Trump’s Proposed Cut Would Deal Serious Setback to California High-Speed Rail

The Trump administration’s plan, announced this week, to terminate $4 billion in grants to California’s bullet train project could delay the start of even limited passenger operations on the nation’s largest infrastructure project for what some analysts said could be as long as a decade.

Even if the state can eventually win a legal challenge or a future president elects to restore the money, the project, already plagued with delays and funding shortages, is facing one of the most serious setbacks in its 17-year history.

The project to link Los Angeles and San Francisco with a high-speed train that could make the trip in two hours and 40 minutes has already been scaled back numerous times, as costs spiraled and construction schedules faced repeated delays. Until now, however, the California High-Speed Rail Authority always had enough money in the bank to take incremental steps forward.

But over the last four years, the state has drawn down almost all of a $9 billion bond that voters approved in 2008. Losing the federal grants will put the project on a near starvation diet to complete even the limited, 171-mile initial segment in the Central Valley, linking Merced and Bakersfield, both of which are far from the state’s major population centers.

“I don’t think we are going to see electric trains running on track from Merced to Bakersfield for a long, long time,” said Louis Thompson, a railroad veteran who spent more than a decade as chairman of a state-appointed peer review panel for the rail project. “Not in 10 years with no federal money. This is reality, and reality is painful.”

If the Transportation Department moves forward with terminating the grants next month, as it has said it intends to do, it is likely that California will file suit to challenge the decision, a case that could drag on for years.