On her first day in office, Mayor Karen Bass declared a state of emergency on homelessness.
The declaration allowed the city to cut through red tape, including through no-bid contracts, and to start Inside Safe, Bass’ signature program focused on moving homeless people off the streets and into interim housing.
On Tuesday, nearly three years after she took the helm, and with homelessness trending down two years in a row for the first time in recent years, the mayor announced that she will lift the state of emergency on Nov. 18.
“We have begun a real shift in our city’s decades-long trend of rising homelessness,” Bass said in a memorandum to the City Council.
Still, the mayor said, there is much work to do.
“The crisis remains, and so does our urgency,” she said.
The mayor’s announcement followed months of City Council pushback on the lengthy duration of the state of emergency, which the council had initially approved.
Some council members argued that the state of emergency allowed the mayor’s office to operate out of public view and that contracts and leases should once again be presented before them with public testimony and a vote.
Councilmember Tim McOsker has been arguing for months that it was time to return to business as usual.
“Emergency powers are designed to allow the government to suspend rules and respond rapidly when the situation demands it, but at some point those powers must conclude,” he said in a statement Tuesday.
McOsker said the move will allow the council to “formalize” some of the programs started during the emergency, while incorporating more transparency.
Council members had been concerned that the state of emergency would end without first codifying Executive Directive 1, which expedites approvals for homeless shelters as well as for developments that are 100% affordable and was issued by Bass shortly after she took office.
On Oct. 28, the council voted for the city attorney to draft an ordinance that would enshrine the executive directive into law.
The mayor’s announcement follows positive reports about the state of homelessness in the city.
As of September, the mayor’s Inside Safe program had moved more than 5,000 people into interim housing since its inception at the end of 2022. Of those people, more than 1,243 have moved into permanent housing, while another 1,636 remained in interim housing.
This year, the number of homeless people living in shelters or on the streets of the city dropped 3.4%, according to the annual count conducted by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. The number of unsheltered homeless people in the city dropped by an even steeper margin of 7.9%.
The count, however, has its detractors. A study by Rand found that the annual survey missed nearly a third of homeless people in Hollywood, Venice and Skid Row — primarily those sleeping without tents or vehicles.
In June, a federal judge decided not to put Los Angeles’ homelessness programs into receivership, while saying that the city had failed to meet some of the terms of a settlement agreement with the nonprofit LA Alliance for Human Rights.
Councilmember Nithya Raman, who chairs the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, said the end of the emergency does not mean the crisis is over.
“It only means that we must build fiscally sustainable systems that can respond effectively,” she said. “By transitioning from emergency measures to long-term, institutional frameworks, we’re ensuring consistent, accountable support for people experiencing homelessness.”
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
SAN JOSE — Matt Mahan didn’t set out to be a scold and pain in Gavin Newsom’s backside.
He doesn’t mean to sound like a wrathful Republican when he criticizes one-party rule in Sacramento. Or a disgruntled independent when he assails a Democratic establishment that’s become, as he sees it, “a club of insiders who take care of each other” and mostly go along to get along.
Maybe because that’s “my diagnosis of it,” said the 42-year-old San José mayor, “I have tried very consciously to not fall into that trap of just wanting to be liked.”
He is, Mahan insists, a Democrat to his core, his roots sunk deep in the loamy soil of working-class Watsonville, where, over the mountains and light years from Silicon Valley, he grew up the son of a mail carrier and a high school teacher.
“We have become so caught up in our own rhetoric of helping the little guy that we’ve stopped actually checking to make sure that we are doing that,” Mahan said over lunch at a cantina downtown.
Results, he said, are what matter. Not good intentions.
And certainly not the performative pugilism that some, including the hyper-online Newsom, pass off as leadership. “A sugar high,” Mahan called it.
“I think a lot of Democrats are frustrated and feel powerless, and so that rhetoric has this cathartic effect,” he said. “But I don’t know that it actually, over time, moves us toward success, and I mean not just success in society, but even political success, because ultimately, if you’re not offering solutions, I think you can have a hard time getting to a majority position.”
