Washington Free Beacon

The House of Representatives on Tuesday voted 217-213 to approve a stopgap funding bill to keep federal agencies running for the next six months, staving off a partial government shutdown while cutting overall spending by around $7 billion.

The vote was mostly along party lines, with one Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden (Maine), voting for the bill and one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.), voting against. The bill cuts non-defense discretionary funding by $13 billion while increasing defense spending by $6 billion to fund warship construction and a pay raise for junior military personnel, Reuters reported.

The bill now heads to the Senate, where it will need the support of at least eight Democrats to pass.

The House bill comes as President Donald Trump works to rein in government waste. Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, says its cost-cutting measures have saved taxpayers an estimated $55 billion since Trump’s inauguration. Musk’s team is also reviewing the Pentagon’s $890 billion budget, which accounts for around half of all federal discretionary spending.

This bill, however, excludes DOGE’s proposed cuts, which House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) said Republicans will incorporate in next fiscal year’s budget. It also preserves funding for major spending programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

In addition to cutting funding, the House bill also strips more than $1 billion from Washington, D.C.’s budget for the remainder of the fiscal year. D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser (D.) protested the bill outside the Capitol on Monday, arguing the cuts are “not savings for the federal government” but “simply damage to the District.”

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Nearly 70 percent of voters in battleground districts see congressional Democrats as out of touch, prioritizing political correctness over real issues, according to a poll released Tuesday.

Only 39 percent of voters believe Democrats have the right priorities, while 69 percent say Democrats are “too focused on being politically correct,” a poll by the Democratic group Navigator Research found. The survey, conducted in 62 swing districts, also showed that more than half of voters think the Democratic Party is “elitist” and does not share their values.

The findings come as Democrats still struggle to regain their footing nearly two months into President Donald Trump’s second term. House Democrats are set to hear from one of the poll’s researchers at a Wednesday conference as they work to rebuild the party’s image ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, Politico reported.

“The Democratic brand is still not where it needs to be in terms of core trust and understanding people’s challenges,” said Molly Murphy, a Democratic strategist who worked on the Tuesday poll, adding that “criticism of Trump doesn’t translate into trust in Democrats.”

While the Democratic Party has long sought to brand itself as the working-class party, for example, less than 40 percent of those polled think the party truly values work, with 56 percent saying Democrats are not looking out for working people.

Murphy acknowledged the disconnect, saying, “How can you care about working people if you don’t care about work? It’s going to be really hard in the midterms if voters don’t think we care about work.”

Democrats also trail Republicans on the economy, 41 percent to 46 percent, according to the poll. Only 27 percent of independents, meanwhile, think Democrats prioritize people like them, while 55 percent say the party is more focused on others.

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MSNBC hired another partisan journalist on Tuesday. Catherine Rampell, the Washington Post columnist best known for praising former second gentleman and home-wrecking nanny handler Doug Emhoff as a “modern-day sex symbol,” will soon cohost a new weekend show on the liberal network alongside Hamas apologist Ayman Mohyeldin.

“Move over, Ryan Gosling. The modern female fantasy is embodied by the man who might soon become our first First Gentleman,” Rampell wrote in August 2024. “Emhoff appears to be a genuine mensch with an impressive career. He’s smitten with his wife and supports her ambitions, as is obvious from his convention speech and their sweet interactions on the campaign trail. But most important for this sexy sobriquet: Emhoff is secure enough with his own masculinity to sometimes prioritize his wife’s ambitions over his own. What. A. Hunk.”

Rampell dismissed Emhoff’s “previous marital drama” as irrelevant, referring to reports that Emhoff destroyed his first marriage by sleeping with his children’s nanny and getting her pregnant. He was also accused of slapping an ex-girlfriend and of fostering a toxic workplace environment at his corporate law firm, where he hired a “trophy secretary” who was “widely considered to be unqualified.”

The Post columnist has also made regular appearances on CNN, where she often sparred with the liberal network’s token Republican, Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year Scott Jennings. During one memorable exchange, Rampell claimed she wasn’t a Democrat but rather a “journalist,” which elicited a devastating smirk from Jennings. She also insisted that illegal border crossings “went down” under President Joe Biden, an absurdly false claim that prompted liberal host Abby Phillip to point out that illegal immigration surged to record highs on Biden’s watch.

