documents present a remarkable series of what-if moments, as the High-Speed Rail Authority proposes a much different project while trying to sell the alterations as a cost-saving reorganization of the same thing.
