By Hudson Crozier
California acknowledged its high-speed rail project has a $7 billion funding gap and hundreds of miles to complete, but the state is still demanding that the Trump administration keep federal funds flowing.
The California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) sent a letter on Thursday demanding that the Department of Transportation (DOT) walk back its threat to pull roughly $4 billion from the state’s oft-delayed efforts to connect major cities by bullet train. The CHSRA called the Trump administration’s threat “unwarranted and unjustified,” doubling down in defense of a project that state auditors and even Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom have criticized as unrealistic and financially burdensome. (RELATED: California Defends High-Speed Rail Boondoggle By Saying It Will Take 20 Years To Finish ‘Initial’ Segment)
BREAKING: The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) is trying to pull the plug on America’s only true high-speed rail system.
Read the Authority’s full response: https://t.co/sqCmsyM4T1
Their claims? Misleading, outdated, and flat-out wrong. Here’s what you need to know. (1/7) pic.twitter.com/qZA8sBUCc1
— CA High-Speed Rail 🚄💨 (@CaHSRA) June 12, 2025
California could complete an “early operating segment” of the rail system by 2033 with enough federal and state funds, the authority claimed. A state website shows 23 miles of guideway left to complete for the 119-mile initial segment, while 463 miles of another portion of the line are merely “construction ready.” The entire rail system was originally projected to be completed by 2020 for $33 billion, but the total cost has risen to $128 billion as timelines have been delayed repeatedly.
The Trump DOT and other critics have derided the rail plans as a “boondoggle” rife with broken promises and a ballooning price tag of more than $100 billion. The CHSRA referred the DCNF to a press release stating that “construction progresses every day on the California high-speed rail project.”
California’s “flawed decision making and poor contract management have contributed to billions in cost overruns and delays in the system’s construction,” state auditors wrote in 2018.
“Let’s level about the high-speed rail,” Newsom said in 2019. “Let’s be real, the current project as planned would cost too much and, respectfully, take too long. Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A. I wish there were.”
Nevertheless, the governor has since continued with the project.
The authority acknowledged that it previously found “a funding gap of $7 billion” for the project in its letter but insisted that it “has several options and opportunities for addressing funding needs.” One strategy the letter pointed to was Newsom’s proposal to provide $1 billion annually for the next 20 years for the project’s “initial” segment.
“We have built many of the viaducts, overpasses, and underpasses on which the first 119 miles of high-speed rail track will run … In total, fifty-three structures and sixty-nine miles of guideway have been completed,” the letter said.
The agency also asked the Trump administration to extend its 30-day deadline to file another response by 15 days. Even if the Trump administration’s specific claims about delays are true, “they do not constitute grounds for terminating” funds, the authority wrote.
This rail project is so expensive that it will cost more to travel by train than by airplane, even though traveling by train is slower. As the Las Vegas Review-Journal notes, “high-speed” rail can’t “compete with air travel in terms of time or price.” Reason Magazine says California’s “high-speed” rail system “will have ticket prices higher than airfares and will take nearly twice as long as flying.”
House Republicans in 2023 tried to stop federal spending on this $128 billion rail project, but Democrats in Congress continued to back it.
