Waste Watch: California's $15 Billion Train to Nowhere

California's high-speed rail project may be the most expensive train ride that nobody will ever take.

In 2008, voters approved a plan to build a bullet train connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles in under three hours. Eighteen years later, California has spent more than $15 billion, hasn't laid a single mile of track, and is still struggling to complete a heavily scaled-back route through the Central Valley.

The project has gotten so bad that even Gavin Newsom admitted in a recently resurfaced video that the project was unlikely to “materialize in our lifetime.”

While the trains have not materialized, something else has in its place: more than 130,000 pages of environmental review paperwork – enough that, if stacked together, would stand 40 feet tall and weigh 1,300 pounds.

A new investigation by Christopher Rufo and Kenneth Schrupp for City Journal investigated what taxpayers got for the more than $677 million they have spent on environmental reviews alone.

“Some of the bullet-train reports include ridiculous measures,” note Rufo and Schrupp. “One proposed that biologists count bumblebees, one by one. Another outlined when a contractor was allowed to break down woodrat stick huts. Still others contemplated using dogs to sniff for lizard scat”. Some of these measures have led to costly orders. Contractors have requested $480,000 “to dig small burrows for mammals by hand” and $352,490 for lizard surveys and reports.

But the real scandal may be who is profiting from the mess.

Rufo and Schrupp found that several companies that helped bankroll the original 2008 ballot initiative went on to receive enormous contracts for environmental reviews. AECOM, WSP, HNTB, and Parsons Brinckerhoff collectively received $286 million for high-speed-rail-related environmental work.

The political connections run deep. The companies and their PACs have contributed to Newsom's campaign and those of other California Democrats. One former HNTB employee, Ian Choudri, has even become the project's chief executive.

For the contractors getting rich off the project, the trains are right on schedule… for every other Californian, not so much.