00:00Today, I'm going to explain why California's high-speed rail is seeking another $400 million
00:05from the Trump administration, even though the Trump administration has already clawed
00:09back $4 billion over what it says are violations of federal guidelines.
00:13California voters approved the high-speed rail project back in 2008 in a ballot initiative,
00:17but what they thought they were getting was a train that would go from LA to San Francisco
00:22in under three hours and that would be finished by 2020 and would cost around about $30 billion.
00:28Instead, the train is still unfinished.
00:30In fact, not an inch of track has been laid as of today in 2026, and the cost has skyrocketed
00:36above $200 billion, although the state says it can do it for about $120, $130 billion if
00:42the train just runs on a single track.
00:44And the train is no longer even going from LA to San Francisco, certainly not in under
00:48three hours.
00:49The Trump administration has been very skeptical of this project, both in the first term and
00:53in the second.
00:54President Trump held back a billion dollars that was supposed to go to the project back
00:59in 2019, but he wasn't the first person to doubt the project.
01:02In fact, that was Governor Gavin Newsom, who said in his first speech to the California
01:06state legislature that the train would cost too much and take too long.
01:10So he canceled it, except for a portion in the rural Central Valley, and that's the portion
01:15that California continues to want to build.
01:18The bet that the California High-Speed Rail Authority is making is that Trump won't be around
01:22forever, because when Trump canceled that $1 billion back in 2019, Biden restored it as
01:27soon as he came to office.
01:28And so California's high-speed rail enthusiasts are betting that a Democrat will win in 2028,
01:34and they'll get the funding they need to complete the long-awaited train to nowhere.
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