As ransomware attacks surge, the FBI is doubling down on its guidance to affected businesses: Don't pay the cybercriminals. But the U.S. government also offers a little-noticed incentive for those who do pay: If you pay a ransom, it may be tax deductible. From a report, shared by a Slashdot reader: The Internal Revenue Service offers no formal guidance on ransomware payments, but multiple tax experts interviewed by the Associated Press said deductions of ransomeware payments as a cost of doing business are usually allowed under law and established guidance. Some called it a 'silver lining' for ransomware victims. Those looking to discourage payments are less sanguine. They fear the IRS deduction is a potentially problematic incentive that could entice businesses to pay ransoms against the advice of law enforcement. At a minimum, they say, the deductibility sends a discordant message to businesses under duress.

"On January 15, a hacker tried to poison a water treatment plant that served parts of the San Francisco Bay Area," reports NBC News: It didn't seem hard. The hacker had the username and password for a former employee's TeamViewer account, a popular program that lets users remotely control their computers, according to a private report compiled by the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center in February and seen by NBC News. After logging in, the hacker, whose name and motive are unknown and who hasn't been identified by law enforcement, deleted programs that the water plant used to treat drinking water.

The hack wasn't discovered until the following day, and the facility changed its passwords and reinstalled the programs. "No failures were reported as a result of this incident, and no individuals in the city reported illness from water-related failures," the report, which did not specify which water treatment plant had been breached, noted.

The incident, which has not been previously reported, is one of a growing number of cyberattacks on U.S. water infrastructure that have recently come to light. The Bay Area attack was followed by a similar one in Oldsmar, Florida, a few weeks later. In that one, which made headlines around the world, a hacker also gained access to a TeamViewer account and raised the levels of lye in the drinking water to poisonous levels. An employee quickly caught the computer's mouse moving on its own, and undid the hacker's changes... The usernames and passwords for at least 11 Oldsmar employees have been traded on the dark web, said Kent Backman, a researcher at the cybersecurity company Dragos...

[A] number of facilities have been hacked in the past year, though most draw little attention. In Pennsylvania, a state water warning system has reportedly alerted its members to two recent hacks at water plants in the state. In another previously unreported hack, the Camrosa Water District in Southern California was infected with ransomware last summer. Whether hacks on water plants have recently become more common or just more visible is impossible to tell, because there is no comprehensive federal or industry accounting of water treatment plants' security... Unlike the electric grid, which is largely run by a smaller number of for-profit corporations, most of the more than 50,000 drinking water facilities in the U.S. are nonprofit entities.

Some that serve large populations are larger operations with dedicated cybersecurity staff. But rural areas in particular often get their water from small plants, often run by only a handful of employees who aren't dedicated cybersecurity experts, said Bryson Bort, a consultant on industrial cybersecurity systems. "They're even more fragmented at lower levels than anything we're used to talking about, like the electric grid," he said. "If you could imagine a community center run by two old guys who are plumbers, that's your average water plant."
NBC News also a spokesperson for America's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who shared an internal survey conducted earlier this year. As many as 1 in 10 water and wastewater plants reported they'd recently found a critical cybersecurity vulnerability — and more than 80% of their major vulnerabilities were software flaws discovered before 2017.

USA Today reports: Companies like Moderna and Pfizer's partner BioNTech, whose names are familiar from COVID-19 vaccines, are using mRNA to spur cancer patients' bodies to make vaccines that will — hopefully — prevent recurrences and treatments designed to fight off advanced tumors. If they prove effective, which won't be known for at least another year or two, they could be added to the arsenal of immune therapies designed to get the body to fight off its own tumors...

Over the last decade, pharmaceutical companies around the world have been developing new ways to train the body's immune system to fight off tumors, particularly melanoma. They had learned how to remove a brake installed by tumors, unleashing the warriors of the immune system. Ten years ago, only about 5% of people with advanced melanoma survived for five years. Now, nearly half make it that long. Trials of mRNA cancer vaccines aim to boost that number even higher by adding soldiers to the fight... Once a tumor has been largely removed through surgery, a vaccine can help generate new immune soldiers known as T cells... A computer algorithm analyzes the mutations distinct to the cancer cells, looking for ones that trigger the production of T cells, said Melissa J. Moore, Moderna's chief scientific officer, of platform research. So far, she said, Moderna, working with partner Merck, has tested these personalized vaccines in about 100 patients. They aim eventually to make a personalized mRNA vaccine within about 45 days after the patient's cancer surgery, during their recovery...

