DOGE certainly has high-speed rail in its crosshairs. Before DOGE co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy stepped down to pursue a run for governor of Ohio, he called high-speed rail “a wasteful vanity project, burning billions in taxpayer cash, with little prospect for completion in the next decade… Time to end the waste.”

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz says he has been investigating the California High-Speed Rail project, accusing the nation’s first publicly funded high-speed rail system of wasting taxpayer money and its governing board of a lack of transparency regarding costs.

The California Office of the Inspector General warned that work on the initial segment could slip behind schedule.