The Bullet Train's Watchdog Found $543,000 Wasted. Build It Anyway.

The inspector general found $543,000 in prohibited consultant travel on a project already more than $100 billion over its original budget.

A consultant flew his own jet from Washington, D.C., to Sacramento and collected a reimbursement priced like a premium airline seat. That line sits inside a new report from the inspector general for the California High-Speed Rail Authority, next to reimbursed car service to an escape room, a nightclub and a D.C. cigar lounge, the Los Angeles Times reported on September 17, 2026.

The people who paid for that ride still can't board anything. Construction is confined to the Central Valley, no stretch of the line is operable, and the project is years past its own deadline for linking Northern and Southern California.

Fire the consultants. Then lay the track.

The authority paid more than $2 million in travel for four consulting firms between June 2024 and April 2026. The inspector general reviewed about half of that. The sample turned up roughly $680,500 that never got prior approval and $543,000 the report called prohibited, along with nearly $130,000 for 30 Denver-to-Sacramento trips taken by one person, against five travel requests on file.

The firms, the inspector general's office told the Times, are KPMG, the financial advisor; Nossaman, the legal services contractor; the AECOM-Fluor Joint Venture on program delivery; and the SYSTRA/TYPSA Joint Venture on track and systems design. KPMG declined to comment. Nossaman declined as well and sent questions to the rail authority. AECOM-Fluor and SYSTRA/TYPSA didn't immediately respond, the paper reported.

The worst thing in the report isn't a bar tab. It's a consultant who, pressed on an expense, said he owed nobody a justification for in-person travel because the chief executive had asked for it, and that questioning the CEO's direction would be out of line “as other consultants in other Authority offices are learning the hard way.” The expense got approved.

Now the denominator. The prohibited travel comes to $543,000. The project is more than $100 billion past the $33-billion budget it started with, so anyone telling you the cigar lounge explains the overrun is selling you something else.

The strongest case against me belongs to state Sen. Tony Strickland, a Republican and vice chair of the Senate Transportation Committee. He told the Times the findings didn't surprise him and that Californians squeezed by costs deserve accountability: “It's time to pull the plug and put those taxpayer dollars toward the needs of Californians today.” An agency that can't police a rideshare receipt shouldn't be handed billions. That's a real argument, and it's the one I'd have made three paragraphs into the report.

Here's what changed my mind by the end of it. The office that caught this was created in 2022 to catch exactly this, and it worked; the fix it recommends is written approval before a trip, clear rules for the staff who sign off, and a bill sent to the firms for what wasn't allowable. Meanwhile, pulling the plug refunds nobody. The federal government already pulled billions from the project last year, and cancellation falls where the work is: the thousands of jobs the project has created, and the only segment anybody has actually built.

The authority says it “takes these findings seriously” and will recover improper costs. I'd start the recovery with the jet.

Source: latimes.com, retrieved September 17, 2026.