Maybe he can get Mexico to pay for it.
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Has anyone heard anything about the new Piedmont fleet? I remember hearing we got a grant that grew to replace it after the Circus Cars caught fire but I haven’t heard anything since.
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There were two grants awarded, totalling 177 million, that have not been disbursed so they are in the same limbo as all of NC’s rail grants that have been awarded but not spent.
The legislation enabling the grant programs came with an appropriation using the language “available until spent”. If Trump & Co win their fight these disbursements will only go ahead at the administration’s discretion. They might be suspended indefinitely. Making it go away entirely so even a future administration can’t follow through would require congress to repeal the enabling law.
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I can just sense the greatness America is becoming again!
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We will be greater if we aren’t wasting hundreds of millions and even hundreds of billions of dollars on fraud and abuse and dubious projects (and wars) for everyone else in the world instead of the US citizens here. More money they won’t have to tax us plebes for, or alternatively more smart investment in things that will actually help us. I am all for infrastructure, but I am fully aboard the audits and justification requirements underway that I think are LONG overdue. Goes back to Obama saying they need to cut out the waste too. Nothing new here discussed, other than someone finally willing to actually do it.
I know they’re examining the California high speed rail boondoggle, and that may get completely shut down. I would not mind that. I do hope the NC rail and East coast rail projects in general will ultimately happen.
Given what’s happening politically right now with rail spending being looked at (along with literally EVERYTHING else), had the Triangle embarked on an approved light rail or commuter rail project, you can be 100% assured it’d be on hold currently. So there’s that.
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Once the wallet inspector comes back my wallet will be better, actually
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Immediately calling the most ambitious rail project in the country’s most populated and most economically important state a boondoggle tells me that your position on rail and general government funding doesn’t come from a neutral place.
I don’t think that anyone wants to see the government abuse/waste money, but I also don’t think that the way that it’s being handled right now assures me (and many others) that going after waste is the actual desired result. Using any mechanism necessary including just firing folks in the 1 year probation period doesn’t assure me that wastefulness is actually being addressed, and threatening public employees like a bully doesn’t either.
One party has complete control of the two elected branches of the federal government and the majority on the appointed SCOTUS. The law of the land is the constitution and the powers laid out therein should be followed to address waste and abuse. What’s happening right now is the very definition of constitutional abuse because the Executive Branch does not have the power of the purse in this country. The country isn’t a privately held company (yet).
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Clinton fired 377,000 federal workers in his efforts to balance the budget. So far Trump has only fired around 30,000.
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“But the Reinventing Government project was nearly the opposite of the abrupt , chaotic Musk effort, say those who ran it or watched it unfold. It was authorized by bipartisan congressional legislation, worked slowly over [seven] years to identify inefficiencies and involved federal workers in re-envisioning their jobs.” Trump and Musk aren't the first to make deep cuts. Clinton-era Reinventing Government saved billions
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Get outta here with all that useful and important context!!! lmao
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Ouch. Triggered. Lmao.
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CAHSR has definitely made some questionable decisions. The idea of high-speed rail in California is a sound one, but the project as it stands today is questionable in terms of ROI.
We need to find something between the Tea Party/Trump/DOGE caucus that projects an image of wanting to gleefully (sadistically?) burn it all down, and the “business as usual” types who only care about funding, refuse to even talk about efficiency, can’t implement or govern worth crap, and wind up dumping billions down the drain on Consultants, Contractors, Studies, and Engagement, with very little in terms of outcomes to show for it.
Neither “big government”, nor “small government”: effective government. It’s not the size that matters, it’s how you use it.
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There is no doubt a good bit of inefficiency in Government agencies. But there is a better way to accomplish this then the Chainsaw approach.
Firing the people that run the nukes, and then realizing it a few days later and trying to rehire them back is not an efficient way to go about things. And will probably end up costing more to fix the mess.
This isn’t Musk taking over Twitter, this is national security.
