Well this sucks. The House of Representatives tonight cut $1.5 billion from the annual appropriation for high speed rail for fiscal year 2011 (FY11). The cut was apparently requested by President Barack Obama, as the statement linked above from House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey explained. In the same Year Long Funding Act, the Department of Defense gets $4.9 billion more than in 2010, and $159 billion is appropriated for the war in Afghanistan, now in its 10th year.

I’ve had a busy week, so apparently I missed where the president requested HSR funding be brought down to just $1 billion from the $2.5 billion level it was at in 2010. This seems to have been part of the president’s effort to appease Republicans, as last week he announced a pay freeze for federal workers. Of course, this week Obama has touched off a firestorm of controversy by agreeing to blow a $900 billion hole in the budget by extending the Bush tax cuts for two more years.

To say this is profoundly disappointing would be an understatement. President Barack Obama took office in early 2009 amidst a lot of hope and expectation that he would make good on his promises to invest in American infrastructure to make us competitive for the 21st century. His early moves showed he was serious: putting $8 billion for HSR into the stimulus, and following it up with a relaunch of the federal HSR program. Obama initially proposed $1 billion per year for HSR for FY10 – the House increased it to $4 billion, and the Senate pared it back to $2.5 billion last December.

Today, however, Obama is in full retreat – one might even call it a rout. Abandoning election promises left and right in a quixotic effort to appease a Republican Party that has vowed to destroy him, his political position is growing worse by the day. His base is in revolt, and his agenda has ground to a halt.

By embracing budget cuts and tax cuts – an agenda that is Republican-lite – at the expense of things like high speed rail, Obama is signaling he is willing to sacrifice HSR in order to achieve a desired political accommodation with Republicans ahead of the 2012 election. Obama is clearly looking to the mid-1990s for inspiration, when President Bill Clinton pursued a similar strategy, winning a big re-election victory in 1996.

However, it’s very unlikely that things will turn out that way again. We know from the experience of the last 30 years that spending cuts and tax cuts fail to produce economic growth (tax cuts were tried in 2008 and 2009 and each time failed to revive the economy). Instead they merely weaken the overall economy by creating a big deficit problem as well as a problem of deteriorating infrastructure. Combined with the fact that this recession is far worse than the recession Clinton inherited, Obama is therefore very unlikely to see an economic recovery before 2012.

That alone suggests Obama will not be able to recreate the Clinton triangulation strategy. But there are other factors, including the fact that there is a much better organized and powerful progressive movement today, whereas it barely existed 15 years ago. Obama is already facing serious political resistance from other Democrats to his tax cut deal, and any further deal-making with Republicans is likely to produce outright rebellion. Obama may believe that such deals are in his political interest, but he will soon find that Republicans always demand more, and that meeting such demands is a price his base is unwilling to pay.

Sadly, Obama hasn’t yet realized that fact. So this is probably just the beginning of HSR’s political difficulties in Congress. Several Republicans have already demanded that the unspent HSR stimulus funds be rescinded, and while I assume that to be unlikely, Obama doesn’t appear to be in a mood to fight for his original agenda, so we should take that threat seriously.

What does this all mean for California’s HSR project? Well, it certainly makes the financial picture more challenging. I suspect it will increase the pressure on California to find an outside partner to help build it – China in particular becomes a much more important possibility as a source of HSR funding. That brings its own challenges, as we do not want to see a repeat of the financial problems faced by Taiwan’s HSR project, problems brought on by overreliance on private funding.

Still, it seems increasingly likely that California will have to look to Beijing or Tokyo instead of to our own national government to help us build a vital piece of 21st century infrastructure. It is a sad, even pathetic state of affairs. 80 years ago the federal government helped build Boulder Dam, Shasta Dam, several important canal projects in the Central Valley, and even helped refinance the Golden Gate Bridge bonds. The harbor at Los Angeles, a crucial element of our trade and export industry, was built by the federal government. And the feds paid 90% of the cost of our interstate highway system.

All that seems relegated to the past now, at least with the incoming Republican majority and with a president who is panicking and abandoning his own promises as quickly as he can.

While Obama will pay a political price for his doomed efforts at appeasement, it is the country as a whole that is going to suffer. We desperately need new investment in sustainable infrastructure. We cannot rebuild our shared prosperity without it. We will have to step up our organizing efforts in the coming weeks and months to ensure that the HSR cuts stop here.