On the heels of another debate among California’s candidates for governor, the state received more bad news about the failing high-speed rail project. Any serious candidate for governor should commit to ending the high-speed rail scam once and for all.
The price tag for the high-speed rail has ballooned again, this time to a whopping $231 billion.
That is almost exactly $200 billion more than the initial promised price tag back in 2008, when California Democrats had promised that the entire project would be done by 2020. The current deadline for the full Los Angeles-San Francisco rail is set for 2040, for now, but the project still doesn’t have the funding it needs to come anywhere close to completing it. The grand strategy now is for California to try to persuade private investors that the project is profitable, an uninspiring pitch for a project that is nearly $200 billion over budget and some 20 years behind schedule.
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The high-speed rail’s “progress” is so pathetic that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has been reduced to bragging about the union jobs the project has created. It is a bloated jobs program funneling taxpayer money to unions, which Newsom considers a win. Meanwhile, in early 2025, Newsom celebrated that the rail was “beginning” the “track-laying phase.” Earlier this year, Newsom boasted about a track being laid at a logistics hub in Wasco. But those tracks are freight tracks for the delivery of high-speed rail components, not high-speed rail tracks.
So, no, the high-speed rail has not seen any track laid, now six years removed from when the project was supposed to be entirely completed. And the price tag continues to go up.
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The top Democratic candidates for governor are committed to finishing the high-speed rail, only willing to pay lip service to the idea of reining in the project. As California has spent year after year with increasing taxes, increasing spending, and growing budget deficits, the project has (like much of the state government) been nothing more than a money furnace, with a deadline that is constantly moving out of reach. If California’s Democratic candidates for governor were serious about turning around the state, they would spike the project on their first day on the job.
But they are not serious, and the next Democrat will continue to burn billions on this train to nowhere. Any Californian expecting a Democrat to come in and do anything differently than the Democrats who have been destroying the state for years is being taken for a ride. The high-speed rail is a failure of the California Democratic Party, and it will be an anchor on the state’s budget and on people’s tax burdens until it is buried for good.