Mahan comes by his outsider status naturally.
In high school, he rode the bus four hours a day — from Watsonville to San José and back again — to attend a college prep academy on a work-study scholarship. (“My golden ticket,” he called it.) He worked on the grounds crew to help pay his way, and continued on to Harvard, where his dorm mates included Mark Zuckerberg. (The two hung out in college and still talk occasionally.)
After a year in Bolivia, helping family farmers, and a stint teaching middle school, Mahan co-founded a social media company that focused on civic engagement and raising money for nonprofits. He was elected to the San José City Council in 2020. Even before his first term was completed, Mahan launched an upstart bid for mayor.
The front-runner was a member of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, a former San José vice mayor and longtime civic leader. Waging a nothing-to-lose campaign — “we had no endorsements, we had much less money” — Mahan knocked on thousands of doors. He asked voters what they had on their minds.
The experience impressed two things upon Mahan: a need for accountability and the importance of voters’ lived experience, as opposed to vague promises, abstract notions and politically fashionable statements.
“I think ultimately political success and policy success comes from offering better ideas and demonstrating impact,” Mahan said, sounding very much like the technocrat he calls himself.
Mahan won the mayor’s race — narrowly, in a major upset — and was reelected two years later in a November 2024 landslide. (The year Mahan was elected, San José voted to shift its mayoral contest to correspond with presidential balloting, which cut his first term in half.)
Soon enough, Mahan found himself at odds with some major Democratic constituencies, including powerful labor unions, which pushed back over wages and a return-to-office policy, and homeless advocates who bristled at Mahan’s focus on short-term housing and threat to arrest homeless people who refused multiple offers of shelter.
While the mockery and memes may feel good as snickering payback and certainly stoke the Democratic base — boosting Newsom’s presidential hopes — Mahan suggested they are ultimately counterproductive.
“If we don’t have a politics of solutions and making people’s lives better, I just don’t know where we end up,” he said, as his enchiladas sat cooling before him. “It’s politics practiced in bad faith, where we just … tell people things that test well because they sound nice, and then we just blame the other side for being evil, incompetent, corrupt. … It’s just a race to the bottom.”
He took particular issue with Newsom’s taunting reaction after Bed Bath & Beyond recently announced it won’t open or operate new stores in California.
It wasn’t “a reasoned argument,” Mahan wrote in a scathing opinion piece in the San Francisco Standard. The tart headline: “How about less time breaking the internet and more time fixing California?”
“‘Breaking the internet’ doesn’t solve real-world problems — quite the opposite,” Mahan wrote. “More often than not, it’s just political theater that serves to excuse inaction and ineffective policies.”
He elaborated over lunch.
“You have an employer who’s pointing out real issues that everybody else who’s watching thinks are real issues. Talking about business climate, cost of doing business, public safety issues, retail theft, untreated addiction and mental illness,” Mahan said.
“When we start turning on constituents because we don’t agree with their ideology, or attacking Trump is more important than actually solving problems or listening to the criticism … I think we’re heading down a dangerous road.”
Inevitably, there’s the question: To what end all this poking of thumbs in his fellow Democrats’ eyes?
Mahan has drawn wide notice, in particular from the more pragmatic wing of the party. His back-to-basics approach has yielded some measurable success. A recent study called San José the safest major city in the country and, while the overall homeless population grew slightly, there’s been progress moving people off the streets into city shelters.
He considered plunging into the race for governor, but the timing wasn’t right. Mahan has two small children and a wife who’s flourishing in her career as an educator. Besides, Mahan said, he’s quite content being mayor of California’s third-most populous city.
“I have a wonderful marriage,” Mahan said. “I have two wonderful kids. I loved working in the private sector. I’ve got a lot of great friends. I’m doing this because I genuinely want to make our city better, and I love the job. But it’s not who I am, and I can separate myself from the job.”
