The Democratic reaction to Republicans winning back the White House and control of Congress initially focused on the theme that swing voters care far more about the economy that they do the bold cultural initiatives embraced by the left. But there was also the argument that the party cares too little about actually governing in an effective way. The most frequently cited example was the Biden White House’s success in getting Congress to provide $7.5 billion to fund a national network of electric vehicle chargers in 2021. Due to sluggish implementation, more than two years later, only seven had been built.
But then this indictment of Democrats moved beyond Washington, D.C. This came when The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein — a progressive icon after co-founding Vox — assailed California’s handling of the state bullet-train project. In a podcast, Irvine native Klein cited the lack of progress since 2008, when state voters approved $9.95 billion in bond seed money for the project, and since 2009 and 2010, when the Obama White House directed that $3.5 billion in federal funds go toward it. “It is a signal failure of liberalism that it could not be built in a blue state when the federal government was giving them billions of dollars, when the state was putting in billions of dollars,” he said. “And, by the way, what they’re actually doing is building a leg of it right now that nobody really wanted — this Merced to Bakersfield leg. They don’t have the money to finish that leg” — much less the promised statewide network.
Fast forward two weeks, and Klein has fresh cause for what he called his “fury” over the bullet train fiasco. On Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom held a celebratory news conference in Kern County where he announced the state was poised to start laying track on the project’s initial Central Valley route. Newsom asserted that steady progress had been made toward the original 2008 goal of providing trains able to get from downtown Los Angeles to downtown San Francisco in less than three hours. He dismissed critics and their “cynicism,” suggesting the project deserved far better.
But Newsom only inspires more cynicism. It’s irrational and irresponsible to dismiss the many accurate critiques from the Legislative Analyst’s Office, an official engineering “peer review” and journalists who have documented a decade-plus of broken state promises. Examples:
— Voters were told in 2008 the $43 billion project would be completed by 2020. But no route is close to done, and the price tag is now at least $135 billion.
— Voters were told in 2008 that private investors would be eager to invest in the project, a claim repeated Monday by state Sen. Dave Cortese, D-San Jose. But California High-Speed Rail Authority analysts warned months before Proposition 1A’s approval that private investors were very unlikely to team with the state because the measure banned public subsidies if the system was losing money. The Schwarzenegger istration never shared this with voters. The analysts were exactly right. No credible private partner has ever come forward.
— The only conceivable way a bullet train could get from Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than three hours is if it can go over 200 miles per hour for much of the way. But facing extreme obstacles in acquiring land in Silicon Valley and northern Los Angeles suburbs, the state gave up on its original plan — way back in 2011! Instead, a “blended” system reliant on regular commuter rail for the last 40 miles or more on each end of the trip was pushed through by Gov. Jerry Brown. Coverage of this decision noted that even with this change, the state didn’t remotely have enough money to build a true San Jose to San Fernando Valley bullet train.
This is only the short list of all that has gone wrong with a project on course to be the biggest public works boondoggle in U.S. history. Newsom should have listened in 2014 when a wonky, well-informed state leader announced he had concluded the troubled project no longer was a worthwhile use of billions in taxpayer funds in a state with so many infrastructure needs. That leader: Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom.
