Kudos to President Donald Trump for moving to cut off the spigot of federal funds for the California High-Speed Rail project during the first month of his second term.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Thursday that $4 billion in funding, slated for projects that are part of a promised bullet train from Merced to Bakersfield, will be reviewed. "For too long, taxpayers have subsidized the massively over-budget and delayed California High-Speed Rail project," Duffy explained.
Someone had to say that the scheme is over, it didn't work and it won't get another dime.
Duffy also noted that if Californians really want a fast train from L.A. to San Francisco (the original plan) or Merced to Bakersfield (the placeholder scheme), they can have it. They just have to pay for it.
But who wants to pay for a project that already is more than a decade late and obscenely overbudget? Not Trump, I am happy to report. How did we get here?
The HSR boondoggle started as a vanity project peddled by Democrats who argued that a fast train would help Golden State efforts to combat climate change.  But there never was a compelling need for a high-speed locomotive, not when planes can fly from L.A. to the Bay Area in around 90 minutes.
In 2008, California voters approved a bond measure that was supposed to raise funds for High-Speed Rail's expected $33 billion budget, a project that was supposed to be completed in 2020.  Two years after 2020, the cost estimate was $105 billion. Seventeen years after 2008, there is no bullet train.
"I really wish we could take this back to the voters," GOP California Assemblywoman Alexandra Macedo told me. It's a bridge too far to ask voters to endure watching their tax dollars get sucked into a project that probably won't be finished, ever. "I don't think there's even going to be a Merced to Bakersfield" line, Macedo offered, after she rattled off expenses —  mortgages, rent, groceries — her squeezed San Joaquin Valley constituents are struggling t...