Seldom has a public agency needed a housecleaning more than the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation.

And only in Hawaii would we have a union-led uproar when it finally happens 10 years and $7 billion too late.

HART’s new CEO, Lori Kahikina, former Honolulu director of environmental services under Mayor Kirk Caldwell, has fired nearly half the rail agency’s staff to eliminate “redundancies and inefficiencies” as the project faces a $3.68 billion deficit and 12-year delay with construction indefinitely stalled at Dillingham Boulevard.

The Hawaii Government Employees Association is grieving the firings, and the Federal Transit Administration has concerns.

Much grousing involves the loss of “institutional memory” from the firings in a project that’s ballooned from $5.2 billion in cost to $12.4 billion across multiple regimes of mismanagement.

What a shame HART will lack bureaucrats knowledgeable about how to miserably fail at completing the transit line from Kapolei to Ala Moana Center despite two state bailouts.

What a loss HART won’t have “experts” who can coordinate past misinformation they spread about rail with new lies.

The most valid concern about the housecleaning is that it partly involves replacing devotees of former Mayor Mufi Hannemann with allies of Caldwell; it’s a coin flip as to which is more responsible for Oahu’s rail disaster.

Then there’s the ever-looming dark presence of our federal partners, who have committed $1.5 billion to the project.

The FTA has put up $750 million of the $10 billion misspent on rail so far, and for this very minority contribution it demands final say on how to proceed over local taxpayers, who put up far more funding.

This is like a rich uncle contributing $750 to your $10,000 wedding and demanding veto power over every aspect from flower girls to pupu — and won’t let you move the party inside from the garden when torrential rain comes.

Now HART tells us this partner won’t contribute its remaining $750 million unless we cough up $3.68 billion more local money and spend it exactly as FTA says.

When HART board member Joe Uno recently tried to start discussion of a “Plan C” — an excellent idea given that the agency has no idea how it’ll cover its nearly $4 billion deficit and can’t even start planned interim service to Honolulu Stadium because faulty train wheels don’t fit track junctions — he was shot down by Chairman Tobias Martyn, who insisted HART must follow the letter of its “Full Funding Grant Agreement” with the FTA that has failed us so spectacularly.

Seeing where our kowtowing to the FTA has gotten us so far, perhaps it’s time to tell Uncle Rich that we’ll take it from here and conclude the sputtering project in whatever way best suits our changing needs.

We can leave our congressional delegates, who claim new empowerment in Democratic Washington, to dissuade FTA from penalizing us for seeking our best way out of this dreadful mess it helped create.

Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.