I have spent two decades as an expert witness testifying about where other people's money goes missing. Pension funds looted by trustees who knew the rules better than the regulators. Family trusts gutted by fiduciaries who mistook other people's capital for their own severance package. None of that prepared me for California's high-speed rail line, which voters approved in 2008 at a projected cost of $33.6 billion and which the Authority's own 2026 business plan now prices at $126.2 billion, without laying a single mile of track between two cities anyone outside the Central Valley could find on a map.

Here is the part nobody in Sacramento wants to explain. The rail project runs under a Community Benefits Agreement, a project labor agreement that hands craft work to union hiring halls and requires most workers on site for more than eight days to pay union dues. Every construction contract the High-Speed Rail Authority signs carries this agreement, straight from the Authority's own paperwork.

Now follow the money, because I have spent a career doing exactly that for a living. In 2008, when California voters were deciding whether to approve the $9.95 billion bond that got this train rolling, the California Alliance for Jobs put up $616,500 for the “yes” campaign, nearly a quarter of the roughly $2.7 million raised. Operating engineers' locals kicked in another $575,000. Add in the laborers' council and the building trades, and construction unions bankrolled a meaningful share of the campaign that authorized a project whose contracts were then, by design, steered back to those same unions. They did not do this out of civic charity. As Edward Ring at........

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