That grounding and perspective, so different from those politicians oozing ambition from every pore, may be Mahan’s best commendation for higher office.
Local officials and advocates for the homeless are fearful that President Trump will take draconian action against homeless people, including pushing them into detention camps, when Los Angeles hosts the Olympic Games in 2028.
In recent weeks, Trump has appointed himself head of an Olympics task force and has seized control of local policing in Washington, D.C., declaring that homeless people will be given places to stay “FAR from the Capital.”
“Based on everything that has happened so far … I think you would have to be irrational not to worry about a worst case scenario [during the Games], where federal troops are effectively forcing poor people on the street to relocate to what is essentially a detention center somewhere out of sight,” said Gary Blasi, a professor emeritus at UCLA School of Law and a leading homelessness researcher.
On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that for now, D.C. police and federal agents will clear homeless encampments in the capital and give people the option of accepting shelter beds and services or facing fines and jail time. The administration, she said, is also exploring how it can move homeless people far from the city.
The White House did not answer questions about whether it has a plan to address homelessness in L.A. in preparation for the Olympics. But White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said, “The people of Los Angeles would benefit tremendously if local officials followed President Trump’s lead to make the city safe and beautiful, especially as they prepare to welcome 15 million people from around the world as the Olympics’ host city.”
When hosting the Olympics, local officials typically try to present the best image of their city, which can include refurbishing landmarks and sports venues or cleaning up areas where homeless people congregate.
“The eyes of the world will be on Los Angeles,” and officials don’t want “people coming to the city and see this visual problem manifest right in front of them,” said Benjamin F. Henwood, director of USC’s Homelessness Policy Research Institute.
French authorities bused homeless people out of Paris before the 2024 Games, and in 1984, the Los Angeles Police Department used mounted horse patrols to scatter homeless people into less visible areas of downtown.
This time, L.A. city and county officials said they will not deviate from their efforts to place homeless people in interim and permanent housing locally.
Last year, in an interview with The Times, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said that unlike during previous Olympics, she would not bus homeless people out of the city and instead would focus on “housing people first.”
Similarly, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors has ordered county staffers to develop an encampment plan for upcoming sporting events, including the 2026 World Cup and the Olympics, that will emphasize permanent housing solutions.
But the supervisors also noted that encampments near Olympic venues will need to be “addressed,” in part to “establish adequate security perimeters.”
In D.C., in addition to taking over the city police department, Trump has deployed the National Guard to, as he put it, “reestablish law and order.” He has threatened to resend the Guard and the military to the Los Angeles area, where they were stationed this summer during federal immigration raids, if needed to maintain safety during the Olympics.
In a statement, Supervisor Janice Hahn said that federalizing local law enforcement and sending the U.S. military to American cities is “what tyrants do.” She also noted that the Trump administration has cut social safety net programs and is seeking to withdraw support for policies that prioritize placing homeless people in permanent housing before addressing other issues such as substance abuse and mental health.
“What the President is doing in DC should concern everyone,” Hahn said. “If he really wants to solve homelessness, he needs to get us the resources we need to get people housed and keep them housed.”
Nithya Raman, chair of the L.A. City Council’s housing and homelessness committee, said in a statement that given the region’s homelessness crisis, “the repercussions of similar actions as they are threatening in DC would be staggering.”
In her own statement, Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said that despite the Trump administration’s plan of “dehumanization,” the county “will keep doing what’s right — focusing on humane, lasting solutions to homelessness.”
Katie Hill, a former Democratic member of Congress who now runs Union Station Homeless Services, said she fears the Trump administration is working on “mass institutionalization of some kind” for homeless people during the Games, similar to federal immigration detention facilities, where there have been reports of inhumane conditions.
“He doesn’t care about the rules or the norms,” Hill said of Trump. “There is a lot of federal facilities and land that they could use potentially as a detention facility.”
