In a series of letters that will likely soon be exhibits in a federal lawsuit, the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) has formally responded to the Trump Administration’s June preliminary decision to terminate the project’s federal grant agreements. Much is at stake – specifically the roughly $4 billion in federal grants that the Administration is trying to pull. As this article went to press, the Trump Administration had not yet made a final determination, per the grant agreements, to terminate. It likely will do so very soon, and California has already vowed to litigate. According to the New York Times, it would be one of the largest grant revocations in U.S. history.
And, oddly enough, the grant dispute could hinge, in part, on whether the California High-Speed Rail project is able to attract private investors. The Authority published a Request for Expressions of Interest (RFEI) for investors in late June.
Once a project has been in development as long as California High-Speed Rail (the Authority was created in 1996), history starts repeating itself. This is unfortunately not the project’s first time litigating a cancelled grant, or flirting with private investors for that matter. In 2019 the first Trump Administration cancelled a grant for the project, but the lawsuit over the cancellation was never actually resolved before the Biden Administration reversed the decision. In 2008, the project published an RFEI and a report on investor responses to it, but it never got around to actually structuring a portion of the project scope as an investible work package.
