What’s needed for San Francisco to LA to happen is we’re going to need the federal partner to say, ‘Get that done.’”

DOGE certainly has high-speed rail in its crosshairs. Before DOGE co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy stepped down to pursue a run for governor of Ohio, he called high-speed rail “a wasteful vanity project, burning billions in taxpayer cash, with little prospect for completion in the next decade… Time to end the waste.”

President Trump said Tuesday that he would investigate California’s high-speed rail plan, calling it “the worst-managed project” he has seen. “They have hundreds of billions of dollars of cost overruns,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “It’s impossible that something could cost that much.”

Trump and one of his key advisors, technology billionaire Elon Musk, have both been highly critical of the California High-Speed Rail Authority and its planned bullet-train project to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco by way of Fresno and the San Joaquin Valley.

The California Office of the Inspector General warned that work on the initial segment could slip behind schedule.