California’s high-speed rail project connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco is now estimated to cost $126 billion, a rail authority board member said in an interview released by CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday.
But the High-Speed Rail Authority, according to its 2026 Business Plan issued in February, forecasts $39.3 billion in capital funding through 2045, a shortfall of around $87 billion.
“It is a big gap to fill,” board member Anthony Williams said, “[but] we have an understanding of how to get there and to fill that gap.”
The project, approved by voters in 2008, was supposed to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles by high-speed rail for around $33 billion and a completion date of 2020.
“We’re now in 2026,” Republican Congressman Vince Fong of Bakersfield said in the interview. “There are no trains. There’s no track laid. It was a complete bait and switch. The business plan that was put out in 2008 was very theoretical. You know, ‘This is what we think is gonna happen.’ And it became very clear that they didn’t have the specifics worked out.”
Toks Omishakin, who became California’s secretary of transportation in 2022, admitted that mistakes had been made and a lot of the project’s criticism is “very fair.”
“I don’t think the voters fully understood, and neither did we, in the public sector, what it was gonna take to actually get this project delivered,” he said.
Williams admitted that when construction started, there wasn’t enough financing to complete the rail line.
“It wasn’t [enough funding]. Let’s be real. We had a lot to learn. We had a lot of growth to do,” he said. “It’s arguable whether ... we should have been clearer about that.”
In July 2025, the Federal Railroad Administration terminated approximately $4 billion in unspent federal funding for the project.
“This is California’s fault,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy.
“Gov. Newsom and the complicit Democrats have enabled this waste for years. Federal dollars are not a blank check—they come with a promise to deliver results. After over a decade of failures, [California High-Speed Rail Authority’s] mismanagement and incompetence has proven it cannot build its train to nowhere on time or on budget.
“It’s time for this boondoggle to die.”
The Authority’s inspector general issued a report in February 2025 noting issues with the project, including that the agency would likely not complete the Merced to Bakersfield portion by the intended year of 2033.
Omishakin said they believe the Merced to Bakersfield line can be done without federal funding.
“This initial segment, we believe so. The ultimate 494 miles of building this out without the federal government’s help will be challenging. There’s no doubt about that,” he said.
Lou Thompson, who sat on California’s High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group until 2024, said the project can’t, and shouldn’t, be done without federal funding since a lot of the benefits are public.
“A lot of the benefits of the project, the reason why you build a project, is public. Pollution reduction, congestion reduction, improved safety, comfort, reliability—all of those things are public benefits,” he said.
The Epoch Times reached out to Newsom’s office and the High-Speed Rail Authority for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.
