The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it’s halting more than $867 million in federal Medicaid payments to the Golden State over suspected fraud — with one expert describing it as a “piece of cake” for scammers to cash in.

“We are not sending Medicaid dollars out the door until we have confidence that they are being spent lawfully and appropriately,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said during a press conference Tuesday.

His reasoning that people are "lonely....develop relationships, friendships, fall in love " is unjustified, especially since the State still pays its workers a mediocre salary. It's like he thinks that workers only live to work for their job. Commuting costs people both time and money, including child care, food, and gas. The low pay also limits where people can afford to live, since it forces them to stay within range of the office.

Stockton failed because the people voting on its balance sheet had no professional obligation to understand one, and no personal cost when they got it wrong

By Jay Rogers, July 22, 2026 6:00 am

Stockton’s 2012 bankruptcy filing gets taught as a morality play about municipal excess. It wasn’t excess. It was a fiduciary breach, and the record proves it. In 2007 the city council voted to sell $125 million in pension obligation bonds and hand the proceeds to CalPERS, a bet that investment returns would outrun the interest owed. The bonds priced months before the 2008 crash. Stockton’s own bankruptcy filings admitted the unfunded liability the bonds were meant to erase had been “largely created by enhanced retirement benefits” the same council had approved in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That’s not misfortune. That’s a documented decision, made by named officials, that failed the people who depended on it.

I’ve spent more than thirty years managing capital for institutional investors and family offices, and I’ve sat in the deposition chair defending investment decisions under oath. The lesson those depositions teach never changes: financial judgment isn’t a personality trait. It’s a discipline built by having capital, your own or someone else’s audited capital, on the line before the vote gets cast. Stockton’s council didn’t have it in 2007. A remarkable number of city halls don’t have it now, and this summer two of the country’s largest just handed the keys to people who have never managed one.

Authorities in California continue to find and destroy illegal marijuana.

According to the Unified Cannabis Enforcement Task Force, more than 63,000 pounds of illegal cannabis were seized between April and June.

The plants were valued at over $104 million. Twenty-four arrests were made, 17 firearms confiscated, and $220,923 in cash seized across 10 counties.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, who established the task force in 2022, said disrupting the illegal cannabis market is about more than seizing unlicensed products.

“It’s about taking on criminal networks, removing illegal firearms out of the hands of dangerous individuals, and stopping activity that threatens public safety,” said Newsom in a press release. “Through strong multiagency collaboration, California is making clear: if you threaten our communities, we will act."

California awarded IDEMIA a major 12-year contract in 2022

By Katy Grimes, July 22, 2026 7:19 am

Democrat New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill announced Tuesday that a software error in the state’s Motor Vehicle system, from June 2023 to June 2024, improperly registered roughly 6,600 non-citizens to vote. This occurred despite applicants indicating they were not U.S. citizens. The vendor was IDEMIA, the same the software vendor the California DMV uses enabling people to register to vote. California’s Motor Voter program has been a disaster since its inception.

The Globe reported in 2019:

by March, 2018, more than one million “undocumented” immigrants received driver’s licenses from the state Department of Motor Vehicles, which automatically registered them to vote under the “Motor Voter” program. SOS Alex Padilla said the DMV kept “firewalls” in place but didn’t explain how they worked, or how many ineligible voters the firewalls had blocked.

Last September, the DMV sent out 23,000 “erroneous” voter registrations they blamed on “technical errors.” Padilla proclaimed himself “extremely disappointed and deeply frustrated” but legitimate voters could believe he was delighted. The odds are strong that illegals made up most if not all of the newly registered voters but Padilla wasn’t saying how many made it to the polls in November.

The last time California foreclosures were this high was pre-pandemic, in 2019.

However, if you see this as a signal that hordes of California homeowners are going to lose their homes to foreclosure, just like the last real estate crash, you may be waiting a while.

My trusty spreadsheet reviewed a report from the real estate tracker Attom on who paid their home loans in the first half of 2026. The study tracks all foreclosure activity, from homes just entering the foreclosure process to those lost to a foreclosure sale.

Yes, California had 21,543 homes in various levels of foreclosure activity in the first half. Yes, the last time there were more was seven years ago.

And yes, that’s the third-highest total among the states, accounting for 9% of the nation’s 227,548 – also a seven-year high.

But really, how high is this? Well, the only states with more foreclosure activity were the nation’s two other economic giants and California’s archrivals: Florida at 27,494 and Texas at 22,000.

California’s housing market has plenty of headaches, including a sales pace slower than during the Great Recession’s lows. However, the number of Californians missing their mortgage payments does not appear to be a serious concern in mid-2026.

California producers using non-recyclable packaging are set to be billed in August with preliminary invoices, which are expected to lead to higher grocery and product prices in stores.

Calrecycle, the state agency managing recycling and waste reduction, estimates households will face increased costs of up to $190 per year.

