Susannah Luthi of the Washington Free Beacon details questionable spending tied to a West Coast boondoggle.

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.”