Mutated cancer cells have proteins on their surface that can be targeted by an mRNA vaccine. For a tumor that has, say, five common mutations, a patient could get a combination of five of these vaccines. On Friday, BioNTech announced it was launching a new trial for this approach, testing it in 120 melanoma patients Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia and the U.S. The new treatment, given in connection with an antibody from Regeneron, is aimed at four tumor-associated antigens. More than 90% of melanoma tumors contain at least one of the four.
The U.S. federal government now lists 29 studies underway or that will be soon investigating mRNA cancer vaccines, according to the article.

And Dr. Stephen Hahn, who had a career as an oncologist before running the Food and Drug Administration from 2019 until early this year, "said he's more optimistic this time because of how much researchers have learned about the role the immune system plays in cancer. 'That gives us an edge to maybe finally get to the place where we need to be.'"

As California approaches the biggest state tax rebate in U.S. history, Bloomberg News co-founder Matthew A. Winkler questions its reputation as a state doomed by over-regulation and high taxes.

In fact, California "has no peers among developed economies for expanding GDP, creating jobs, raising household income, manufacturing growth, investment in innovation, producing clean energy and unprecedented wealth through its stocks and bonds." By adding 1.3 million people to its non-farm payrolls since April last year — equal to the entire workforce of Nevada — California easily surpassed also-rans Texas and New York. At the same time, California household income increased $164 billion, almost as much as Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania combined, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. No wonder California's operating budget surplus, fueled by its surging economy and capital gains taxes, swelled to a record $75 billion...

While pundits have long insisted California policies are bad for business, reality belies them. In a sign of investor demand, the weight of California companies in the benchmark S&P 500 Index increased 3 percentage points since a year ago, the most among all states, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Faith in California credit was similarly superlative, with the weight of corporate bonds sold by companies based in the state rising the most among all states, to 12.5 percentage points from 11.7 percentage points, according to the Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Corporate Bond Index. Translation: Investors had the greatest confidence in California companies during the pandemic. The most trusted measure of economic strength says California is the world-beater among democracies. The state's gross domestic product increased 21% during the past five years, dwarfing No. 2 New York (14%) and No. 3 Texas (12%), according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The gains added $530 billion to the Golden State, 30% more than the increase for New York and Texas combined and equivalent to the entire economy of Sweden.

Among the five largest economies, California outperforms the U.S., Japan and Germany with a growth rate exceeded only by China...

Corporate California also is the undisputed leader in renewable energy, with 26 companies worth $897 billion, or 36% of the U.S. industry, having reported 10% or more of their revenues derived from clean technology. No state comes close to matching the 21% of electricity derived from solar energy. Shares of these firms appreciated 282% during the past 12 months and 1,003%, 1,140% and 9,330% over two, five and 10 years, respectively, with no comparable rivals anywhere in the world, according to BloombergNEF. The same companies also increased their workforce 35% since 2019, almost tripling the rate for the rest U.S. overall and four times the global rate...

California companies invested 16% of their revenues in R&D, or their future, when the rest of the U.S. put aside just 1%...

Much has been made of the state reporting its first yearly loss in population, or 182,000 last year. Had it not been for the Trump administration preventing new visas, depriving as many as 150,000 people from moving to California from other countries annually, the 2020 outcome would have been more favorable.

A data center can easily use up to 1.25 million gallons of water each day — and "More data centers are being built every day by some of America's largest technology companies," reports NBC News, "including Amazon, Microsoft and Google and used by millions of customers." Almost 40 percent of them are in the United States, and Amazon, Google and Microsoft account for more than half of the total. The U.S. also has at least 1,800 "colocation" data centers, warehouses filled with a variety of smaller companies' server hardware that share the same cooling system, electricity and security, according to Data Center Map. They are typically smaller than hyperscale data centers but, research has shown, more resource intensive as they maintain a variety of computer systems operating at different levels of efficiency.

Many data center operators are drawn to water-starved regions in the West, in part due to the availability of solar and wind energy. Researchers at Virginia Tech estimate that one-fifth of data centers draw water from moderately to highly stressed watersheds, mostly in the Western United States, according to a paper published in April...

