California’s high-speed trainwreck has lost yet another chief executive. Ian Choudri resigned recently following scrutiny of the rail authority’s spending, including an investigation by the Office of the Inspector General for the California High-Speed Rail Authority into roughly $600,000 in questionable travel expenses billed by consultants (with obviously no trips by train). His departure—and the dubious billing practices that led to it—is the latest sign of a project that has spent years woefully missing the mark. For the sake of millions of taxpayers, it’s time to finally end this badly derailed project.
Californians were originally promised an efficient way to get around the Golden State. In 2008, voters approved Proposition 1A, authorizing $9.95 billion in bonds to help build a fast rail connection between the state’s major population centers. The original proposal envisioned a trip between San Francisco and Los Angeles in less than three hours. At the time, the authority’s estimate for the broader system was about $45 billion. Today, the authority puts the first phase alone at an astounding $126 billion, while the Merced-to-Bakersfield segment is expected to cost nearly $35 billion.
Meanwhile, the state isn’t remotely close to delivering the trip voters imagined. Construction has concentrated on a 119-mile stretch in the Central Valley, while the current plan calls for initial passenger service between Merced and Bakersfield in 2033. The rail authority has scaled back the initial build to reduce costs—without satisfactorily explaining why costs have ballooned so much.
But even these scaled-back ambitions are proving exceptionally costly. California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office warned this year that available funding may be insufficient even to complete the Merced-to-Bakersfield segment. Extensions beyond the Central Valley face a funding gap measured in the tens of billions of dollars, with no clear way to close it.
Fortunately, federal officials have stepped in to scrutinize the authority’s performance. In 2025, the Federal Railroad Administration reviewed compliance with two grants totaling more than $4 billion and subsequently moved to terminate funding. California disputed the findings and challenged the terminations before dropping its lawsuit. California ostensibly dropped the suit after “deciding this administration was not a reliable partner,” an ironic assessment given California’s comically incompetent handling of the project.
As any California savvy traveler can attest, a train between Merced and Bakersfield is not the same service—not even remotely close—as a fast connection between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Riders would still need other transportation to travel between major cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, even after $35 billion flies off the train. Central Valley service is, of course, not worthless, but attaching such high financial stakes to such limited service makes ridership assumptions, connections and operating costs especially important. Yet, there’s no reason to believe that even this limited project makes any sense as an “investment.”
The California High-Speed Rail project has transformed into a textbook study of epic state-level fiscal mismanagement, and the time has come to finally bring it to a close. What was originally presented to voters as a cost-effective and transformative transit connection between Los Angeles and San Francisco has devolved into an endless sinkhole of taxpayer dollars, plagued by perpetual delays and ballooning budgets. Continuing to pour taxpayer dollars into a project whose costs have far outpaced any realistic economic or transit return is an unsustainable drain on California’s finances. California already has a “true deficit” of $20 billion, contrary to the claims of politicians.
State lawmakers must acknowledge the stark reality of the situation and officially sunset this mega-failure. And going forward, they must firmly reject similarly speculative mega-scale proposals bound to fail.
Choudri’s resignation will not fix California high-speed rail. A new executive will very likely not improve management, and more importantly, leadership changes cannot close a multibillion-dollar gap. It’s time for California to get its finances back on track and for politicians to keep high-speed rail off their platforms.
Ross Marchand is the executive director of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.