The California High Speed Rail Fraud Ecosystem

Gavin Newsom, who's term limited as California governor and leaves office on January 4, 2027, is clearly gearing up to run for president in 2028. Apparently he's waking up to what will be a major vulnerability when he starts his campaign, the California High Speed Rail Project:

California’s HSR is perhaps the greatest infrastructure failure in the history of the country. And the reason it failed is because of a gross failure of state governance, one on such a grand scale that it is nothing short of a betrayal of Californians.

The extent of the betrayal is only slowly coming to light, in part because legacy media reporters simply can't get their heads around an enterprise this size, and in part because they enable the whole fraud-based ecosystem. Independent analyst-journalists lie Christopher Rufo and Nick Shirley have been working on the fringes of medical and welfare fraud in places like Minnesota and Los Angeles, but the level of high speed rail goes beyond immigrant entrepreneurs and extends to respectable consulting firms, labor unions, and the political establishments of both parties.

The link above from 2023 gives a bare-bones sketch of the project's history:

In 2008, California voters approved $9.95 billion of state bond funding as seed money to build an 800-mile high-speed rail (HSR) network connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the Central Valley to coastal cities, at speeds of up to 220 miles per hour, with an expected completion date of 2020.

But now, 15 years after the bond issue, three years after the expected completion date, not one train has left the station. Not one route has been completed, even though nearly all the $9.95 billion seed money has been spent. And the original budget of about $33 billion for the entire 800-mile system is now inadequate to build just one route (Bakersfield to Merced), whose cost pencils out to $207 million per mile—a cost that will almost certainly rise in the future, and for a route that may not be ready for ten years. Or more. Or perhaps ever.

The shortening of the proposed route, originally meant to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco, was a result of Newsom's first campaign for governor in 2018. Originally, he was a strong supporter as San Francisco mayor, but as opposition to the project grew -- the 2018 election came just two years before the system was supposed to be complete, but there had been minimal progress on basic construction -- he became vague on what he'd do, and following his election, he announced the project would be shortened to a "first phase" connecting Merced to Bakersfield in the hot, hardscrabble Central Valley. The link above concludes,

There is no path to completion for the fantasy rail system that was falsely sold to voters 15 years ago. Finishing the Bakersfield-Merced route, which will cost in excess of $35 billion, and which won’t be operative for ten years [2033], doesn’t come close to penciling out. The only reasonable decision is to end a project that should never have begun.

But that was in 2023. Now, just the Bakersfield-Merced phase is looking more and more dubious:

According to a new report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office reviewing the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s Draft 2026 Business Plan, Gavin Newsom’s bullet train project may not even reach downtown Merced or downtown Bakersfield. The report says the northern end would stop roughly 3.5 miles south of downtown Merced, while the southern end would land about six miles north of the previously planned Bakersfield station.

That is not a punchline. That is the plan.

And remember, this is already the scaled-down version.

The under-construction photo at the top of this post was one I took in 2023 near Shafter, a little farther north than the route is now projected to end, six miles from Bakersfield. You can see what the country looks like in the area, and you can see what a thrill it will be to catch a limo to downtown Bakersfield from the station. But it gets worse:

The Trump administration has cut off all communication and cooperation with the California High-Speed Rail Authority — including freezing all environmental review, engineering and safety work dating back to last year — which the state says is putting the already embattled project at risk of further delays and cost increases.

“This disengagement by the [Federal Railroad Administration] represents an unprecedented federal government action to cripple the advancement of a project it has helped fund,” the Authority wrote in its project update report released Wednesday.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office report says 144 of the planned 162 miles could now operate on a single track. In real-world terms, trains traveling in opposite directions may [not "may", "will"] have to wait for one another at sidings rather than running continuously on dual tracks.

California’s “world-class” bullet train is starting to sound like a one-lane country road with better branding.

The report also notes that the stations themselves are being simplified into “at-grade stations with single-side platforms” — bureaucratic language for another downgrade.