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The Environmental Protection Agency canceled two $20 million environmental justice grants that the Biden administration awarded to its own advisers, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

On Monday, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency’s latest round of grant cancellations and cost-cutting measures. Included among the more than 400 canceled grants are 2 that the Biden administration awarded in December to Tennessee-based nonprofit Young, Gifted & Green and North Carolina-based nonprofit Democracy Green, a source familiar told the Free Beacon. Both groups had connections to the Biden White House and EPA—and neither had handled such a substantial amount of money before securing the taxpayer funds.

Young, Gifted & Green received its $20 million environmental justice grant after its CEO—LaTricea Adams—personally applied for the funding while simultaneously serving as a member of a top White House environmental justice council, the Free Beacon reported last month. The group has reported just $2.7 million in revenue—about 14 percent the size of the grant—since it registered as a nonprofit in 2020, tax filings show.

Democracy Green, meanwhile, received the $20 million to restore wetlands and remove lead pipes in hundreds of homes in North Carolina. The group is a small mother-daughter operation that has never conducted wetlands restoration or lead pipe removals, the Free Beacon reported last week. Last January, former EPA administrator Michael Regan appointed the president of its board, La’Meshia Whittington, to his Local Government Advisory Committee. Months later, Whittington spoke alongside Regan at a policy forum.

The actions underscore the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle Biden-era spending. Zeldin has taken particular aim at green energy and environmental justice programs that the previous administration rushed to implement during its final weeks and months in office.

“Working hand-in-hand with DOGE to rein in wasteful federal spending, EPA has saved more than $2 billion in taxpayer money,” Zeldin said in a statement on Monday. “It is our commitment at EPA to be exceptional stewards of tax dollars.”

Both the grant awarded to Young, Gifted & Green and the grant given to Democracy Green were part of the $2 billion Climate Justice Community Change Program, which was established by Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and championed by former president Joe Biden and former EPA administrator Michael Regan.

The groups were among the 105 entities selected to receive funding under the program. The EPA received 2,801 applications requesting tens of billions of dollars in funding for the program.

According to the source familiar, Zeldin’s actions to cut Biden-era spending affect several other Climate Justice Community Change Program grants and grants awarded under eight other programs. Those programs include the EPA’s Environmental Justice Small Grants Program and Collaborative Problem-Solving Cooperative Agreement Program.

In addition, Zeldin’s team located $20 billion the Biden administration awarded to eight nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program parked at an outside financial institution. The Department of Justice froze that funding while they and the FBI investigate the Biden administration’s implementation of that program.

“It is my pledge to be accountable for every penny the EPA spends. This marks a stark turn from the waste and self-dealing of the Biden-Harris Administration intentionally tossing ‘gold bars off the Titanic.’ The American people deserve accountability and responsible stewardship of their tax dollars. We will continue to deliver,” Zeldin said last week.

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Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.) suggested Tuesday that Americans elected President Donald Trump because the country is in its “angry teenage years” and voters’ brains have not fully formed.

“I don’t think there’s anyone who feels like what’s going on right now is normal, even if you voted for Trump,” Slotkin said on The View. “We’re about to turn 250 years old, right? We’re still pretty young for a country.”

“These are like our angry teenage years. We are going through this push and pull where we’re happy, we’re sad, we want this, we want that,” Slotkin continued. “And what do you do when you have a teenager threatening themselves and others? You just try to get them through this period alive so that their brain can fully form.”

The View’s Joy Behar asked if Slotkin was referring to Trump.

“No, I’m talking about our country,” Slotkin replied. “We’re a pendulum swinging.”

Slotkin’s comments came in response to cohost Sunny Hostin asking the senator to address concerns that Democrats are “playing it safe” and “not meeting the moment” to combat Trump and his agenda. A Quinnipiac poll in January showed that only 31 percent of registered voters had a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party, which has faced criticism for being too passive against Trump.

“I think that we are absolutely in extraordinary times, and it requires an extraordinary response,” Slotkin said.

Slotkin, a first-year senator, was elected in a swing state where Trump won by 1.4 percentage points. She also delivered the Democratic Party’s rebuttal to Trump’s joint address to Congress last week.

“America wants change. But there is a responsible way to make change—and a reckless way—and we can make that change without forgetting who we are as a country and as a democracy,” Slotkin said Wednesday.