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Let’s try and not get pulled ( 
) into this one. Please focus just on the agencies related to passenger rail. Easy to get side tracked ( 
) into making generalizations about the whole federal government with what’s going on.
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Bad faith audits and terminations are going to cripple any chance of the federal government conducting successful large projects in the future. Nothing good will ever get done if every four years a bunch of toddlers show up to paint shit on the walls, break all the furniture, cancel every project, and make everyone recite the Horst-Wessel-Lied while standing on one leg and rubbing their head. How can anyone take it seriously when it’s conducted by one of the least accountable contractors in US history–who happens to also be the richest man in the country?
I’m very bored of this. You can’t have urbanism without rail, and you can’t have rail without government assistance–just the same as highways. The only threat to the Cali HSR project is the potential for it to be terminated after all the capital that has already been sunk into it. THAT would be inefficiency. Not sure why anti-urbanists are on this forum cheering on that outcome.
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I mean, that’s what you’re doing. immediately defending a crazy boondoggle of an rail project. I’m just reacting to others’ opinions about our rail and the giant project in CA being potentially affected. I’m all for audits and justifying costs and saying “Hold Up” when things are askew. And things in California are most DEFINITELY askew on this project. The NY Times is definitely no MAGA fan, and even they quote experts as saying “it will never be operable.”
"Fourteen years later, construction is now underway on part of a 171-mile “starter” line connecting a few cities in the middle of California, which has been promised for 2030. But few expect it to make that goal.
Meanwhile, costs have continued to escalate. When the California High-Speed Rail Authority issued its new 2022 draft business plan in February, it estimated an ultimate cost as high as $105 billion. Less than three months later, the “final plan” raised the estimate to $113 billion.
The rail authority said it has accelerated the pace of construction on the starter system, but at the current spending rate of $1.8 million a day, according to projections widely used by engineers and project managers, the train could not be completed in this century.
As of now, there is no identified source of funding for the $100 billion it will take to extend the rail project from the Central Valley to its original goals, Los Angeles and San Francisco, in part because lawmakers, no longer convinced of the bullet train’s viability, have pushed to divert additional funding to regional rail projects."
so I’m gonna call it what it is: a boondoggle or HUGE waste of taxpayer money that could be better spent on other rail in other states (to whatever degree federal money is involved in the California rail project.)
Hopefully the numbers shake out for the infrastructure investment of rail on the East Coast but I have no problem with people looking at numbers before continuing on with the spending. It’s not as though any of this spending can’t wait a few months more since the completion of NC rail is years away anyhow. Hell we can’t even get frequent BUSES established here in Raleigh (BRT fiasco).
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I think everyone is splitting hairs on the definition of boondoggle.
work or activity that is wasteful or pointless but gives the appearance of having value.
“writing off the cold fusion phenomenon as a boondoggle best buried in literature”
a public project of questionable merit that typically involves political patronage and graft.
“they each drew $600,000 in the final months of the great boondoggle”
The trick is, the idea is fantastic - no questionable merit at all. But it’s been so colossally mismanaged that at this point it seems like wasteful and pointless spending.
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Bottom line is that the US is the richest and most advanced civiliazation in the history of civilizations and we can’t build a railroad?!
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California is the fifth largest economy in the world. And it’s two major metros are building rail transit on the regular. LA added like 3 or 4 new metro lines or extensions in the last 10 years and a people mover from LAX to the metro line is almost ready.
I don’t think we have a hill to stand on to question them since we can’t even build a hill in the first place.
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California can’t build HSR. The French rail company took at look at the project, and pulled their bid, seeing it was going to be a regulatory and bureaucratic nightmare. Since then they’ve started and finished high speed in Morocco. BrightLine did it in Florida, we will see if they can do it in California.
The California cluster f*&k has become the poster child for high speed in America. I suggested earlier we need to be focusing on what Brightline has done, and could do again, if we are going to counter the nay-sayers who see every rail project as a copy of this boondoggle in the central valley.
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