The state of California has spent a whopping $7 billion on a high-speed railway project that was greenlit in 2008. Today — a decade and a half later — not one single track has been laid. Now the Department of Transportation has put California on notice, threatening to pull the plug on $4 billion in federal funding for the project if the state doesn’t address missed deadlines, budget shortfalls, and unrealistic ridership projections by mid-July.
On Wednesday, Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted the following to X:
“How did the state keep this charade up for 15 years?” asks “Blaze News: The Mandate’s” Jill Savage.
Blaze Media editor in chief and former California resident Matthew Peterson says this isn’t surprising in the least. “California is exactly like the federal government in terms of the corruption and the wasting of money in broad daylight,” he says. Between the state’s stringent laws on environmental protection, labor, housing, and business operations and wealthy entities with the means to “prevent growth and development at all costs,” “you can’t build anything in California.”
“So the idea … that you could build a high-speed rail given the regulations California already had … was absolutely absurd without fundamentally changing the law,” says Peterson. However, “what everyone also knew is that this [project] would employ a lot of people and pay off a lot of people for a long period of time,” making it a classic “boondoggle.”
“From the beginning, this was destined to fail,” he says, calling Duffy’s ultimatum “music to my ears” after four years of Pete Buttigieg, who knew “basically zero” about transportation.
California Governor Gavin Newsom (D), however, is digging his heels in, publicly maintaining that California’s high-speed rail project is progressing, often highlighting milestones like completed environmental reviews and land acquisition as proof.
Peterson scoffs at Newsom’s remarks. “If you take any message from this,” let it be: “As California goes, so goes the nation.”
“Everyone with any common sense knew this was ridiculous from the beginning; it was all corruption in plain sight … just sitting there daring for anyone to common-sense it to death, and that never happened. It still kept on going forward,” he says. “That is exactly where we’re at as a nation, and we’re going to need a lot more from Sean Duffy and others to say, ‘To hell with this,’ and put a stop to it.”
To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above above.
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