By Jose E. Navarro, MBA | The Navarro Report | September 22, 2026
Los Angeles County voters have approved four separate sales tax measures to fund public transit since 1980 — Proposition A, Proposition C, Measure R, and Measure M — committing billions in dedicated public revenue to a system they were promised would transform how their region moves. The system has been transformed. Ridership has declined more than 19 percent since 2013. Crime on the Metro more than doubled between 2020 and 2025. And with the 2028 Olympics arriving in less than two years, the agency responsible for moving one million additional daily riders during the Games is running a $1.1 billion funding gap it has not closed and may not close in time.
This is not a story about bad intentions. It is a story about what happens when a public agency is accountable to its construction schedule rather than its ridership numbers — and what the financial consequences look like when the world is watching.
The centerpiece of LA Metro’s Olympic strategy was an initiative called “Twenty-eight by ’28” — a commitment to complete 28 transit projects before the 2028 Games. The program carried an estimated price tag of $26.2 billion. By March 2024, Metro’s own board had quietly replaced 11 of the 28 original projects, including five rail line expansions, with smaller, more feasible alternatives after the original commitments proved impossible to meet on schedule. By late 2024, independent observers had determined that only 5.2 percent of Metro’s $3.3 billion Olympic-related project list was funded.
The Olympics transit plan compounds that existing gap. LA Metro needs to acquire 1,750 buses from across the country in addition to its own 2,100, to handle an unprecedented one million extra transit trips per day during the Games — and it does not have enough money to pull it off. The agency has requested $2 billion in federal funding. Only $875 million passed in the House Appropriations Committee and it has not gone to the Senate. President Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget request did not include any LA Olympic transportation funding.
Los Angeles City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson has acknowledged the stakes publicly. He told reporters that he doesn’t think budget overruns will happen but acknowledged it was “a risky proposition” for the city — adding “there’s a lot of things that can go wrong.” That acknowledgment carries weight. The city’s financial exposure is essentially unlimited in the event of budget overruns — on the hook for the first $270 million in losses, with the California Legislature agreeing to cover the next $270 million, and any additional burden falling on Los Angeles taxpayers after that. Academic analysis of recent Olympic host cities projects average budget overruns of 172 percent. Applied to LA28, that benchmark would put the total cost at approximately $12.3 billion.
The safety crisis on the system itself is inseparable from the ridership decline. Between 2020 and 2025, crime in the system more than doubled. Metro’s response — replacing traditional law enforcement with unarmed ambassadors in neon-green shirts — generated its own documented consequences. According to a December 2025 report by UCLA researchers, the unarmed ambassadors have been threatened at gunpoint, sexually assaulted, punched, and kicked. Metro’s board has since approved a return to in-house law enforcement, but the new Transit Safety Department will not be fully operational until 2029 — one year after the Games conclude.
Federal prosecutor Bill Essayli, commenting on LA’s broader pattern of public spending failures, said it plainly last week in a downtown Los Angeles courthouse: “Nobody was minding the shop.” LA County District Attorney Nathan Hochman, standing beside him, added: “We have not seen the results you would expect for billions of dollars being spent. This is the beginning.”
They were speaking about homeless services. The statement applies with equal precision to the transit system that is supposed to move the world in 2028.
Human-Directed AI Journalism | The Navarro Report
This article was produced under The Navarro Report’s Human-Directed AI Journalism model. Jose E. Navarro, MBA, directed all research, selected the topic, determined the analytical framework, and approved the final version. AI assisted with research compilation and drafting. Every factual claim was verified against primary sources.
© 2026 The Navarro Report | jose@navarro-report.com | navarro-report.com