Speaking to a group of reporters on the White House lawn on Wednesday morning President Donald Trump confirmed that he'd be unilaterally revoking federal funds for the California High Speed Rail Authority's ongoing efforts to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco by rail. The project is intended to develop in stages, with the Initial Operating Segment connecting Bakersfield to Merced through the central valley, and plans to eventually extend to Sacramento and San Francisco in the north, as well as Los Angeles and San Diego in the south, also connecting to the proposed Brightline West rail project connecting Ontario, California to Las Vegas, Nevada. Primarily due to political roadblocks, the IOS "phase one" part of the project is significantly past its initial projected 2020 completion.
Trump announces he's pulling federal funding for high-speed rail in California
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-06-18T14:28:37.480Z
President Trump had this to say about the California High Speed Rail Authority; "A train, a railroad, going from San Francisco to LA, I think it's a hundred times over budget. One of the most incompetent things." When a reporter asks why federal funds are still flowing to the project in spite of the President's ire, he replies with a chilly, "I think we're not going to anymore. In fact, a little bit of a story, we're not gonna fund that anymore, it's out of control." Watching him say this, it's obvious that he's been inspired by the reporter's question to pull billions of dollars of allocated funding for an active California DOT transit project. He continues to spitball demonstrable falsehoods about the project without any documentation, saying "What is it, 30 or 40 times over budget?"
The IOS, around 170 miles of rail, are currently under construction across the comparatively uninhabited sections of central California. There isn't much economic benefit to connecting Bakersfield and Palmdale if it does not continue onward to the state's major economic hubs, and cancelling this project at this point would be tantamount to lighting tens of billions of dollars on fire, seemingly out of spite.
Once the IOS is completed, the project's Phase One would extend the dark grey line up to San Francisco and down to Anaheim, which was always the plan. This plan, which has been on the books since 2008, seems like a surprise to the President, who said "It doesn't go where it's supposed to. It's supposed to go from LA to San Francisco, but now because they don't have any money... they made it much shorter, because it no longer goes into the cities, it stops miles and miles outside of the cities."
A third segment of the project, called Phase Two, would add San Diego and Sacramento to the high-speed rail operation. As of 2023 San Diego's population was recorded at 1.388 million people, compared favorably to San Francisco's 808,000 and Sacramento's 526,000. All of these pale in comparison to the 9.66 million people living in Los Angeles County.
The project, when it was approved in 2008, projected phase one would be operational before 2033 at a cost of up to $38.5 billion. As of the end of 2023, the project had consumed $11.2 billion, and the estimate had been pushed up to $130 billion (not the up to $3.8 trillion that Trump accused). It's worth noting that even the original $38.5 billion approved in 2008 would be the equivalent of $58.63 billion today, when accounting for inflation. At worst, the project has doubled its projected costs.
According to hsr.ca.gov, the project is funded through a mix of California Air Resources Board "Cap-and-Trade" project funding, Proposition 1A, and federal grants. The Cap-and-Trade funding comes from selling future emissions reduction credits that the rail line would produce to corporations which will fall short of their greenhouse gas emissions cap limits in the state, working much in the same way Tesla sells emissions credits to Stellantis, for example. Proposition 1A is the state's 2008 high-speed rail bond measure, which authorized the state to issue $9.95 billion in general obligation bonds. It's the federal grants, worth around $4 billion in Biden-era infrastructure investment, that Trump says he will revoke, which could scrap the project altogether while it's in the middle of construction.
It seems unlikely that Trump has the power to unilaterally revoke already attributed federal funds, but his typically unconstitutional power grabs have met little pushback thus far, so his strategy of saying he'll do something he probably legally can't do will probably continue apace.