California high speed rail has $4.3B in unspent federal grants. Could Trump take it away?
High-speed rail development and construction in Fresno and the central San Joaquin Valley has consumed more than $11.4 billion in state and federal funds, with about $1.7 billion more budgeted through the end of the 2024-25 fiscal year in June.
President Donald Trump promised this month to investigate the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s project because of cost overruns, delays and a reduced scope for early operations.
The threat by a president who has been critical of the state’s high-speed rail project was already apparent to former California High-Speed Rail Authority CEO Brian Kelly as he ended his six-year tenure at the agency last summer. Not only would finishing Merced-Bakersfield be at risk, he suggested, but so could any hope of future extensions beyond the Valley to San Jose, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
“I look at how we are doing Merced and Bakersfield with those extensions, and we’ve still got to get more federal money to get them done,” Kelly told The Bee in an August 2024 interview. “And the capital cost is so high (to move beyond the Valley), you got to have a big investment. What’s going to be needed for San Francisco to LA to happen is we’re still going to need the federal partner to say, ‘Get that done.’”
Kelly expected the outcome of the presidential election to be a huge pivot point: “You’re either going to have a federal partner or you’re not.”
Since 2009, the California High-Speed Rail Authority has been awarded more than $6.8 million through an array of federal grants and programs, and has applications pending since last fall with the U.S. Department of Transportation for another $216.6 million.
Much of that money has helped pay for the three sections of construction under way in the Valley spanning from the northern fringe of Madera to the community of Shafter in Kern County. The state has also kicked in billions more from Proposition 1A, a 2008 bond measure, and from California’s greenhouse gas-reduction program.
But while the first $2.5 billion in federal grants awarded by the Obama administration in 2009 under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has been fully spent — matched by an equal amount of state money — almost $4.3 billion remains unspent as of November 2024. Most of that was awarded by the Department of Transportation under the Biden administration. The unspent federal funds conceivably could be subject to cancellation by a hostile Trump administration.
It might be a déjà vu situation for one of the unspent chunks of cash. One Federal Railroad Administration grant of almost $1 billion, awarded in 2010, was canceled by the Trump administration in 2019. California sued the federal government over the already-appropriated grant, and it was restored by the Biden administration in 2021 in a settlement of the state’s lawsuit.
With Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk — who is heading the president’s advisory Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE — both antagonistic toward California’s bullet-train project, the potential exists that the 2010 grant may once again be in jeopardy, along with about $3.3 billion in more recent grants from the Biden-era Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
The money in jeopardy includes:
▪ A grant of about $24 million awarded in 2021 from the Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) program for safety and construction work in and near Wasco in Kern County.
▪ A grant of about $25 million awarded in 2022 from the RAISE program for design of extensions of extensions of the Valley rail work north into Merced and south into Bakersfield.
▪ A grant of about $20 million awarded in 2023 from the RAISE program for renovation of Fresno’s historic Southern Pacific Railroad Depot, which will be incorporated into the plans for a future high-speed rail passenger station.
▪ A grant of about $202 million awarded in 2023 from the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements (CRISI) program to design, acquire right of way for, and build six grade separations in and near Shafter in Kern County.
▪ A grant of about $307 million awarded in 2023 to help pay for right-of-way acquisition, design and construction of Fresno’s high-speed rail station, purchasing six trainsets for testing and operations, and building trainset facilities.
The authority’s goal is to build out 171 miles of route and tracks between downtown Bakersfield to downtown Merced with trains operational and carrying passengers between 2030 and 2033.
Valley cities along the future rail route, including in downtown Fresno, Merced and Bakersfield, are pinning at least part of their hopes for downtown revitalization and economic development on a boost from state-of-the-art passenger stations now in the planning stage.
The cost of ultimately building a 520-mile route connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles by way of Fresno and the Valley with electric-powered trains at speeds up to 220 mph ranges from an estimated $88 billion and $130 billion in 2024 dollars. The estimates depend on when construction could commence, the cost of tunneling through mountains and the price of materials.
Kelly said it is impossible to overstate the importance of federal participation in such a large project.
“If you look at countries around the world where they have built out full high-speed rail networks, like China, their national governments went all in,” Kelly said. “I mean, they just said, ‘We’re doing this,’ and they spent billions to build. And it’s the same thing in European countries too. When they say they want to do it, they go do it, and it gets done.”
He said the same held for European nations with mature high-speed rail programs, such as France, Italy and Spain — the destination for a Bee reporting trip in 2011 to examine that nation’s bullet-train system.
“I think you get the trains operating in the Valley where we’ve already constructed so many things, you advance the design work (for other parts of the state) and refine those costs, and you work with our federal partner on long-term funding,” Kelly said in August. “That’s the model, but I can’t give dates (for extending operations to San Jose or Los Angeles) because if (Trump) wins the election in November, I don’t know.”
This story was originally published February 11, 2025 at 5:30 AM with the headline "California high speed rail has $4.3B in unspent federal grants. Could Trump take it away?."
