California promised a rail line for $33 billion. The project is over budget and faces long delays, with no destination in sight

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.”

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.”