Consultants on California’s High Speed Rail Disaster Just Got Exposed for What Happened to Taxpayer Money

A California high speed rail consultant billed taxpayers $4,182 for a private plane ride, and nobody signed off first.

State inspectors just uncovered where another two million taxpayer dollars in consultant travel actually went.

Nightclubs, tiki bars and cigar lounges are just the beginning of what investigators found.

Auditors Find a Consultant Who Billed a Private Flight Without Asking

California's Office of the Inspector General pulled the receipts on the California High-Speed Rail Authority's outside consultants for fiscal years 2024-25 and 2025-26.

What they found reads like an expense account for a bachelor party, not a public infrastructure project.

Four consulting firms billed the Authority more than $2 million in travel costs.

Investigators flagged $680,500 of those claims for lacking advance authorization – roughly 60 percent of everything they reviewed.

Another $543,400 was ruled flatly "not allowable" under state travel rules.

One consultant flew a private plane from Washington, D.C. to California, billed taxpayers $4,182 for it, and investigators found no record anyone approved the trip or the fare beforehand.

The same pool of consultants expensed premium Uber and Lyft rides to Planet Fitness gyms, even after a supervisor told them to stop.

One rider took a 25-mile "Uber Comfort" trip to a Folsom steakhouse.

Another billed $40 for an "Uber Black" ride that covered less than one mile in downtown Sacramento.

KPMG Consultants Turned Expense Reports Into a Party Budget

The inspector general named KPMG LLP specifically for nightclub visits, tiki bar tabs and a Washington, D.C. cigar lounge, all charged to California taxpayers.

Records elsewhere in the same batch show premium rides booked from a restaurant to a bar to a nightclub between 9:40 p.m. and 2:30 a.m.

Consultants also expensed an escape room outing and a sushi dinner in Denver.

One legal consultant collected $40,800 in reimbursements plus another $86,500 for "travel time" on more than 30 round trips between Denver and Sacramento in a single year.

Taxpayers also covered $118,000 in international airfare, even though the consultant's own contract barred international travel outright.

The inspector general did not mince words in the report, writing that the trips "clearly appear to be for personal enjoyment rather than for the benefit of the state."

KPMG declined to comment.

The Authority's spokesperson said only that the agency "takes these findings seriously."

State Senate Transportation Committee Chair Tony Strickland was less polite.

"Consultants should expect that when they make an executive decision to travel without authorization, that they're taking on the expense themselves," Strickland said.

Assembly GOP leader Alexandra Macedo called the spending "wasteful and unallowable."

Sacramento Built a Culture Where Nobody Says No

This is not a rogue employee problem.

It is what happens when an agency signs checks for 18 years with nobody in the room asking hard questions.

California voters approved high speed rail in 2008 with a $9.95 billion bond and a promise of bullet trains linking Los Angeles to San Francisco.

The Authority has since spent more than $11 billion and completed zero miles of track carrying a single paying passenger.

Citizens Against Government Waste has tracked the project for years and calls it an "epic failure of planning, management, and fiscal accountability."

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy pulled $4 billion in remaining federal grants from the project in July 2025 after a 300-page federal compliance review found nine separate failures, including a $7 billion funding gap.

"Federal dollars are not a blank check – they come with a promise to deliver results," Duffy said.

"It's time for this boondoggle to die," he added.

Cigar lounges and tiki bars did not bankrupt a $126 billion project by themselves.

But they prove the same rot runs all the way down, from the executives who let the budget balloon to the mid-level consultants who figured nobody was checking their Uber receipts either.

Every dollar spent on a Denver sushi dinner or a Sacramento nightclub was a dollar taken from the same taxpayers still waiting for a train that will not arrive before 2039, if it arrives at all.

Sources:

• Bradford Betz, "California High-Speed Rail Consultants Billed Taxpayers for a Private Plane, Tiki Bars and Cigar Lounges," Fox Business, September 17, 2026.
• U.S. Department of Transportation, "Trump's Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy Pulls the Plug on $4B for California High Speed Rail's Train to Nowhere," Press Release, July 16, 2025.
• Citizens Against Government Waste, "California High-Speed Rail is Still a Multi-Billion Dollar Boondoggle," CAGW.org, April 11, 2025.
• The San Francisco Standard, "Tiki Bars, Cigars: High Speed Rail Advisers Misspent $592k," September 15, 2026.