Looking to cut costs on Amtrak’s project to replace an aging West Baltimore tunnel, rail officials under the Trump administration have been talking with Elon Musk’s tunneling company, The Boring Co.

The talks surround a potential engineering contract for the Frederick Douglass Tunnel project near Penn Station, a major undertaking by Amtrak to modernize deteriorating rail infrastructure that is expected to cost billions. Multiple officials confirmed the discussions first reported by The New York Times, but the Trump administration disputed how they were characterized by the newspaper.

U.S. Department of Transportation spokesperson Nathaniel Sizemore said that rail officials are seeking advice from “many stakeholders in the infrastructure-engineering space,” including Boring, to get Amtrak’s single largest infrastructure project “back on track” in the face of rising expenses.

He called the Times’ reporting, which raised issues about Musk’s conflicts of interest in government dealings, a “hit piece” and “more fake news to try and make something out of nothing.”

The discussions came after cost estimates ballooned for the long-awaited project to replace the 152-year-old Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel, one of the biggest bottlenecks in Amtrak’s busiest region. The long-awaited rebuild was estimated at $4 billion when site work kicked off in 2021, though estimates last fall hit as high as $8.5 billion.

Officials said that the Federal Railroad Administration met with Boring about issuing a new contract to focus on lowering construction costs. No decision has been made on bidding out the additional “value engineering” work, which would not involve any construction but rather a review of the project’s technical aspects in order to lower costs.

Amtrak already has an “independent cost estimator” for the project, choosing a national firm in 2023, according to contract records obtained by The Baltimore Sun through a public records request.

A report from Amtrak’s inspector general’s office warned of potential cost overruns and delays caused by short staffing and ineffective management in the project’s early years. But officials under the Biden administration said they had implemented fixes and started to make “significant strides” in their efforts to replace the current tunnel, which runs under Bolton Hill, Madison Park, Reservoir Hill, Sandtown-Winchester and Upton.

Musk’s role as the head of several companies and an adviser to President Donald Trump has broken precedent for interplay between the federal government and companies owned by a major campaign booster. Other brands owned by Musk, such as the automaker Tesla, rocket technology firm SpaceX and its internet service subsidiary Starlink, have had an increasing presence in both the White House and other federal agencies — but especially in the Transportation Department.

There hasn’t been a final decision to hire a new contractor to find cost-cutting measures. The Transportation Department and Amtrak will “follow standard procedures for bidding out contracting and subcontracting” for value engineering work, Sizemore said.

Musk, who has disparaged Amtrak’s rail service and advocated for privatizing the rail corporation, founded Boring in 2016, proposing ambitious projects to tunnel under cities for underground high-speed transportation networks. It has completed a test tunnel in Los Angeles as well as a 1.7-mile loop in Las Vegas that is planned for expansion, though many of its projects have been canceled or tabled.

One of those was a proposed 35-mile loop connecting Baltimore and Washington. Musk claimed in 2017 that he had received “verbal” government approval to dig a “hyperloop” from New York to Washington, with stops in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Years later, federal regulators released details of the scaled-back proposal connecting Washington and Baltimore. That project was removed from Boring’s website in 2021.

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