Donald Trump is on the warpath again, and this time, his target is California’s high-speed rail disaster—a project so expensive, so mismanaged, and so wildly over budget that even Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) isn’t needed to investigate it. No, Trump is taking this one on personally.
During impromptu remarks in the Oval Office, Trump blasted the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco train as “the worst-managed project I think I have ever seen.” And for a man who’s spent a lifetime in construction, that’s saying something.
“Billions and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars over budget,” Trump fumed. “In fact, I read where you could take every single person that was going to go on the train and get the finest limousine service in the world, and take them back and forth in limousines, and have hundreds of billions of dollars left over.”
And he’s not wrong. The project, first approved by voters back in 2008, was supposed to cost $33 billion and be completed by 2020. Fast forward nearly 16 years later, and what do we have?
- A rail line that no longer connects Los Angeles or San Francisco
- A price tag now expected to exceed $128 billion
- A “high-speed rail” that won’t even be high-speed in most places
Yes, you read that correctly. The rail system has been reduced to a stretch of track between Merced and Bakersfield—far from either major city. Even California’s own governor, Gavin Newsom, admitted in 2019 that the project was unworkable, saying it would “cost too much” and “take too long.”
So why hasn’t it been shut down? Because California Democrats refuse to admit defeat. Instead of pulling the plug, Newsom and Biden have kept pouring taxpayer money into this sinking ship, with Biden restoring $1 billion in federal funding that Trump had previously blocked.
Trump isn’t just calling the project a failure—he’s calling for a full-scale investigation. And he’s not buying the idea that this was just bad planning.
“I’d like to see what the kickbacks are,” Trump said, raising the question that nobody in California’s government wants to answer:
Where did all the money go?
Because, let’s be honest—California has a long, storied history of wasting taxpayer dollars while quietly enriching the right political insiders. And hundreds of billions in cost overruns don’t just “happen”—somebody got rich off this mess.
“The people that got all that money—are they kicking it back to the people that gave it, from government?” Trump asked. “That, to me, is very, very corrupt.”
This investigation puts Trump on a direct collision course with California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who is desperately trying to keep the project alive—even as it becomes an even bigger embarrassment.
Newsom and Biden have since thrown their weight behind a different high-speed rail project—one that will connect Los Angeles and Las Vegas and is privately funded. But Trump didn’t mention that one. Why? Because that project at least has some financial backing that isn’t straight out of the pockets of taxpayers.
The California high-speed rail boondoggle, on the other hand? A slow-motion train wreck that’s still burning through cash.
And now, with Trump personally leading the charge, there’s a very real chance that we’ll finally get some accountability. Because if there’s one thing Trump has proven time and time again, it’s that he knows how to build things on time and under budget—and he knows a scam when he sees one.