Unlike D.C., which is a federal district where the president holds special powers, Blasi said that in Los Angeles, the federal government cannot legally lock up people for living on the streets but could “make life so miserable for unhoused people” that there are no other options besides “a camp somewhere.”
Blasi said the Trump administration could try to invoke emergency laws to incarcerate people but doubted that courts would approve.
Since she was elected in 2022, Bass has made homelessness her signature issue. In her marquee Inside Safe program, before an encampment is cleared, residents are all offered housing and services, which are voluntary, with no fines or jail time if the person rejects the help, said Bass spokesperson Zach Seidl.
Seidl said the mayor is “laser-focused on addressing homelessness through a proven comprehensive strategy” and that “this is progress she would’ve made regardless of the Games.”
Homelessness in both the city and county has dropped in the last two years, particularly the number of people who are unsheltered, which has fallen 14% in the county and nearly 18% in the city since 2023, data show. About 47,000 people live on the streets in L.A. County.
Eric Sheehan, a member of NOlympics, which opposes holding the Olympics in L.A., said he is concerned about how the Trump administration will act during the Games. But he said the federal approach to homelessness may not differ much from what local officials are already doing.
Sheehan pointed to the city of Los Angeles’ no sleeping zones, encampment cleanups monitored by police and interim housing he characterized as jail-like.
“I don’t think there is a version of this Olympics that doesn’t hurt Angelenos,” Sheehan said.
Amy Turk, chief executive of the Downtown Women’s Center, said that using the police and military to address homelessness is “an expensive intervention that is just moving someone from one place to another place.” She is particularly concerned about the impact on people fleeing domestic violence.
To mitigate the damage the Trump administration could do, Turk said it’s important for nonprofits like hers to keep working to find people permanent housing and services.
One hurdle is funding.
State and local budget constraints have reduced funding for homeless services this year, including for a temporary housing subsidy that officials said was key in reducing homelessness in the last several years.
Hill said more funds are needed so L.A. County can tackle homelessness on its own terms, not those of the Trump administration.
“Where is the money going to come from to set up something that is more humane?” she said.
Musician Dennis Henriquez woke up in a doorway in East Hollywood last month, hidden behind cardboard and sheltered by a tarp.
When he peered outside, half a dozen sanitation workers were standing nearby, waiting to carry out one of the more than 30 homeless encampment cleanups planned that day by the city of Los Angeles.
Henriquez eventually emerged, carried out a bicycle and deposited it on a grassy area 20 feet away. He also dragged over a backpack, a scooter, two guitars, a piece of luggage and a beach chair.
The city sanitation crew grabbed the tarp and the cardboard, tossing them into a trash truck. Then, the contingent of city workers, including two police officers, climbed into their vehicles and drove away, leaving behind Henriquez and his pile of belongings.
This type of operation, known as a CARE-plus cleanup, plays out hundreds of times each week in the city, with sanitation crews seizing and destroying tents, tarps, pallets, shopping carts and many other objects.
The cleanups have emerged as a huge source of conflict in a five-year-old legal dispute over the city’s handling of the homelessness crisis. Depending on how the cleanup issue is resolved, the city could face legal sanctions, millions of dollars in penalties or increased outside oversight of its homeless programs.
A construction loader plows through the remains of a homeless encampment on Wilshire Boulevard, just west of downtown.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
Sanitation crews grab a mattress during the cleanup. (Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
A notice about the cleanup is displayed on a utility pole on Wilshire Boulevard. (Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
In 2022, city leaders reached a legal settlement with the nonprofit L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, promising to create 12,915 homeless beds or other housing opportunities by June 2027. Eventually, they also agreed to remove 9,800 homeless encampments by June 2026 — with an encampment defined as an individual tent, makeshift structure, car or recreational vehicle.
To reach the latter goal, city leaders have been counting each encampment removed from streets, sidewalks and alleys during the Bureau of Sanitation’s CARE-plus cleanups — even in cases where the resident did not obtain housing or a shelter bed.