The growth in the industry shows no signs of slowing. The research company Gartner predicts that spending on global data center infrastructure will reach $200 billion this year, an increase of 6 percent from 2020, followed by 3-4 percent annually over the next three years. This growth comes at a time of record temperatures and drought in the United States, particularly in the West. "The typical data center uses about 3-5 million gallons of water per day — the same amount of water as a city of 30,000-50,000 people," said Venkatesh Uddameri, professor and director of the Water Resources Center at Texas Tech University. Although these data centers have become much more energy and water efficient over the last decade, and don't use as much water as other industries such as agriculture, this level of water use can still create potential competition with local communities over the water supply in areas where water is scarce, he added...

Sergio Loureiro, vice president of core operations for Microsoft, said that the company has pledged to be "water positive" by 2030, which means it plans to replenish more water than it consumes globally. This includes reducing the company's water use and investing in community replenishment and conservation projects near where it builds facilities.

Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.

The U.S. government spent more than $18 billion last year funding drugmakers to make a Covid vaccine, an effort that led to at least five highly effective shots in record time. Now it's pouring more than $3 billion on a neglected area of research: developing pills to fight the virus early in the course of infection, potentially saving many lives in the years to come. From a report: The new program, announced on Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Services, will speed up the clinical trials of a few promising drug candidates. If all goes well, some of those first pills could be ready by the end of the year. The Antiviral Program for Pandemics will also support research on entirely new drugs -- not just for the coronavirus, but for viruses that could cause future pandemics. A number of other viruses, including influenza, H.I.V. and hepatitis C, can be treated with a simple pill. But despite more than a year of research, no such pill exists to treat someone with a coronavirus infection before it wreaks havoc. Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's program for accelerating Covid-19 research, invested far more money in the development of vaccines than of treatments, a gap that the new program will try to fill.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key backer of the program, said he looked forward to a time when Covid-19 patients could pick up antiviral pills from a pharmacy as soon as they tested positive for the coronavirus or develop Covid-19 symptoms. "I wake up in the morning, I don't feel very well, my sense of smell and taste go away, I get a sore throat," Dr. Fauci said in an interview. "I call up my doctor and I say, 'I have Covid and I need a prescription.'" Dr. Fauci's support for research on antiviral pills stems from his own experience fighting AIDS three decades ago. In the 1990s, his institute conducted research that led to some of the first antiviral pills for H.I.V., "protease inhibitors" that block an essential virus protein and can keep the virus at bay for a lifetime.

The number of new wildfires in the U.S. so far this year is at a ten-year high, according to federal data, prompting warnings of a long, potentially dangerous summer of fire. From a report: One of the biggest areas of concern right now is the high desert Great Basin region in Utah, Nevada and eastern Oregon. "When you have standing dead grass that's already out there and when we have high heat, that ignition potential raises dramatically," said Paul Peterson, a fire management officer for the Bureau of Land Management. Since January, more than a million acres have burned from more than 28,000 wildfires â" the highest number of fires for this date since 2011. There are currently 33 active large fires across the West. The biggest has scorched more than 175,000 acres in the canyons and valleys east of Phoenix. It is 73% contained. A record-breaking heat wave across the West this week isn't helping ease fire danger. Temperatures have soared into the triple digits in Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Montana, where new wildfires are sparking weeks earlier than normal.

Oregon is now the third state in the US to allow a deathcare option that's gaining popularity for its environmental benefits: human composting. From a report: Gov. Katie Brown signed House Bill 2574 into law on Tuesday, adding natural organic reduction to the range of approved after-life options in the west coast state. Sponsored and developed by Rep. Pam Marsh (D - Southern Jackson County), the bill met Oregonians' growing interest in sustainable alternatives to traditional deathcare. "This is a hard issue for people to think about; it's not a decision that any of us get to avoid," Marsh told Motherboard over the phone. "It has an appeal, certainly not to all consumers, but to many of us who are really looking for ways to think about how our footprint on the earth continues after life is gone."

The move heeds a growing call from environmentalists across the country to clean up the end-of-life industry. The most common methods of body disposal come with hefty environmental impacts: traditional burials, in which a corpse is embalmed with formaldehyde and placed in a casket underground, permanently occupy large swaths of land and have been found to leach toxins into nearby soil and waterways. Cremation -- in which a body is burned into ash -- is an energy suck and emits damaging pollutants and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. The move follows Washington passing a similar law in 2019 and Colorado last month.