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Eugene Daniels, the “Kamala Harris expert” and “Beyoncé encyclopedia” who recently quit his job at Politico to join MSNBC as a weekend cohost and on-air personality, is under fire from fellow journalists who are increasingly aggrieved by his floundering leadership as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA), a role he intends to keep despite his new role at the virulently partisan network.

Former CNN reporter Oliver Darcy reports that Daniels got an earful from WHCA members during a virtual meeting on Monday. The left-leaning organization is still reeling from President Donald Trump’s decision to revoke its power to determine which media outlets can participate in the White House press pool. The Trump administration argued that ending the group’s “monopoly” on access to White House events would allow less established media outlets to obtain “a seat at this highly coveted table.” The move came several days after Trump partially banned the Associated Press from White House events in response to the outlet’s refusal to acknowledge his renaming of the former Gulf of Mexico, now the Gulf of America.

Daniels, who is “well-liked in Washington” for his bold fashion sense, regular attendance at cocktail parties, and close relationships with powerful Democrats, faced “a lot of pointed questions” from members who were “frustrated” by his failure to respond more aggressively to what they view as a dangerous assault on their professional nobility. Daniels has released a handful of strongly worded statements complaining that Trump’s actions threatened “the independence of a free press in the United States,” but thus far, the WHCA has failed to mount a unified response that might increase the group’s leverage.

The first question Daniels received during the meeting from Christian Datoc of the Washington Examiner was about whether he intended to serve out his full term as WHCA president in light of his move from Politico correspondent to MSNBC personality. Daniels said he would continue covering the White House for MSNBC and vowed to retain his role as president. Other members accused Daniels of surrendering to Trump without a fight. “It does seem like y’all were caught with your pants down,” said Andrew Feinberg, a White House reporter for the Independent. April Ryan, White House correspondent for something called Black Press USA, blasted Daniels for giving a “blowoff” response to her questions about the WHCA’s tepid response.

“Tensions escalated,” according to Darcy, prompting the group’s executive director, former McClatchy reporter Steve Thomma, to defend Daniels by explaining that the WHCA board was doing a lot of hard work behind the scenes. But he also acknowledged there really isn’t much they can do absent some sort of performative boycott that some members would be reluctant to endorse. Thus far, for example, media outlets have continued to take part in White House pool coverage under the new regime. Daniels’s critics weren’t swayed by this argument, insisting feckless leadership was to blame for the group’s lack of unity.

Daniels, who has covered Kamala Harris since 2021, sent Darcy a statement on Monday that channeled the former vice president’s remarkable ability to generate evasive nonsense masquerading as a coherent strategy. He insisted the WHCA was “calibrating our approach” by “hearing from the people we serve.” He remained laser-focused on doing what needs to be done when it comes to “navigating how best to respond … as we chart our strategy going forward” and vowed to “continue these conversations” at next week’s board meeting.

Daniels published his final “scoop” at Politico last week about how Harris was seriously considering taking the steps she needs to take in terms of thinking about running for governor of California in 2026. His duties at MSNBC include cohosting a new weekend show with Jackie Alemany, a banking scion married to a former Biden climate adviser, and Jonathan Capehart, the longtime partisan activist who has urged Democrats to more forcefully acknowledge that “racism and misogyny played a role” in Harris’s defeat in 2024. Daniels has commended himself for his “tough” coverage of the Harris campaign, including the time he asked the failed candidate if she thought Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance were guilty of “irredeemable racism.”

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Ukraine has accepted a U.S. proposal for a 30-day ceasefire with Russia, the State Department announced Tuesday afternoon.

“Today, we’ve made an offer that the Ukrainians have accepted, which is to enter into a ceasefire and into immediate negotiations to end this conflict in a way that’s enduring and sustainable,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said after hours of negotiations in Saudi Arabia with Ukrainian officials.

Rubio said that “we’ll take this offer now to the Russians, and we hope that they’ll say yes, that they’ll say yes to peace.”

“The ball is now in their court,” Rubio went on.

The State Department in a joint statement with Ukrainian officials said that “the United States will communicate to Russia that Russian reciprocity is the key to achieving peace,” adding that the 30-day ceasefire may be extended “by mutual agreement” between Kyiv and Moscow.

As part of the deal, the United States will “immediately lift the pause on intelligence sharing and resume security assistance to Ukraine,” according to the statement.

The agreement follows pressure from President Donald Trump on both Ukraine and Russia to seek an immediate ceasefire.

