LOS ANGELES — President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have California’s $100 billion high-speed rail project in their crosshairs — but Democrats are the biggest threat to its future.
While Trump is trying to eliminate the project’s federal funding, it’s state lawmakers in charge of deep-blue California who control the vast majority of the money it needs to succeed. And that Democrat-dominated bloc is signaling growing resistance amidst financial negotiations now getting underway.
California voters largely back the high-speed project, according to a new POLITICO-UC Berkeley Citrin Center survey. Roughly two-thirds of voters said they support the effort, with the figure climbing to 82 percent among Democrats. But the state’s funding stream is finite, with the potential for even deeper cuts from the federal government, forcing lawmakers to choose between supporting high-speed rail at the current rate or throwing their weight behind other climate programs.
“Is it at the top of my priority list? I’ll give you a hard ‘no’ on that,” said Assemblymember Corey Jackson, a Democrat from Riverside County in Southern California.