California on Friday started offering residents a digital record of their coronavirus vaccinations that they can use to access businesses or events that require proof they got the shots. From a report: The state's public health and technology departments said the new tool allows Californians access to their COVID-19 vaccination records from the state's immunization registry and includes the same information as the paper cards issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To access the information, Californians will enter into a state website their name, date of birth and email or phone associated with their vaccine records and they will be asked to create a four-digit PIN. The record will include a QR code that users can save to their mobile phones. With nearly 20 million people fully vaccinated in California and proof of vaccination already required in some circumstances such as travel, state health officials felt there would be demand for the tool, though it remains optional, said Dr. Erica Pan, the state's epidemiologist.

EPA is out with its latest tally of buildings certified through the Energy Star efficiency program it runs with the Energy Department. From a report: Commercial and multifamily buildings are a big source of energy demand and carbon emissions. The chart shows the ranking of large cities, and this page has more about those, and smaller cities, too.

The Senate on Thursday confirmed Chris Inglis to be President Joe Biden's national cyber director, installing the former NSA deputy director as Biden's top cyber adviser at a time when many lawmakers are pressing the White House for a muscular response to a series of high-profile hacks. From a report: As head of the new Office of the National Cyber Director inside the White House, Inglis will coordinate federal agencies' disparate work on cyber issues and oversee the development of the U.S.' digital defense strategy. The Senate confirmed Inglis on a voice vote one day after the Homeland Security Committee unanimously approved his nomination.

The recent ransomware attacks on Colonial Pipeline and the meat processing giant JBS, both attributed to Russian cybercrime gangs, as well as the SolarWinds espionage campaign that intelligence agencies linked to Moscow, thrust cybersecurity into the spotlight on Capitol Hill and prompted renewed scrutiny of the challenges facing the federal government, including its limited understanding of attacks on private companies.

The Biden administration Thursday unveiled a new mapping tool that shows much greater gaps in use of high-speed internet service across the U.S. than the government's previous maps reported. From a report: The White House is pushing for big spending to provide more, better broadband service to underserved areas after the pandemic made Americans more dependent than ever on their internet connections. The new, zoomable map draws on a wider pool of data than existing maps by the Federal Communications Commission, which relied exclusively on industry-provided data that overstated broadband penetration.

The map raises questions about the gap between internet availability and actual usage, with usage reports indicating wide swaths of the country are not making a home broadband connection. The new "Indicators of Broadband Need" map, developed by the White House and the telecommunications branch of the Commerce Department, pulls together different data sets from Ookla, M-Lab, Microsoft, the Federal Communications Commission and the Census Bureau. The overlapping data points are meant to paint a picture of the areas that need more, better broadband. The map also includes data on places that reported a lack of connection by computer, smartphone or tablet and information on broadband usage in high-poverty communities.

The U.S. and European Union plan to cooperate more on technology regulation, industrial development and bilateral trade following President Biden's visit, in a bid to help Western allies better compete with China and Russia on developing and protecting critical and emerging technologies. From a report: Central to the increased coordination will be a new high-level Trade and Technology Council the two sides unveiled Tuesday. The aim of the TTC is to boost innovation and investment within and between the two allied economies, strengthen supply chains and avert unnecessary obstacles to trade, among other tasks. "You see the possibility for alignment," said European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager in an interview.

In a sign of both sides' aspirations for the council, it will be co-chaired on the U.S. side by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai. The EU side will be co-chaired the Ms. Vestager, the bloc's top competition and digital-policy official, and fellow Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis, who handles trade. As the EU's top antitrust enforcer, Ms. Vestager has gained prominence for her cases against U.S. tech giants including Apple, Google parent Alphabet and Facebook. Former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump both said her policies unfairly targeted American companies. Ms. Vestager has said her work doesn't single out any nationality. The TTC, which is slated to hold its first meeting in the fall and oversee many working groups, will allow the EU and U.S. to focus on cooperation, she said. Both sides stressed they would maintain regulatory autonomy within their respective legal systems.