The Trump administration had halted intelligence-sharing and U.S. aid to Ukraine, urging Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to show a “good-faith” commitment to peace negotiations, the Wall Street Journal reported. Last week, Trump also threatened to impose new sanctions and tariffs on Russia for escalating strikes against Ukraine.

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Former congresswoman Katie Porter (D.) announced Tuesday that she is running next year for governor of California, touting herself as a leader who has “the backbone to fight for what’s right.” Her spokesman told the New York Times, however, that she will drop out of the race if Kamala Harris decides to run.

“What California needs now is a little bit of hope and a whole lot of grit, fresh blood and new ideas, and leaders with the backbone to fight for what’s right,” Porter says in her launch video. “That’s why I’m running for governor.”

“As governor, I won’t ever back down when Trump hurts Californians,” Porter goes on.

But the former congresswoman will back down from the race if Harris decides to run, a spokesman told the Times on the same day that Porter launched her campaign. Other Democratic contenders have also indicated they would step aside should Harris enter, according to Politico.

While Harris has not yet officially entered the race, she is “seriously considering” a run and will announce her plans by the end of the summer, according to alleged “Kamala Harris expert” Eugene Daniels.

Porter, who rose to prominence in 2018 thanks to her anti-Trump rhetoric, has long faced scrutiny over her behavior. Her ex-husband asserted in divorce filings that she subjected him to verbal and physical abuse, once dumping a pot of boiling mashed potatoes on his head. Former staffers, meanwhile, “accused the congresswoman of berating them, making racist comments, and firing employees for contracting the coronavirus,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.

Porter lost the 2024 Senate election to fellow Democrat Adam Schiff, raising $28 million just to come in third place. She claimed following her loss that she had had to face an “onslaught of billionaires spending millions to rig this election.”

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Columbia professor Joseph Albernaz sent his English students a somber message on Monday afternoon: “I am sickened at the news of the ICE detainment of a student, and I do not believe this is acceptable or normal at a university or in society,” he said, referring to the Trump administration’s decision to revoke a visa from encampment leader and foreign national Mahmoud Khalil.

“I cannot see how I can hold a typical class right now under these current conditions, nor how you can be expected to prepare for an exam,” Albernaz continued, “so I am cancelling in person class tomorrow and cancelling the mid-term scheduled for Thursday (everyone will receive an ‘A’ on the midterm).”

Albernaz was one of many Columbia professors who, in emails obtained by our Jessica Costescu and Jessica Schwalb, canceled in-person classes, removed attendance requirements, or offered online course offerings in response to the Trump administration’s actions. Their conduct is at odds with the message from Columbia’s provost, who instructed faculty members to hold classes “as usual, in person.” It’s aligned, however, with Columbia’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, which distributed sample emails for students to send to their professors calling for no in-person courses for the rest of the week.

“Columbia did not answer questions on how—if at all—school administrators will compel faculty members to hold scheduled classes as required,” write Costescu and Schwalb. “Instead, spokeswoman Samantha Slater pointed the Free Beacon to a nearly two-week-old statement that addressed an unrelated ‘unauthorized class cancellation.'”

READ MORE: Columbia Professors Cancel Classes In Solidarity With Pro-Hamas Activist in ICE Custody

Columbia isn’t the only Ivy League institution feeling the heat over the Trump administration’s higher education scrutiny. Harvard announced a blanket hiring freeze on Monday, citing “substantial financial uncertainties driven by rapidly shifting federal policies.”

“We need to prepare for a wide range of financial circumstances, and strategic adjustments will take time to identify and implement,” president Alan Garber, provost John Manning, executive VP Meredith Weenick, and CFO Ritu Kalra wrote in a message to colleagues. “Consequently, it is imperative to limit significant new long-term commitments that would increase our financial exposure and make further adjustments more disruptive.” Cornell, Stanford, and Penn made similar announcements.

Harvard maintains an in-house hedge fund valued at more than $53 billion and spent more than $6 billion on operating expenses last year. The school had a $45 million budget surplus. At the same time, it received an additional fee of roughly 70 percent of all federal grants it received to fund “indirect costs” like building maintenance. When the Trump administration moved to cap that fee at 15 percent, Harvard Medical School encouraged its adult students to play with therapy dogs.

