On April 14, 2025, Jake Ellzey put out a press release with a headline that started with two words: "It's Over."

The U.S. Department of Transportation and Amtrak had just terminated a $63.9 million federal grant for the Texas High-Speed Rail Corridor — the long-planned bullet train between Dallas and Houston, formerly the Texas Central Railway project. Ellzey took credit for the "numerous conversations and collaboration" with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy that led to it.

Six days later, on WFAA's Inside Texas Politics, he was blunter. The segment ran under his own words: "Texas congressman on Bullet Train Project: 'This was all one big grift.'"

There's something he didn't mention in the press release.

What Jake Ellzey does when Congress isn't in session

From his own campaign biography:

"Today, Commander Ellzey is a commercial airline pilot based out of DFW."

That's not a secret and it's not a scandal by itself. Plenty of members of Congress keep a profession.

But a 90-minute train between Dallas and Houston competes with the airplane that currently makes that trip. Nobody has ever pretended otherwise — Southwest Airlines said so in writing the last time Texas tried this, as you'll see below. The people who fly that route for a living have a direct financial interest in whether the train gets built.

And they are among Jake Ellzey's most consistent donors.

The money, from the FEC's own records

Federal Election Commission filings for Ellzey's campaign committee show the following from airline pilots' union political action committees across the 2022, 2024 and 2026 cycles:

That's about $125,000 from pilots' organizations to one member of Congress in three cycles — including $35,000 from the union representing Southwest Airlines pilots.

You can check the underlying filings yourself in the FEC's receipts database for committee C00770438.

Texas has been here before

Killing a Texas bullet train on behalf of the airline business is not a new play.

In the early 1990s a company called Texas TGV proposed a 200 mph line linking Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio. Southwest Airlines fought it hard. In a 1991 filing quoted in Simple Flying's history of that campaign, the airline argued:

"The American reality is that high-speed rail will be viable in Texas only by destroying the convenient and inexpensive transportation service the airlines now provide, and only by absorbing huge public subsidies."

Texas TGV raised more than $70 million and collapsed in the mid-1990s.

Thirty years later, the same route, the same fight, the same outcome — this time with a congressman who flies for a living doing the honors.

What the grant actually was, and what got lost

Ellzey's press release framed this as stopping a taxpayer boondoggle. Two things are worth being precise about.

First, the $63.9 million was a planning grant under the Corridor Identification and Development Program. It paid for studying the corridor, not for laying track.

Second, the project it was studying was not small. When the final construction agreement was signed in June 2021, ABC13 reported the numbers: a $16 billion project, a 200 mph train covering Dallas to Houston in 90 minutes, roughly 17,000 direct construction jobs over six years, 20,000 more in the supply chain, and more than 1,400 permanent jobs once running.

Those are Texas jobs. And Ellzey's district — all of Ellis, Navarro, Anderson, Hill and Cherokee counties, plus parts of Tarrant, Dallas, Freestone and Johnson — sits squarely in the country between the two endpoints.

The argument he did make

To be fair to him, Ellzey's stated objection wasn't about airlines. It was about land:

"Land cannot be taken, homes cannot be destroyed, and lives should not be disrupted for a project that does not serve the needs of our state. As I have stated before, I strongly oppose the use of eminent domain for private ventures like the high-speed rail project."

That's a real concern and rural Texas landowners have raised it in good faith for a decade. A member of Congress who represents farmland is entitled to weigh in on it.

But two things can be true. The eminent domain argument is genuine, and it is also the argument that happens to line up perfectly with the financial interests of the people funding his campaign — and with his own profession.

At minimum, a reader in Ellis County deserves to know all of it before deciding what "one big grift" means.

He's on the committee that writes the checks

This isn't a backbencher's opinion. Ellzey sits on the House Appropriations Committee — the panel that decides where federal money goes — and on its Defense, Interior-Environment, and Labor-HHS-Education subcommittees.

When someone with that seat says a project should lose its funding, it loses its funding. He said so himself: the decision came after "numerous conversations and collaboration" with the Transportation Secretary.

We've written about what the rest of his record looks like in 3 Things to Know About Jake Ellzey, and about the broader bill for Texans in what Texas's Republicans in Congress are costing you.

The question

If a congressman who flies commercial jets out of DFW, and who has taken roughly $125,000 from pilots' union PACs, uses his seat on the Appropriations Committee to help cancel the funding for a train that would compete with commercial jets out of DFW — that is worth saying out loud.

He never said it. So we did.

Sources

Jake Ellzey, "It's Over — U.S. Department of Transportation and Amtrak Rescinds Grant for Texas Central's High-Speed Rail Boondoggle," April 14, 2025; and "Texas congressman on Bullet Train Project: 'This was all one big grift,'" WFAA Inside Texas Politics, April 20, 2025. Contribution totals compiled from Federal Election Commission filings for committee C00770438.