U.S. President Joe Biden told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday that certain critical infrastructure should be "off-limits" to cyber-attacks, while the two leaders agreed in their summit to start cybersecurity talks. From a report: Biden said the list of organizations that should not be attacked includes the 16 sectors designated by the United States as critical infrastructure. The sectors, based on a description published by the U.S. Homeland Security Department, include telecommunications, healthcare, food and energy. "We agreed to task experts in both our countries to work on specific understandings about what is off-limits," Biden said. "We'll find out whether we have a cybersecurity arrangement that begins to bring some order." In a separate press conference, Putin said he agreed to "begin consultations" on cybersecurity issues. He also said that while the United States had requested information from Russia about recent cyber-attacks, Moscow had similarly asked for information about attacks he said were coming from the U.S. side and had not received a response.

The US has warned the EU against pursuing "protectionist" technology policies that exclusively target American companies, ahead of Joe Biden's first presidential visit to Brussels. From a report: The National Security Council, an arm of the White House, wrote last week to complain about the tone of recent comments about the EU's flagship tech regulation, as debates are about to begin in the European parliament. "We are particularly concerned about recent comments by the European Parliament rapporteur for the Digital Markets Act, Andreas Schwab, who suggested the DMA should unquestionably target only the five biggest US firms," said the email, seen by the Financial Times and dated June 9. It added: "Comments and approaches such as this make regulatory co-operation between the US and Europe extremely difficult and send a message that the [European] Commission is not interested in engaging with the United States in good faith to address these common challenges in a way that serves our shared interests. Protectionist measures could disadvantage European citizens and hold back innovation in member-state economies. Such policies will also hinder our ability to work together to harmonize our regulatory systems," it said. The note was sent by the NSC to staff at the EU's delegation in the US capital, according to several people familiar with it, as part of routine communications between Washington and Brussels. It comes at a time when both the US and EU are keen to rebuild a relationship that was marred by acrimony during Donald Trump's presidency. On Tuesday Biden will attend an EU-US summit in Brussels to discuss trade, tech, and China.

The Senate confirmed President Joe Biden's nominee to the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, the young progressive who helped launch a reckoning amongst antitrust scholars and enforcers, in a 69-28 vote. From a report: At 32, Khan will become the youngest commissioner ever confirmed to the agency. Her confirmation also signals a bipartisan desire to impose more regulations on Big Tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet and Apple. Khan received the support of several Republicans, including Commerce Committee Ranking Member Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who participated in her confirmation hearing. Still, others like Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, opposed her confirmation. Lee has tended to be cautious about certain types of regulation despite concerns about tech companies' influence and previously expressed apprehension about Khan's experience.

Khan became a well-known figure in antitrust circles after writing "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" for the Yale Law Review in 2017, while a student at the university. The paper made the case for using a different framework for evaluating competitive harm than the popular consumer welfare standard. That standard essentially says that antitrust law violations can be determined based on harm to consumers, which is often measured based on prices. But Khan argued that standard could miss significant competitive harm in the modern economy, such as predatory pricing that lowers consumer prices in the short term but allows a company that can afford it to quickly gain market share. She also argued that both owning and selling on a marketplace, like Amazon does, could allow a business to exploit information across their ecosystem to undercut the competition. Update: Biden Names Lina Khan, a Big-Tech Critic, as F.T.C. Chair.

Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith criticized secret data subpoenas sent by the government to cloud providers like his company and Apple, saying gag orders on requests for personal information undermine freedoms and are hurting U.S. technology companies in Europe. From a report: Last week the New York Times reported that during the administration of former President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice demanded records from Apple relating to two Democrats on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee. CNBC reported Microsoft received a confidential request for the personal emails of a Congressional staffer. Both companies were under nondisclosure orders that prevented them from talking about or alerting the subjects of the data seizures.

The U.S. government should change the rules so that people whose data is being demanded can be informed and choose whether to file a legal challenge to the subpoenas, Smith said Monday in an interview with Bloomberg Television. Microsoft in 2016 filed a case against the DOJ related to the gag orders, and a year later the department issued new guidelines it said would scale back the practice of these kinds of confidential requests. "If we fail to do so, we undermine longstanding fundamental freedoms in the country and, frankly, for those of us in the tech sector, we're put in the middle," Smith said. "This should be an issue where the government has to go most of the time to the individuals whose information they are seeking."

