“President Trump has thought about this project, he’s talked about this project, and I think he was kind when he said that this project has been mismanaged,” Duffy told reporters.
But the most striking part of the conference may have been the LA crowd’s vocal protests. Beneath the sound of Duffy’s voice, video of the conference sounds like a hostile sports match, with near-constant waves of boos and chants.
“Build the rail! Build the rail!” protesters chanted at one point; at another, “We pay taxes, we want trains!” One protestor held up a cardboard sign: “Don’t delay our trains.”
Duffy, for his part, took a moment to acknowledge the protestors in the crowd. “These protestors should all be at the steps of Gavin Newsom’s mansion,” he said. “They should all talk to him about what happened here.”
The Trump-appointed director of the Department of Transportation criticized the project, which has been marred in delays and setbacks, as unnecessarily wasteful and inefficient. “Can California build a project with an allotted amount of time, with an allotted amount of money? Because right now, all the estimates have been wrong,” Duffy said.
As the LA Times reported a year ago, the project, which was originally meant to conclude in 2020, has no set end date. The initial phases of the project focus on the Central Valley, where more than 100 miles of the rail line are under construction. At that time, the state’s High-Speed Rail Authority expected a stretch of the line from Merced to Bakersfield would be completed in the early 2030s.
In a statement shared with KTLA-TV on Wednesday, California’s High-Speed Rail Authority anticipated, and refuted, Duffy’s criticisms.
“Of approximately $13 billion spent on the project, $10.5 billion have been funded exclusively by the State of California (not hundreds of billions) and those expenditures have created over $22 billion in economic impact,” the statement reads. “Every dollar of the project is accounted for and has been thoroughly reviewed by the independent Office of the Inspector General [whose] sole focus is improving oversight and accountability of the California high-speed rail project.”
In 2021, President Biden restored almost $1 billion in federal funds for the project, which the first Trump administration had previously blocked. In 2023, Biden also awarded a $3 billion grant to the high-speed rail project.
The Senate approved Duffy, a former U.S. representative and alumnus of MTV’s “The Real World,” by a 77-22 vote in January.
