California Governor Gavin Newsom’s diminished dream of connecting the city of Merced (population 83,964) to Bakersfield (population 390,233) has hit a snag. Several steel cables in a 636-foot-long bridge built to support construction of the project have corroded and snapped, forcing a new work stoppage on the years-long delayed project.

“California’s High-Speed Rail Is the Very Definition of a Boondoggle,” headlined a commentary by Adam B. Summers nearly one year ago. Plagued from the start by fanciful assumptions, the costs “quickly ballooned from $40 billion or $45 billion to $98.5 billion,” and Gov. Gavin Newsom said the project would “cost too much and take...
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California’s costly high-speed bullet train boondoggle has officially entered a zombie-like state of existence, neither truly alive nor fully dead.

“Thousands of pages of public records were removed from the California High Speed Rail Authority website in June,” Katy Grimes of the California Globe reports.

As monumental boondoggles go, it’s hard to top California’s bullet train.

It’s all about spending, expanding government, and ruling-class privilege.

After racking up bills of over $77 billion, California’s new governor announced that the high-speed rail project will be dramatically scaled back.

Governor Brown’s record leaves a dismal legacy.