Why? Because the costs have gotten so absurd that Sacramento is now trying to cheapen the project enough to keep pretending it is still viable.

. . . That is not a cost overrun. That is a civic humiliation.

It goes without saying that both Trump administrations have seen the project as a waste of federal funds. As of 2019,

The Trump administration has cut off all communication and cooperation with the California High-Speed Rail Authority — including freezing all environmental review, engineering and safety work dating back to last year — which the state says is putting the already embattled project at risk of further delays and cost increases.

“This disengagement by the [Federal Railroad Administration] represents an unprecedented federal government action to cripple the advancement of a project it has helped fund,” the Authority wrote in its project update report released Wednesday.

The Biden administration reversed course:

The Biden administration late on Thursday restored a $929 million grant for California's high-speed rail that then-President Donald Trump revoked in 2019.

Trump had pulled funding for a high-speed train project in the state hobbled by extensive delays and rising costs that he dubbed a "disaster." Trump repeatedly clashed as president with California on a number of policy fronts, prompting the state to file more than 100 lawsuits against the Republican Trump administration.

But the second Trump administration has continued the policies of the first. According to Chrome AI mode,

As of late 2025 and early 2026, the federal government has terminated major funding for the California High-Speed Rail project.

• In July 2025, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) pulled approximately $4 billion in federal grants for the project.
• In February 2026, Congress formally rescinded an additional $928 million for the project in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026.
• California dropped its lawsuit against the federal government in December 2025 regarding the terminated $4 billion, opting to move forward without federal support.

But ther idea of finishing anything at all without federal money looks, as various links have pointed out, more and more like fantasy. But this brings us to Gavin Newsom's electoral dilemma: to be any sort of contender in 2028, he has to put the high speed rail project out of the picture as an issue:

Three months ago, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced an extraordinary achievement. Standing on the site of a new railyard, with trains all around him, Newsom proudly explained that the state’s high-speed rail project had a new marshaling facility to support the transition to busily laying track.

. . . Two weeks ago, talking to Bill Maher, Newsom defended the high-speed rail project with these words: “We’re actually laying track.” The railhead is the signal that a new phase has arrived: There’s a construction yard full of material, with trains to move it. It’s the really-making-stuff moment, the time for active, provable success. There’s a place where you can go look at all the iron that’s moving into place.

There’s nothing there. There are rail lines, but they run into an empty and unpeopled yard next to a bunch of dirt. There are no construction materials. There are no construction workers. There are no warehouses. They ran a bunch of trains in, posed in front of them, and then returned the site to its normal empty condition. Nothing is happening there. Nothing.

I walked the site. I walked up and down the tracks, worried that I was missing something. I drove up to Wasco, then back, up and down dirt roads along the tracks — old tracks, for BNSF freight trains.

. . . The railyard where Gavin Newsom declared “real progress” while standing next to train cars is the center of no construction activity at all. I walked around the fence and stood on the tracks today in the empty yard. I was alone.

Not only that, in the video, he now refers to a "119-mile first phase", when up to now, for instance via Chrome AI mode, the "first phase" has been generally understood to be 171 miles from Bakersfield to Merced. Under the Legislative Analyst report linked above, it is thought now to be slightly shortened to 162 miles, allowing for stations well outside Bakersfield and Merced, but at least nominally connecting them -- but now, without explanation, Newsom has it down to 119 miles.

I asked Chrome AI mode, "If I travel 119 miles on Highway 99 north of Bakersfield, where will I be?" The short answer is Fresno, or as Bakersfielders call it, "the big 'No". It sounds like there's been a big reduction of the first phase, and it should probably be called Bakersfield-Fresno. Amtrak, by the way, has already had conventional trains on this route since the 1970s, and has already ordered new equipment to operate on it, presumably for the next 20 years or more.

This is a big story. Sounds like Amtrak doesn't expect high speed trains to replace anything on its own Central Valley route for decades to come. They probably have good inside info. Will Nick Shirley or Christopher Rufo follow up, let along legacy media? Somebody needs to be asking Gavin Newsom serious questions.