READ MORE: Harvard Announces Hiring Freeze as Trump Admin Threatens Funding Cuts Over Campus Anti-Semitism

On Capitol Hill, two of the worst people you know are madly in love. We’re talking about Chris Murphy, who, our Andrew Stiles reports, “has a new (and younger, but not necessarily more attractive) lover less than four months after ditching his wife”: Tara McGowan, “the Soros-funded dark money operative who has been denounced by the Washington Post for pushing ‘partisan propaganda’ via a network of misleading ‘local news’ websites.”

The happy couple was spotted canoodling at a hipster bar in Washington, D.C., earlier this month. And while it’s unclear when Murphy, 51, and McGowan, 39, initiated their love affair, both recently exited failed marriages. Classy.

“Murphy has allegedly distinguished himself in recent months, according to mainstream political journalists, for his relentless opposition to Donald Trump and his even more relentless efforts to promote himself,” writes Stiles. McGowan, for her part, “has been promoting Murphy’s content on social media for years, touting the senator as a ‘prominent pro-democracy leader’ in November 2023, when her divorce was still making its way through the court system.”

McGowan nuked her X account on Monday after news of the relationship came to light. The pair join a long line of marriage-destroying Democrats, including Ilhan Omar, Ruben Gallego, and Anthony Weiner, who ended his marriage to longtime Hillary Clinton servant Huma Abedin “after repeatedly sending photos of his genitals to teenagers.”

READ MORE: Lust for Power: Dem Senator Chris Murphy Ditches Wife for Soros-Funded ‘Soap Opera Villainess’ Tara McGowan

Away from the Beacon:

• Sorry, Dr. Jill: Donald Trump revoked Joe Biden’s access to classified presidential briefings, as Biden did to him four years earlier. The Trump administration also formalized an order pulling Antony Blinken and Jake Sherman’s security clearances.
• The Washington Post says it’s revamping its newsroom structure in part to make it more aligned with billionaire owner and Free Beacon Man of the Year Jeff Bezos. We look forward to the impending resignations.
• In addition to Columbia professors, two other groups are rallying behind Mahmoud Khalil: Senate Judiciary Democrats and PFLP terrorists.

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When the Trump administration announced it was investigating California’s long-troubled high-speed rail project, the top official overseeing it pressed back. Though the project has more than tripled in price to $106 billion, the official said that “every dollar is accounted for.”

While the money is indeed accounted for, that accounting does not paint a rosy picture for the Golden State. State audits over the past 15 years, which the Washington Free Beacon reviewed, have found a litany of wasteful and bizarre spending and financial commitments, ranging from $177,000 for PoliticoPro subscriptions to $5 million for graffiti removal. One company received more than $50,000 to head diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, while active environmental service contracts total $537 million.

The high-speed rail project launched in 2008. It promised to offer 220 mph trains between Los Angeles and San Francisco, with an estimated completion date of 2020 for $33 million. Construction didn’t begin until 2015. Since then, no track has been laid, no stations have been built, and there’s no estimate on when it will be finished. Even the shorter-term goal that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) announced in 2019—a 171-mile rail in the Central Valley—will likely miss its 2033 deadline, according to the project’s inspector general.

“This project belongs in the graveyard of boondoggles,” said former San Francisco state senator Quentin Kopp, a liberal who wrote the 1996 law creating the High-Speed Rail Authority, the agency responsible for the project.

For 15 years, audit after audit has identified management issues causing delays and massive cost overruns. President Donald Trump called it “the worst-managed project I think I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some of the worst.”

“We’re going to start a big investigation of that, because I’ve never seen anything like it,” Trump said last month. “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. The worst overruns that there have ever been in the history of our country.”

The Free Beacon reviewed the High-Speed Rail Authority’s spending habits found in California’s contracts database.

In 2021, the authority inked a $10,850 contract with CPS HR Consulting to run meetings for the agency’s DEI task force, though it ultimately spent only $4,725. It signed another $46,000 contract with that firm in 2023 to provide a DEI training. The authority’s DEI page, which was removed sometime in the last five months, named diversity as “one of the six overarching goals that guide our holistic, integrated approach.”

CPS HR Consulting also received five contracts worth some $177,000 to conduct salary surveys.

Another $62,400 went to a political data firm to archive media stories from 2014-16, while the City of Fresno got $5 million in 2023 for graffiti removal. Since 2015, the High-Speed Rail Authority has paid more than $177,000 to Politico for the publication’s paywalled subscription service.