The alliance has strongly objected to the city’s methodology, arguing that destroying a tent, without housing its occupants, runs afoul of the 2022 settlement agreement. Any “encampment resolution” tallied by the city must be more permanent — and address the larger goal of reducing homelessness, said Elizabeth Mitchell, an attorney for the alliance.
“If the person insists on staying where they are and nothing else has happened, that’s not a resolution,” she said. “They can’t count that.”
City leaders have carried out CARE-plus cleanups for years, saying they are needed to protect public safety and restore sidewalk access for wheelchair users, the elderly and others. Some encampments are strewn with debris that spills across an entire walkway or out into the street, while others carry the smell of urine, fecal matter or decaying food waste.
The cleanups have a Sisyphean quality. Many seasoned residents drag their tents across the street, wait out the cleanup, then return to their original spots in the afternoon. The process frequently restarts a week or two later.
The alliance’s legal team, alarmed by the inclusion of CARE-plus cleanups in the encampment reduction count, recently spent several days trying to persuade a federal judge to seize control of the city’s homelessness initiatives from Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council and turn them over to a third-party receiver.
U.S. Dist. Judge David O. Carter, who presides over the case, declined to take that step, saying it went too far. But he has made clear that he, too, objects to the city’s approach to eliminating the 9,800 encampments.
In March, Carter issued a court order saying the city may not count CARE-plus cleanups toward its goal because, as the alliance had argued, they are “not permanent in nature.”
Last month, in a 62-page ruling, he found the city had “willfully disobeyed” that order — and had improperly reported its encampment reductions. Clarifying his position somewhat, the judge also said that the city cannot count an encampment reduction unless it is “accompanied by an offer of shelter or housing.”
“Individuals need not accept the offer, but an offer of available shelter or housing must be made,” he wrote.
Attorney Shayla Myers, who represents homeless advocacy groups that have intervened in the case, has opposed the 9,800 goal from the beginning, saying it creates a quota system that increases the likelihood that city workers will violate the property rights of unhoused residents.
“Throwing away tents doesn’t help the homelessness crisis,” she said. “Building housing does.”
Shayna, a person experiencing homelessness, moves things out of a tent during the June 24 encampment cleanup.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo, who helped negotiate the settlement, told the court last month that his office does not count the tents that homeless people move temporarily — around the corner or across the street — during city cleanups. However, the city does include those that are permanently removed because they block the sidewalk or pose a public health or safety threat, he said.
Szabo, during his testimony, said that when he negotiated the promise to remove 9,800 encampments, he did not expect that every tent removal would lead to someone moving inside.
The city is already working to fulfill the alliance agreement’s requirement of creating 12,915 homeless beds or other housing opportunities. On top of that, Szabo said, encampment residents have “free will” to refuse an offer of housing.
“I wouldn’t ever agree that the city would be obligated to somehow force people to accept [housing] if they did not want to accept it,” he said. “We never would have agreed to that. We didn’t agree to that.”
For an outside observer, it might be difficult to discern what the different types of city encampment operations are designed to accomplish.
Mary, a person experiencing homelessness, speaks with a police officer during the June 24 cleanup.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
Bass’ Inside Safe initiative moves homeless people into hotel and motel rooms, and at least in some cases, permanent housing. By contrast, CARE cleanups — shorthand for Cleanup and Rapid Engagement — are largely focused on trash removal, with crews hauling away debris from curbs and surrounding areas.
CARE-plus cleanups are more comprehensive. Every tent must be moved so workers can haul away debris and, in some instances, powerwash sidewalks.
Sanitation crews are supposed to give residents advance warning of a scheduled CARE-plus cleanup, posting notices on utility poles. If residents don’t relocate their tents and other belongings, they run the risk of having them taken away.
In some cases, cleanup crews take the possessions to a downtown storage facility. In many others, they are tossed.
