It’s the worst managed project I think I’ve ever seen,” Donald Trump said last week. “I built for a living and I built on time — on budget. ... It’s impossible that something could cost that much.”

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.”

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.

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

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.”