As promised, the Trump administration is looking to cancel $4 billion in funding already approved for California's beleaguered high-speed rail project, which was already on life support. But Scott Wiener, at least, says this isn't "a death knell."

A review launched in February by the Trump administration is now complete, and a smiling Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy — whose only experience with transportation management is as a contestant on MTV's Road Rules in the early aughts — went on Fox News this morning to announce its findings.

"We have $4 billion that has been authorized to go to California to build this project and we don’t want to invest in boondoggles," Duffy said. "We're gonna give them 30 days to respond to us ... if they don't make a good case, we're gonna take that money back."

We know that Trump and his cohort hate California and have no use for the state, and Trump once before tried to cancel funding for the high-speed rail project in his first term — even though the vast majority of the monies for the project, 82%, have so far come from the state. And today's 350-page report from the Department of Transportation is a reiteration of all the gripes about this very-over-budget, long-delayed project, which in the near term may only produce a 119-mile rail segment connecting two parts of the Central Valley.

"[They've] been laying the groundwork for this for month[s]," says state Senator Scott Wiener, speaking to the Chronicle today. "They’re completely hostile, not just to California high-speed rail, but rail in general and public transportation. This is a Neanderthal administration that probably thinks public transportation is a Communist plot."

The California High-Speed Rail Authority has 37 days to issue a response to the administration, and in a statement they call the report "misguided."

"The Authority will fully address and correct the record in our formal response," the agency said, per the LA Times.

The authority has spent roughly $14 billion so far in building out the infrastructure for the railway that would eventually connect Bakersfield to Merced, if and when it's completed in 2030 or 2033. Connections to the Caltrain tracks on the Peninsula, and to LA to the south, would come in a later part of "Phase 1." And "Phase 2," if we ever get there, would build links to Sacramento to the north, and San Diego to the south.

The original — perhaps poorly conceived — estimate for the project back in 2008 was $33 billion, but that didn't seem to take into account the massive rise in construction costs that would occur in the 17 years to follow, nor the massive logistical and legal issues the project would face, particularly in acquiring land and tunneling into the Los Angeles Basin.

Much hay has been made about the ballooning budget of the project, which is now around $128 billion at the high end (it could also come in around $89 billion, by another estimate). But it is also true that a massive public rail project like this hasn't been undertaken in the US in half a century, and huge infastructure projects usually have cost overruns, and maybe it was just budgeted too optimistically from the start.

Wiener tells the Chronicle that while the potential loss of $4 billion in federal funds will "certainly be a setback... it is a relatively small percentage of the overall budget of the project," and, he adds, "It’s not a death knell."

The new CEO of the High-Speed Rail Authority, Ian Choudri, who took charge in August, has been trying to focus the conversation on public-private partnerships, which he says will be the key to locating the funds necessary to complete the other segments of the rail line.

So, when Duffy states in his report that "CHSRA relied on the false hope of an unending spigot of Federal taxpayer dollars," that isn't entirely true.

But, regardless of Trump's feelings about California or his rivalry with Gavin Newsom, the fact remains that Republican sentiment is dominated by bitterness over President Biden's infrastructure spending — which one report last fall found was flowing more to blue states than to red ones. And it's basically baked into the Republican agenda at this point to love gas-guzzling Ford trucks and highways, and hate public transit and electric cars, Trump's brief plug for Tesla aside.

Previously: High-Speed Rail Project, Facing More Funding Woes Under Trump, Might Now Get Linked to Vegas Rail Line