The beleaguered California high-speed rail project was back in the news this week after the state legislature held hearings at which the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office testified.

The LAO’s office really didn’t have much to say, because the California High-Speed Rail Authority has not turned in its 2025 Project Update Report complete and on-time. (CHSRA did submit a document purporting to be the 2025 PUR by the March 1 deadline, but that document was incomplete in that it did not have (a) schedule updates or (b) cost updates, and those are the only two things lawmakers want to know. CHSRA says it will submit the full update this summer.)

But the LAO was able to pull from last year’s cost estimates and report that CHSRA is still $7 billion short of the funds needed to complete the 171-mile segment from Merced to Bakersfield and make it operational, and so far CHSRA “has not put forward a specific plan to meet this funding gap.”

From the LAO report:

This will not come as a surprise to any longtime ETW readers – see our December 8, 2023 article “California HSR’s New $3.1 Billion Fed Grant Still $7B Short of Merced-Bakersfield Completion.” The article explains that the $9.3 billion in “Other” costs includes $1.2 billion to build stations, $3.3 billion to build track and electric catenary, $561 million to buy six high-speed trainsets, $418 billion million to build a maintenance facility, $1.5 billion in overhead, plus $1.3 billion in money already spent on the “bookend” commuter rail track the high-speed trains will share with other, slower trains

But the fact that it was LAO saying it, on camera, made another round of headlines, prompting Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to bemoan on X, “Now California says they need an additional $7B to fall out of the sky just for a 171-mile train from Merced to Bakersfield. What a joke! The state’s train to nowhere was supposed to cost around $33 billion and be done by 2020.”

In addition to being $7 billion short (pending more cost increases likely to come this summer), Duffy and the Trump Administration are trying to make it $11 billion short by clawing back the $929 million appropriated by Congress in 2010 (but not yet spent) and the $3.1 billion in grant money from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law (also not spent yet). As with the attempted clawback in the first term, this will wind up in federal court to decide.

And even if they can connect Merced and Bakersfield with an operable system, the state still has no plans for finding an additional $36 billion to get from Merced to the Bay Area, or an additional $53 billion on top of that to get from Bakersfield through L.A. to Anaheim.

Reminder: If you want to understand why the excesses of this particular project do not necessarily reflect badly on high-speed rail in general, read my February 2019 article on the Seven Worst Practices utilized to create, define, and fund this project.