The claim: 

In February 2019, President Trump declared California’s long-delayed, budget-busting bullet train a “disaster,” asserted that Gov. Gavin Newsom had canceled the project, and vowed to claw back federal funding. A few months later, his Transportation Department demanded the repayment of nearly $1 billion in grant funding from California. The state sued.

California has been forced to cancel the massive bullet train project after having spent and wasted many billions of dollars. They owe the Federal Government three and a half billion dollars. We want that money back now. Whole project is a “green” disaster!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 14, 2019

The facts:

Contrary to the president’s claim, California was not “forced to cancel” the bullet train project. But you can see where he might have gotten that idea.

In his State of the State speech last year, Newsom conceded that “there simply isn’t a path” to complete the high-speed rail project as originally planned. For now, he said, rather than pursue a San Francisco to Los Angeles line, the state would focus on connecting Merced to Bakersfield. 

For the governor, this was stating the obvious: The decades-old plan to connect California’s two biggest population centers at the speed of European-style rail had become a fiscal albatross around the neck of state lawmakers. Newsom was hoping to rein in those expectations. 

But the Trump administration (along with much of the California press corps) initially took Newsom’s announcement as an out-and-out nixing of the bullet train.

Since then, the president has argued that by changing the scope of the project, the state reneged on its initial multi-billion-dollar funding agreement with the feds. 

Who’s right? The project is now tens of billions of dollars over budget and has been saddled with litigation, delays and political opposition from Republicans in Sacramento and Washington D.C. Supporters of the project still say it remains the best way to integrate the state’s economic hard cases with its coastal boomtowns—and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the process.

The lawsuit is ongoing.