

Annoying as many Californians may find President Trump’s rhetoric on the environment, they should agree that Washington deserves its money back squandered on the failed high-speed rail project.

Calling the captured funds a “bait and switch,” Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao has demanded around $2.5 billion in train funds back from Sacramento. Her argument is straightforward: regardless of the desirability of the train, the project morphed so dramatically from its original authorized proposal that the funds must be considered inapplicable.

Absurdly, state officials responded in a letter to the Federal Railroad Commission that the terms of the grant have not been breached, and that the stunted stretch of Central Valley track is still a big deal worthy of support.

There are a few reasons why Californians should play fair and accept Chao’s argument. First of course is the argument itself is fair. Imagine if the federal government had made a big grant to a state project to build a “big, beautiful wall” along its border with Mexico.

Now imagine the state slowly discovered it could not deliver anything like that wall, contended itself after huge overruns with a radically reduced fence-like construction, and pocketed the change.

That would be in effect a scam, just as keeping the federal high-speed rail grant money would be.

Second, this money is not just summoned forth out of thin air in a Washington. It is taxpayer money. Californians would be justifiably annoyed if, sticking with the failed wall analogy, Texas pocketed the billions.

Obviously, distributed out over California taxpayers, the $2.5 billion breaks out to a trivial per-person some. But it’s the principle of the thing—and a bad precedent to set. And after all, exactly because Californians pay such astronomical taxes, Sacramento is hardly hurting for cash. It has no emergency claim to keeping now misallocated federal cash, and no such claim to avoid paying it back.

Some are already complaining that it’s unaffordable to complete even the $16 billion mini-train track that Gov. Newsom authorized as the only feasible alternative to the original plan.

But if money is really that tight, the answer is as obvious as it was when the whole sorry high-speed rail saga began: scrap the train completely.

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