A construction loader transports the remnants of the Westlake encampment to a city garbage truck.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
One of the largest CARE-plus cleanups in recent weeks took place in the Westlake district, where nearly three dozen tents and structures lined a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard. A construction loader drove back and forth on the sidewalk, scooping up tents and depositing them in a trash truck.
Ryan Cranford, 42, said he didn’t know the cleanup was scheduled until minutes beforehand. He wound up losing his tent, a bed and a canopy, but managed to keep his backpack, saying it contained “all that matters.”
Sitting on a nearby retaining wall, Cranford said he would have accepted a motel room had someone offered one.
“Hell, I’d even take a bus to get all the way back to Oklahoma if I could,” he said.
On the opposite side of the street, Tyson Lewis Angeles wheeled his belongings down the street in a shopping cart before sanitation workers descended on his spot. He said an outreach worker had given him a referral for a shelter bed the day before.
Tyson Lewis Angeles, a person experiencing homelessness, holds his dog, Nami, before city sanitation workers descended on his spot on Wilshire Boulevard.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
Angeles, 30, said he was not interested, in part because he deals with panic attacks, PTSD and other mental health issues. He also does not want a roommate, or the rules imposed by homeless shelters.
“Basically, it’s like volunteer jail,” he said.
While Angeles managed to safeguard his possessions, others are frequently less successful.
Nicholas Johnson, who is living in a box truck in Silver Lake, said city crews took the vast majority of his belongings during a CARE-plus cleanup in mid-June. Some were destroyed, while others were transported by sanitation workers to a downtown storage facility, he said.
Johnson, 56, said he does not know whether some of his most prized possessions, including letters written by his grandmother, went into that facility or were tossed. City crews also took books, tools, his Buddhist prayer bowls and a huge amount of clothes.
“All of my clothing — all of my clothing — the wearables and the sellables, all mixed in. Hats, scarves, socks, ties, a lot of accessories that I wear — you know, double breasted suits from the ’30s, the suit pants,” he said.
Nicholas Johnson, who lives with his dog, Popcorn, in a truck parked in Silver Lake, said the city took many of his prized possessions during a recent encampment cleanup.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Johnson said the city’s cleanup process is a “harassment ceremony” that only makes life more stressful for people on the street.
“They hit you in the kneecaps when they know you’re already down,” he said.
Earlier this year, city officials informed the court that they had removed about 6,100 tents, makeshift shelters and vehicles — nearly two-thirds of what the agreement with the alliance requires. Whether the city will challenge any portion of the judge’s ruling is still unclear.
In a statement, a lawyer for the city contends that the ruling “misconstrues the city’s obligations.”
“We are keeping open our options for next steps,” said the lawyer, Theane Evangelis.
SACRAMENTO — One of the many traits that set California apart from other states is the way undocumented immigrants are woven into our communities.
Their economic impact is obvious, and the Golden State would be hard-pressed to keep our status as a world-competing financial power without their labor.
But most Californians know, and are OK with the reality, that at least some of our neighbors, our kids’ classmates, our co-workers, are without legal documents, or in blended-status families.
Gov. Gavin Newsom took a stand Wednesday for those undocumented Californians that seems to have gone largely unnoticed, but which probably will be a big fight in Congress and courts. In his bad news-filled budget presentation, Newsom committed to keeping state-funded health insurance for undocumented residents (with cuts, deep ones, which I’ll get to). Although some are disappointed by his rollbacks, many of which will hit citizens and noncitizens alike, standing by California’s expansion to cover all low income people is a statement of values.
“We’ve provided more support than any state in American history, and we’ll continue to provide more support than any state in American history,” he said.
Sticking with that promise is going to be tough, and likely costly.
This decision comes as Congress considers a Trump-led budget bill that would severely penalize states (there are 14 of them) that continue to provide health insurance to undocumented immigrants. California, of course, has the largest number of such folks on its Medi-Cal plan and would be the hardest hit if that penalty does indeed become the new law — to the tune of $27 billion over six years, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
To put that in perspective, the governor is now estimating a nearly $12-billion budget shortfall this year. That federal cut would add at least $3 billion a year to our costs once it hits.
That federal cut, Newsom said, was “not anticipated in this budget,” which means we are ignoring it for the time being.
Federal programs aren’t open to noncitizens, and no federal dollars are used to support California’s expansion of healthcare to undocumented people.
But Congress is threatening an approximately 10% cut in reimbursements to states that insure undocumented people via the Medicaid expansion that was part of the Affordable Care Act. That expansion allows millions of Americans to have access to healthcare.
Those expansion funds are working in ways that many don’t know about. For example, as Newsom pointed out, behavioral health teams doing outreach to homeless people are funded by Medicaid dollars.
In all, about one-third of Californians rely on Medi-Cal, including millions of children, so this threat to cut federal funds is not an empty one, especially in a lean year.
Katherine Hempstead, a senior policy advisor for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which advocates for universal healthcare, said that the bill being debated by Congress is so full of cuts to healthcare that arguing against the provision penalizing coverage for undocumented people may not be a priority for most Democrats — making it more likely that the cut will get through.
“I don’t know if this is going to be a do-or-die issue,” she said.
Gov. Gavin Newsom presents his revised 2025-26 state budget during a news conference Wednesday in Sacramento.
(Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)
And indeed, the pressure by Republicans to kill off coverage entirely for undocumented folks was quick.
“Gov. Newsom has only partially repealed his disastrous policy,” Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin) said in a statement. “ It needs to be reversed entirely, or Californians will continue to spend billions on coverage for illegal immigrants and our state will lose an even larger amount in federal Medicaid funding.”
Newsom has given economic reasons for sticking with the state’s coverage for all low-income residents, regardless of status. When people don’t have access to routine care, they end up in emergency rooms and that is extremely expensive. And also, Medicaid has to cover that emergency care, so taxpayers often end up spending more in the long run by skimping on upfront care.
“It’s definitely important to the people that get the coverage because they don’t really have an alternative,” Hempstead said.
But that care has been vastly more expensive than California expected, also to the tune of billions of dollars in unexpected costs, in part because so many people have signed up.
To the dismay of many, Newsom’s budget reflects both recent economic woes — a $16-billion revenue hit caused by what he’s dubbing the “Trump slump” — as well as the state vastly understimating the cost of covering those undocumented folks.
That shortfall may force cuts in the coverage that undocumented people qualify for if the Legislature goes along with Newsom’s plan, or even parts of it.
Most notably, it would cap enrollment for undocumented adults age 19 and over in 2026, effectively closing the program to new participants. That’s a huge hurt. His plan also calls for adding a $100 per month premium, and other cuts such as ending coverage for the extremely popular and expensive GLP-1 weight loss drugs for all participants.
“I don’t want to be in this position, but we are in this position,” Newsom said.
Amanda McAllister-Wallner, executive director of Health Access California, called those cuts “reckless and unconscionable” in a statement.
“This is a betrayal of the governor’s commitment to California immigrants, and an abandonment of his legacy, which brought California so close to universal healthcare,” she said.
I strongly believe in universal single-payer healthcare (basically opening up Medicare to everyone), so I don’t disagree with McAllister-Wallner’s point. In better days, I would hope to see enrollment reopen and benefits restored.
But also, we’re broke. This is going to be a year of painful choices for all involved.
Which makes Newsom’s, and California’s, commitment to keep insurance for undocumented people notable. The state could back down under this real federal pressure, could try to find a way to claw back the benefits we have already given.
But there’s a moral component to providing healthcare to our undocumented residents, who are such a valuable and vital part of our state.
Although the fiscal realities are ugly, it’s worth remembering that in providing the coverage, California is sticking with some of its most vulnerable residents, at a time when it would be easier to cut and run.