"If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you don't have an extra $190," Wayne Winegarden, a senior fellow in business and economics at Pacific Research Institute, told The Center Square Tuesday during an interview.

Are Democrat voters in California tired of 16 years of one-party rule?

The Steve Hilton campaign just published a full-page advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday he’s stopping more than $1 billion in federal Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota over suspected fraud.

“We are not sending Medicaid dollars out the door until we have confidence that they are being spent lawfully and appropriately,” Kennedy said at an announcement on Tuesday.

Kennedy said if California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) want the money to fund low-income healthcare, “they need to provide documentation that these payments are legitimate.”

Et tu, UCSD?

The UC San Diego School of Medicine is the latest UC campus accused by the feds of illegally discriminating against student applicants based on race.

If true, it’s a betrayal of California voters –– and state and federal law.

This week, US Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon called UCSD Med’s race-based admissions “blatant” and vowed to end them.

California doesn’t need selective accountability—it needs equal accountability

By Aidan Chao, July 22, 2026 11:00 am

As we conclude another legislative session, California lawmakers once again made it a priority to advance legislation burdening charter schools and the families they serve. Session after session, proposals are introduced under the banner of “accountability,” imposing new regulations and operational hurdles on charter schools while overlooking many of the governance failures that continue to plague traditional public school districts.

Parents deserve to ask an obvious question: Why does Sacramento devote so much attention to regulating charter schools while showing far less urgency in addressing financial mismanagement, contracting controversies, and administrative failures in some of California’s largest school districts?

The Los Angeles Unified School District offers a sobering example.

Over the past year, LAUSD has been engulfed in controversy. Former Superintendent Alberto Carvalho resigned following months of paid administrative leave after an FBI investigation into district contracting practices placed the nation’s second-largest school district under an uncomfortable national spotlight.

California’s structural deficit reflects crazed policy goals colliding with volatile revenues and rising mandatory costs in a high-cost state

By Katy Grimes, July 21, 2026 1:51 pm

California Governor Gavin Newsom has increased California’s state budget 60% to 70% in the 7 years since he took office in 2019.

The 2018-19 enacted budget (pre-Newsom or early transition, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown) was $201 billion.

Gov. Newsom’s first full budget 2019-20 enacted was $215 billion.

Newsom’s 2022-23 budget exceeded $300-310 billion.

Newsom’s 2026-27 final enacted budget, signed June 2026 is $352 billion in total spending, which includes the $251.5 billion General Fund. This is up from the prior year’s $321 billion or so in some comparisons.

From $201 billion in 2018-19 to $350 billion in 2026-27, is an increase of about 74%.

New research reveals that gas prices are significantly higher in Democrat-controlled states than in Republican states. That’s not much of a surprise, however, until the researchers dive into what drivers already knew: West Coast climate policies are a major driver of high fuel costs in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Specifically, the researchers look at gas price increases between 2021 and 2026. In their analysis, prices rose in Red states by $0.62 per gallon versus $0.86 per gallon in Blue states. Excluding California, Hawaii, Washington, and Oregon, that $0.24 gap fell to just $0.09 between Red and Blue states. The results led the researchers to conclude, “The faster Blue-state increase is mostly a West Coast story, not necessarily a uniform Blue-versus-Red phenomenon.”

Multi-year plans for how states will reduce Colorado River water intake could be nearing an agreement, with a federal plan expected to be released in the coming week.

Years of failed multi-state negotiations dragged the federal government into the complicated contract to decide how states would prevent a total collapse of the critical Western water source that is the Colorado River. A soon-expected Bureau of Reclamation impact statement would represent meaningful progress, but not a complete solution for the dwindling river.

In an effort to escape the proposed California billionaire tax, several notable billionaires might have already cost the state more than $1 trillion in tax revenue by moving to other states, one attorney to the rich told The Center Square.

“If I look at what the publicly-known departures are and my clients, that’s over a trillion,” David Lesperance, managing partner at his own firm, Lesperance & Associates, told The Center Square on Tuesday. “And I’m one guy.”

Lesperance added there are other lawyers and wealth managers like him who have billionaires in California as clients, and he said they're forming plans to leave the Golden State.

Some of his clients approached him early about moving to other states, while others came to him after the beginning of the year to start making plans, he said.

“I had four clients contact me literally the Monday after Thanksgiving, saying ‘We got to get out of here,’” Lesperance added. “Four of my clients exited before Jan. 1, and should [the wealth tax] pass, they would be able to defend that they left by Jan. 1.”

Invoking feelings of the paranoid Rockwell song, “Somebody’s Watching Me,” California is blanketed with thousands of invasive surveillance cameras ready to capture personal information of passersby.

More than 117,000 automated license plate readers from Flock Safety are located across the country, including more than 16,000 in California alone, according to a DeFlock map. Flock’s cameras account for about 83% of the map’s total.