Reality Winner, a former NSA intelligence contractor who leaked a classified hacking report to the press in 2017, was released on Monday from prison for good behavior, her attorney said. From a report: Winner is not yet at large. She has been transferred from prison to a Residential Reentry Management facility in San Antonio, Texas, where she will remain until November 2021, when she will be fully released under supervised release, her lawyer said. Winner, who worked for NSA contractor Pluribus International Corporation, was initially arrested in June 2017 on charges that a month earlier, she leaked a classified NSA report to online news outlet The Intercept.

In the report, the NSA detailed a hacking campaign linked to Russia's military intelligence service, the General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), which compromised the email accounts of multiple employees of election software maker VR Systems ahead of the 2016 US Presidential Election. The hack, which took place in August 2016, was used by the GRU hackers as a springboard to send spear-phishing emails with malware-laced documents to US government employees. Winner's leak, although not extensive, served as the base material for an article titled "Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election."

Winter through spring, the French Alps are wrapped in austere white snow. But as spring turns to summer, the stoic slopes start to blush. Parts of the snow take on bright colors: deep red, rusty orange, lemonade pink. Locals call this "sang de glacier," or "glacier blood." Visitors sometimes go with "watermelon snow." From a report: In reality, these blushes come from an embarrassment of algae. In recent years, alpine habitats all over the world have experienced an uptick in snow algae blooms -- dramatic, strangely hued aggregations of these normally invisible creatures. While snow algae blooms are poorly understood, that they are happening is probably not a good sign. Researchers have begun surveying the algae of the Alps to better grasp what species live there, how they survive and what might be pushing them over the bleeding edge. Some of their initial findings were published this week in Frontiers in Plant Science.

Tiny yet powerful, the plantlike bacteria we call algae are "the basis of all ecosystems," said Adeline Stewart, an author of the study who worked on it as a doctoral student at Grenoble Alpes University in France. Thanks to their photosynthetic prowess, algae produce a large amount of the world's oxygen, and form the foundation of most food webs. But they sometimes overdo it, multiplying until they throw things out of balance. This can cause toxic red tides, scummy freshwater blooms -- or unsettling glacier blood. While it's unclear exactly what spurs the blooms, the color -- often red, but sometimes green, gray or yellow -- comes from pigments and other molecules that the snow algae use to protect themselves from ultraviolet light. These hues absorb more sunlight, causing the underlying snow to melt more quickly. This can change ecosystem dynamics and hasten the shrinking of glaciers.

Back in 2009, then-governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger requested $4.7 billion in federal stimulus money to help build an 800-mile bullet train system from San Diego to San Francisco. "We're traveling on our trains at the same speed as 100 years ago," the governor said. "That is inexcusable. America must catch up."

Nearly 12 years later, "a $929-million federal grant for the California bullet train project was restored Thursday," reports the Los Angeles Times, "reversing a decision by the Trump administration to terminate the funding." But their story (shared by Slashdot reader schwit1) notes this grant has a very long history: The grant was originally made in 2010 after other states backed out of high-speed rail projects and declined to take the federal support. The California project already had won another $2.5-billion grant from the Obama administration's stimulus program, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The Trump action to take back the money was highly controversial, and federal grant experts said such terminations were rare in cases that did not involve fraud but were merely behind schedule.

Ronald Batory, then chief of the Federal Railroad Administration, cited California's multiple failures to forecast accurate schedules, among other problems, in taking the action. Along with House Republicans from California, Trump officials were highly critical of the California project, with former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao calling it a "bait and switch" on promises made to taxpayers. Chao and Trump had issued an even bigger threat, to claw back the much larger $2.5-billion grant that had already been spent. Despite such rhetoric, the Trump administration never made an attempt to get back the funds.

The $929 million is part of a planned $22.8-billion effort aimed at building a 171-mile partial operating system between Bakersfield and Merced [part of the route between San Francisco and Los Angeles], as well as completing environmental planning and making some high-speed rail investments in Southern California and the Bay Area.
In a statement, America's Federal Rail Agency said the settlement "reflects the federal government's ongoing partnership in the development of high-speed rail." And they called their restoration of funding "an important step in advancing an economically transformational project in California."

The Times adds that "Some bullet train advocates believe $10 billion or more from the state and federal government could be added to the project, allowing an expansion of the current construction. But even that much money would not close a roughly $80-billion shortfall needed to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco."