Opinion: House's “anti-HSR” budget provision could revive talks about CA HSR's (in)utility

Marc Joffe unpacks the recently approved budget from the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, which pulls the plug on federal funding to California's disastrous high-speed rail. While this won't automatically spell doom for CA HSR, Joffe believes it could “trigger a renewed debate” about the project, and what's more feasible and beneficial than a $120 bil Train to Nowhere. From the Cato Institute.

In March, California’s High‐Speed Rail Authority told the state legislature that existing funding sources were insufficient to finance the construction of the initial 171-mile operating segment linking Madera to Bakersfield. At the time, Authority management thought that it could obtain an additional $8 billion in federal grants, which it hoped would be enough to close the funding gap.

The new House budget appears to thwart that ambition, but there are multiple caveats. The Senate’s version of the budget almost certainly will not contain a similar prohibition of California High‐Speed Rail funding, and the House prohibition would then need to survive a conference committee negotiation. Further, the prohibition only applies to the FY 2024 budget. It would have to be renewed annually until California either abandons the high‐speed rail project or finds an alternative source of funding.

So, inclusion of the anti‐HSR provision in the budget is unlikely to kill the project on its own, but perhaps it will trigger a renewed debate about high‐speed rail at the federal level. Such a conversation is essential because if the project continues along its current trajectory, its sponsors will ultimately require tens of billions of federal funding. And the California project is seen by advocates as the first part of a nationwide high‐speed rail network that would require hundreds of billions in federal funding. In 2021, Representative Seth Moulton (D-MA) introduced a bill that would have spent $205 billion of federal funds on a nationwide high‐speed network. Had that bill passed, the total cost would likely have multiplied amid cost overruns and operating losses.

This article originally appeared in the Cato Institute. Read the whole thing here.