Eighteen years after California voters approved Proposition 1A's $10 billion bond in 2008 on the promise of a 220-mph train from San Francisco to Los Angeles in under three hours by 2020, the state has spent $15.5 billion, laid zero miles of track, and watched the full-system estimate climb to $126 billion (with a $231 billion worst case). After the Trump administration clawed back $4 billion in federal grants, Governor Gavin Newsom and the legislature locked in a flat $1 billion a year from cap-and-trade auction revenue through 2045 — turning temporary seed funding into a twenty-year consulting annuity while pushing affordable housing, transit, and clean air down to Tier 3.
The waste isn't in a single cartoon envelope of cash; it's in the compounding across a project with no permanent in-house engineering staff that pays outside consultant engineers $427,000 per head versus $131,000 for state employees. Over $677 million went to produce 130,000 pages of environmental review (a 40-foot-tall stack weighing 1,300 pounds, including $480,000 to dig small mammal burrows by hand and $352,000 for lizard surveys) paid largely to four engineering giants — Parsons Brinckerhoff, HNTB, WSP, and AECOM — three of which were major donors to the 2008 ballot campaign that created the project. Meanwhile, on the 65-mile Fresno stretch (CP 2-3), Dragados-Flatiron Joint Venture used 597 change orders plus May 2026's $537.3 million Change Order 427 settlement to push a $1.365 billion contract past $3 billion.