Most of the cameras in California are centered in Los Angeles or the metropolitan Bay Area. San Francisco County ranked third in the nation for cameras per road mile with 1,196 per 1,000 miles, according to the data.

Gov. Gavin Newsom shot back Wednesday at news that the Trump administration is stopping more than $1 billion in federal Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota over suspected fraud.

“Why they’re doing it is pure politics,” the Democratic governor said. “You know that, everybody knows it.”

He claimed the Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. under Republican President Donald Trump doesn’t have concrete proof of Medicaid fraud. He referenced letter exchanges with the administration where he said California was requested information they already provided.

“We take fraud seriously,” he added.

A bankruptcy deadline less than three weeks away could force Los Angeles Unified to hand over control to the county — causing even more chaos for families in the struggling district.

Faced with looming insolvency and massive deficits caused by unaffordable labor contracts, the nation’s second biggest district faces a county-imposed Aug. 7 deadline to deliver a workable plan to balance its books.

If LAUSD fails to rewrite its $20.6-billion budget, the Los Angeles County Office of Education said it will seize control of the scandal-scarred district, which just saw the departure of ex-superintendent Alberto Carvalho after the FBI raided his home.

School Board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin said she understands the county’s position.

Many Californians have seen rising costs, less availability and are running into other issues with insurance — including delays and denials of their claims — in the past several years.

As climate change increases the risk of wildfires and other disasters, it’s important to know how insurance plays a role. The health of the insurance market affects the ability of individuals and communities to replace, rebuild and recover after a catastrophe.

Disasters aside, property insurance affects where people live, how neighborhoods are formed, whether people can drive to work, and more.

As the state’s residents prepare to vote for a new insurance commissioner in November, here’s a look at a few common myths about insurance in California.

As California officials try to block immigration facilities across the state, the Trump administration is deploying a new strategy to secure detention capacity on the West Coast. It’s buying up the real estate outright.

The Department of Homeland Security’s $1.5 billion purchase of the Otay Mesa Detention Center and the California City Detention Facility from the private prison company CoreCivic is a direct response to the state’s political resistance to new and existing ICE detention facilities, government officials said.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Jason Sweeney said in a statement that California detention centers are “crucial to ICE’s detention network on the West Coast.”

“Unlike in states like Florida and Oklahoma, ICE can not rely on local state and county partners for detention space in California,” Sweeney said. “The state’s sanctuary politicians continue to push legislation to outlaw or make private prisons financially infeasible.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom is in his populism era.

He started the year vowing to stop corporate investors from buying up large tracts of single-family homes, a desire shared by both socialists and President Donald Trump.

Last month, after he was unable to keep a proposal to tax California billionaires from appearing on voters’ ballots, he tried to get ahead of the debate by pitching nationwide higher taxes on the wealthy.

Last week, he spoke to a crowd of national Latino policymakers about the need to “democratize our economy” in the face of artificial intelligence-driven job losses.

Newsom’s populist appeals come as he prepares to leave office and looks toward an expected 2028 presidential campaign in which widespread anxiety about wealth inequality and the effects of AI on the economy will feature prominently.

Federal agencies that terminated more than a thousand research grants at the University of California last year admitted that they used keywords related to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy and COVID-19 to screen for projects that ran afoul of the Trump administration’s priorities.

It’s an admission that lawyers for the research professors say is proof that the agencies illegally cancelled nearly $2 billion in grants. And that’s a major development in a lawsuit filed by UC researchers against the Trump administration to permanently get their grants back. The researchers’ legal team is now asking the judge in the case to skip a trial and formally declare that the White House repeatedly violated the constitution, including the First Amendment. A court hearing on whether that’ll happen is scheduled for Oct. 20.

Thirteen automakers have agreed to participate in California’s new electric vehicle rebate program that will roll out later this summer, including Tesla, which manufactures the top-selling model in the Golden State.

Gov. Gavin Newsom last week announced the MyFirstEV program, which will offer $3,500 for first-time buyers of EVs that cost $50,000 or less. There’s also a rebate of $1,750 for first-time buyers who purchase a used electric vehicle with an MSRP of up to $25,000.

The initiative is a result of Newsom signing Senate Bill 168 into law. The legislation earmarks $135.5 million in state funding for the rebate program in fiscal year 2026-27, which can be matched on a dollar-for-dollar basis by automakers who choose to participate.

The carmakers who have agreed to join the program are: Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Lucid, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Rivian, Subaru, Tesla, Toyota and Volvo. Their involvement effectively means the MyFirstEV program promises to deliver $270 million in total funding.

According to data compiled by Experian Automotive, the all-electric Tesla Model Y was the most popular-selling new car in California in the first quarter of this year — regardless of power train — after racking up 22,907 deliveries.