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 pointed to the "numerous conversations and collaboration" he had had with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.

Six days later, on WFAA's Inside Texas Politics, he was blunter. Asked whether the grant decision ended the bullet train, he said "Deader than a doornail," and added that "the federal government is not interested in putting one buffalo nickel towards this project." The whole thing, he said, "was all about selling trains." WFAA ran the segment under the headline "Texas congressman on Bullet Train Project: 'This was all one big grift.'"

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

The airline on Jake Ellzey's financial disclosure

From his own campaign biography:

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

His federal filings name the airline. Ellzey's 2025 annual House financial disclosure lists, under Positions, "Pilot — Southwest Airlines Company," with the comment "On leave." Under Agreements it lists a July 2021 arrangement with Southwest under which "The Congressman receives payment from Southwest Airlines Co. for being on inactive status as a pilot." He reported $3,870 of that inactive-status pay for 2025. He also holds a Southwest Airlines Co. Retirement Savings Plan and a Southwest Airlines Pilots Association Retirement Savings Plan. The same three entries, and $8,760.65 of inactive-status pay, are on his filing for 2024.

So he is not flying a line while he serves. He is a Southwest pilot on leave, still on Southwest's payroll, and still vested in Southwest's plans. That is not a secret and it is not a scandal by itself. Plenty of members of Congress keep a job to go back to.

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 pilots' 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. Simple Flying's history of that campaign quotes the airline's argument:

"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 is a Southwest pilot on leave 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 civil construction contract was signed in June 2021, ABC13 reported the numbers: a $16 billion contract with the builder, 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 the airline that still pays him.

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, and about the broader bill for Texans in what Texas's Republicans in Congress are costing you.

The question

If a congressman who is a Southwest Airlines pilot on leave, still drawing pay from Southwest, and who has taken roughly $125,000 from pilots' PACs — $35,000 of it from Southwest's own pilots' union — uses his seat on the Appropriations Committee to help cancel the funding for a train that would compete with short-haul flights between Dallas and Houston, 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. Employment and pay from Ellzey's House financial disclosures for 2025 and 2024.