Why fraud saturates California – Latest News
Enablers of epic fraud.
That’s the best one can say about Gov. Gavin Newsom and the remainder of California’s Democratic ruling class following revelations this week from a City Journal investigation.
The outcomes of the probe, revealed in The California Post, discovered colossal fraud in practically each giant program the state administers.
Wrote the investigators: “The best estimates suggest that, on the governor’s watch [since 2018], fraudsters, scammers, and organized crime rings have stolen at least $180 billion from taxpayers.”
That sum is staggering.
REUTERS
It represents an abysmal efficiency by state authorities –– a document that requires change, accountability, and a huge shift in tradition.
The placing facet of the City Journal probe was much less concerning the particulars, many of which had been already public data, than the massive image:
From unemployment advantages to backed health take care of the poor to in-home health care advantages to welfare and homelessness applications, to, allegedly, a member of the governor’s own workplace …
Fraud in opposition to taxpayers has saturated California.
Christopher Rufo, one of the authors of the investigation, estimates –– based mostly on intel from federal officers –– that 25% of the state’s $197 billion [2025-26] annual Medi-Cal [health care for the poor] funds was misplaced to fraud.
That’s nearly $50 billion in a single 12 months … in a single program alone.
Gov. Newsom, Attorney General Rob Bonta, and different state officers can no longer dismiss examples of fraud as “small,” or remoted, or “dealt with,” or the product of partisan politics.
On the opposite: Fraud right here is colossal, rampant, ongoing, and well-documented.
State applications have confirmed simple targets, with little oversight, few guardrails, and a huge provide of different people’s money.
The governor and legislators knew, or ought to have identified, that these lax controls would ship a valentine to thieves and scammers: Come on over.
But they’ve completed little to course right.
That’s why it’s good to see the federal authorities –– together with prosecutors and President Trump’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, led by Vice President JD Vance –– take the case.
No one ought to count on California’s governor and legislators to repair this, given their document as enablers.
Some of them, in actual fact, intentionally make it worse.
In at the very least one case, a state legislator has sought to ease penalties for fraud in state welfare applications.
City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, reported, “In April 2025, state Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas sponsored a bill that would raise the threshold for felony welfare fraud from $950 to $25,000. The measure would also make it more difficult to charge perjury based on misstatements to county welfare departments. Republican state Assemblyman Carl DeMaio has said that if the bill becomes law, it will effectively ‘legalize welfare fraud’ in California.”
It’s nearly astonishing that any legislator would suggest such a measure.
But as Assemblyman David Tangipa advised the investigators, “Sacramento is pervaded by a culture of corruption” and the governor himself has helped “create an environment where corruption thrives.”
The fraud in California, enabled by an boastful political class, is epic.
The reckoning ought to be, too.
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