The University of California, Los Angeles, meanwhile, was awarded nearly $291,000 in 2016 for a health impacts study. One researcher on the team worried that noise and traffic problems stemming from the rail would disproportionately affect “low-income populations and people of color.”

Lobbyists and lawyers—some far from California—have also benefited from high-speed rail funding. Kadesh & Associates, a top D.C. beltway firm, received several contracts worth nearly $1.9 million in total for lobbying and “congressional advisory services.” Another D.C. firm, Akin Gump, provided “legal services for Congressional Hearings” for nearly $1.1 million.

The High-Speed Rail Authority has also paid out $537 million for its active contracts for environmental services—but that total doesn’t include closed contracts. California’s environmental regulations are notorious for delaying development projects, including the high-speed rail. It took 14 years to develop the project’s environmental impact statement and 12 years for the national historic preservation review. Separate endangered species and fish impact studies took more than a year each.

An environmental restoration firm, Westervelt Ecological Services, has two contracts worth nearly $95 million and has been paid more than $20 million for “habitat mitigation”—essentially creating new animal habitats to replace any destroyed by the high-speed rail’s development. CivicWell, a Sacramento nonprofit, was paid more than $31,000 for services including “environmental justice and equitable outcomes gap assessment.” HNTB Corporation— High-Speed Rail Authority CEO Ian Choudri’s former employer—holds two contracts for “Environmental and Engineering services” worth nearly $196 million.

The biggest spending commitments have gone to engineering, architecture, and construction firms. AECOM and Fluor Corporation, for example, together hold a $400 million contract with the authority for strategic planning—$117 million of which has already been paid. While that may seem logical for a development project, the High-Speed Rail Authority said it needed more than a week to provide the Free Beacon with those businesses’ top accomplishments while working on the project. After that deadline passed, the agency said it would take an additional two weeks.

The state auditor has also identified wasteful spending and pervasive management issues that cause compounding delays and budget overruns. It repeatedly warned that the High-Speed Rail Authority’s projected costs exceeded its budget—multiple times over—and that its weak oversight of its contractors put taxpayer money at risk. The authority once paid $4 million to contractors without documented evidence the work was completed.

And, perhaps most damningly, the state auditor reported in 2018 that the High-Speed Rail Authority’s decision to begin construction before development plans were complete caused over $2 billion in cost overruns.

An inspector general was appointed in 2023 and maintained the state auditor’s crusade. Even after the deadline for the shorter, 171-mile rail had already been extended from 2030 to 2033, the watchdog warned even that may not be achievable.

“With a smaller remaining schedule envelope and the potential for significant uncertainty and risk during subsequent phases of the project, staying within the 2033 schedule envelope is unlikely,” the inspector general reported February 3.

The Trump administration took notice. At the direction of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, the Federal Railroad Administration on February 20 alerted the High-Speed Rail Authority that it was scrutinizing the authority’s spending to determine whether it should claw back $4 billion in federal grant money.

“For too long, taxpayers have subsidized the massively over-budget and delayed California High-Speed Rail project,” Duffy said in a statement. “President Trump is right that this project is in dire need of an investigation. That is why I am directing my staff to review and determine whether the [High-Speed Rail Authority] has followed through on the commitments it made to receive billions of dollars in federal funding. If not, I will have to consider whether that money could be given to deserving infrastructure projects elsewhere in the United States.”

California officials balked and defended the project.

“With multiple independent federal and state audits completed, every dollar is accounted for, and we stand by the progress and impact of this project,” Choudri said. “California’s high-speed rail is 171 miles under active construction, with over 50 major structures completed, 14,700 jobs created, and more than 880 small businesses engaged. This investment has already generated $22 billion in economic impact, primarily benefiting the Central Valley.”

“At a certain point, you have audit fatigue,” Newsom said.

Still, there haven’t been any serious repercussions for those audits. One columnist said a funding cut-off could be a “mercy killing,” and all but 2 of 13 economists and business executives surveyed by the San Jose Mercury-News said the project should be abandoned altogether.

“If the only consequence of not meeting expectations is to increase funding, more failure will continue. Rather than throwing more money after bad, the entire project should be reengineered if not entirely abandoned. Reviewing the project is not the outrage, misspending performance is,” San Diego Institute for Economic Research economist Kelly Cunningham said.

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