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California’s High Speed Railroad Bureau sued the Trump administration on Thursday over the cancellation of multi-billion dollar federal funding.
The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California by state Attorney General Rob Bonta comes the day after the Federal Railroad Administration pulled $4 billion from a project intended to be built in the Central Valley. The lawsuit seeks declarative and pressing relief and challenges the legality of the decision.
The lawsuit calls the administration’s actions “arbitrarily, whimsical, abuse of discretion and threatens to bring about great economic damage to central valleys, states and states, contrary to the law.” It portrays Department of Transport Secretary Sean Duffy and the Director of Acting Hula as defendants, detailing and detailing President Trump’s “personal animus” towards the project and years of criticism of it. Trump previously deducted funds from the train during his first term.
The lawsuit calls the president’s past statements about the project’s budget untrue. The project is about $100 billion above the budget from the original proposal of $33 billion. Trump previously said it was “thousands of billions of dollars.”
“Trump’s federal grants for the California High Speed Railroad Political Railroad,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement Thursday. “Punishing California is yet another political stunt, in reality, it is a heartless assault on the Central Valley, where they make a real job and livelihood.
The fast train to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles was originally scheduled to be completed in 2020, but last year the entire route was environmentally cleaned, but some of the lines have not been completed and construction is underway in Central Valley. The Trump administration began a compliance review in February after Republican lawmakers called for an investigation into the project and demanded it be refunded.
A 310-page review found a serious failure in the project, missed the deadline due to a lack of budget and its assessment, and was seen as “no viable path.” In two letters rebutting the findings, the project’s CEO, Ian Choudri, said the review was filled with inaccuracies that misrepresented the project’s progress.
In early July, Choudri asked the Railway Bureau to delay the decision and requested another meeting. Within two weeks, the Trump administration instead canceled the funds.
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