By now, everyone is familiar with the abysmal failure that is California’s high-speed rail project. What they might not know is that even a .50-caliber bullet couldn’t put a dent in the 130,000 pages of environmental reports accompanying this monument to government incompetence, arguably one of the greatest infrastructure failures in American history.
EXCLUSIVE: California has spent $618 million on environmental impact reports for its doomed high-speed rail project. We printed out all 130,000 pages and tried to shoot a .50-caliber bullet through them. https://t.co/l85T5hya07
— Christopher Rufo (@christopherrufo) October 21, 2026
Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, detailed that mountain of paperwork in a report for City Journal. The publication used two AI systems to scan environmental documents linked on the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s website, catalog the files, and add up their page counts. Both returned totals exceeding 130,000 pages, a figure a state spokesperson refused to confirm but did not deny.
According to Rufo, the environmental requirements behind that paperwork have helped bog down a project originally supposed to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles by 2020. Among the more absurd examples he highlights are requirements to count individual bumblebees to avoid destroying underground colonies or killing overwintering queens, use specially trained dogs to sniff out endangered blunt-nosed leopard lizards, restrict the removal of certain birds’ nests, and even the construction of an overhead tube intended in part to reduce noise that could affect local bird populations.
All of it, of course, done the California way: in the most complicated, restrictive, and expensive manner possible.
California hasn't built its bullet train because the state has required 130,000 pages of environmental reports, making absurd demands like: • counting bumblebees one by one • rebuilding woodrat stick huts • hiring specialized dogs to sniff lizard scat https://t.co/ojQzp3NUkX
— Christopher Rufo (@christopherrufo) October 21, 2026
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To make matters worse, but entirely predictable, the report also details failures of state oversight and a cozy arrangement in which companies helped bankroll the project’s approval, then landed lucrative contracts to carry it out.
AECOM, WSP, HNTB, and Parsons Brinckerhoff each donated more than $60,000 to support the 2008 ballot measure and have a history of contributing to Democrat politicians in California. Those same firms were paid $38 million, $61 million, $86 million, and $101 million, respectively, to perform high-speed rail environmental reviews, according to data obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
In the Golden State, politicians and their donors run the show, and reap the rewards. But it is Californians left no better off and with a staggering bill.
For a state that boasts the world’s fourth-largest economy, an achievement Gov. Gavin Newsom loves to tout, Sacramento seems remarkably incapable of learning from the efficiency of the private sector that built it.
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