In 2014, Gov. Gavin Newsom knew that the high-speed rail was a failure. Despite that, he kept collecting federal funds for it. You can’t just listen to this and believe it. Newsom also wasted California taxpayer money. I put a transcript at the end. That way you get the feel for how a sociopathic politician can lie, trick the public, waste our money, and laugh about it.
Gavin Newsom confesses about high speed rail: “this project is not going to materialize in our lifetime.”
Yet he continues to BS taxpayers about it after wasting our money on this boondoggle. This dude needs to be in prison for fraud. pic.twitter.com/VAYth1JNQr
— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) August 16, 2026
Do you remember when this sociopathic governor shamelessly blamed Trump for this fiasco in July, 2025?
In July 2025, the Trump administration pulled $4 billion in federal funding for California’s high-speed rail project, citing the state’s failure to lay any tracks after spending $15 billion over 16 years. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said, “Federal dollars are not a blank check — they come with a promise to deliver results.”
Purchasing the trains was a key milestone. Federal officials concluded there was “no viable path” to completing the segment on time. And California had promised to connect “major metropolitan cities” but could now deliver only a substantially reduced system that “may connect two random endpoints.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom called the federal withdrawal of funding a “political stunt to punish California,” and state Attorney General Rob Bonta promptly sued “to stop Trump’s politically motivated attack on high-speed rail.” …
The high-speed rail authority was blamed…
However, a CBS California investigation found it was the California High-Speed Rail Authority that repeatedly failed to meet its own deadlines to buy the trains — a key requirement in the federal grant agreement — then quietly dropped its lawsuit weeks after missing the new deadline. It promised a federal judge it would meet.
Transcript of Gavin Newsom from 2014 –
“I was out there promoting a $33 billion project; I was out there promoting ridership that was 55% higher than the current projected ridership. I was there promoting a third of the money coming from the private sector, 25 to 33% from the federal government; I was out there promoting the fact that this would generate revenue and not cost taxpayers a subsidy, was that they’re promoting it, and none of those things now are taking shape.”
“It’s a 68-plus-billion-dollar project they just announced two months ago. Went up another billion just for this new 130 miles per hour. Started with 33 billion; it went to 96. We value-engineered it, so it’s no longer “quote-unquote” high-speed rail; it’s higher-speed rail. We wildly overstated the ridership projections; we manipulated some of the revenue projections.”
“There’s only one true high-speed rail system in the world that generates real profit. I thought there were two, and I remember when the President of France was here a few months ago;I complimented him on being one of the two, and he laughed, and his ministers laughed. I said, “What do you mean? They said, “Well, don’t believe what you read about us generating profits on our high-speed rail. The only one is Osaka that generates, and that’s a different kind of concentration, urban concentration. “
Taxpayers are going to subsidize it!!!
“So this is going to be a subsidy. The bonds are, you double the cost of the bonds as the actual cost to the taxpayers of repaying them.
“I mean, it’s a burden politically speaking. Candidly, I was there with Schwarzenegger and Tony Blair on the screen. I’ll never forget it. Governor Pataki from New York State, all celebrating cap and trade. Not one person when we advance. I was talking about money going to high speed. We’re talking about energy efficiency programs. We’re talking about retrofitting buildings. I was vocally concerned with my legislative colleagues up there about taking the cap-and-trade money.
When you set out a five-year capital plan, as the governor did, Burden actually read, which showed 56.7 million dollars of capital expenditures, 25.6 going just for the high-speed rail, getting close to half that money, not for the deferred maintenance needs, not for local transit projects up and down the state, not for real jobs, real ones that are, they’re desperately needed. Analysis would conclude that there’s no private-sector money and no capacity to build it. But that said, if that were the process, you would kill the project. Of course, as you break with the tribe, there’s consequences. I doubt it very much. Even in the most optimistic assessments of the next decade, the facts seem overwhelming that this project is not going to materialize at our lectern.”
