Wednesday’s news that the Obama administration had extended for four years a 2017 deadline to complete a 118-mile section of the state’s bullet-train system illustrates the utter failure of federal oversight of the troubled $64 billion project.

A $2.5 billion grant provided to the state under 2009’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act had included the deadline. That law was a $787 billion behemoth meant to jump-start an economy stuck in a deep recession by funding a vast array of “shovel-ready” projects in all 50 states. To win support for its passage, President Obama agreed to include strong guidelines to prevent money being wasted on half-baked proposals. On high-speed rail projects, funding was only to be granted after “rigorous analysis” demonstrated a sound “financial plan (capital and operating),” “reasonableness of financial estimates” and “quality of planning process.”

Based on these restrictions, the $2.5 billion grant should never have been approved in the first place. The foundation of the California bullet-train project is Proposition 1A, a 2008 ballot measure allocating $9.95 billion in state bonds as seed money toward building a state high-speed rail network then expected to cost $43 billion.