Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget for California made a lot of people unhappy
Good morning and welcome to the A.M. Alert!
ANGER ALL AROUND
Coming up with a budget in the face of a state deficit usually won’t make you popular. That is definitely the case with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s revised plan for the 2025-26 year. Advocacy groups, state workers, legislators and others on Thursday piled on to criticism of the proposal and vowed to fight changes from going into effect. The Legislature must pass a budget June 15.
Ronald Coleman Baeza, managing director of policy and lobbyist for the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network, said during a press conference there would be “devastating impacts” if Newsom’s plan to freeze Medi-Cal enrollment for undocumented people, charge $100 monthly premiums for some immigrants and eliminate dental benefits for certain people, goes into effect.
“These cuts are completely out of touch,” Baeza said.
Yesena Jimenez, a senior policy associate with End Child Poverty California, said at the same press conference that a plan to reduce $50 million from a program to help children who lost their parents or primary caregiver to COVID-19 was “a broken promise.”
Also on Thursday, a bipartisan group of 15 Assembly members and state Senators sent a letter Thursday to legislative budget leaders urging them to reject Newsom’s call to streamline the building of a controversial project that would use a tunnel system to move water from the San Francisco Bay Area to Southern California.
The legislators said the state should abandon the idea completely and use the state’s existing water system.
And state workers booed the governor’s plan to suspend pay increases during a protest against Newsom’s order that they return to the office four days a week in July.
Shelby Goss, an environmental scientist with the California Department of Transportation, called it “incredibly harmful for state workers and harmful in the long-term for the state government and for taxpayers.”
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“What do hospitals do with a newborn? What do states do with a newborn?”
— U.S Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked during oral arguments for a case on the implementation of President Donald Trump’s order regarding birthright citizenship.
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This story was originally published May 16, 2025 at 4:55 AM.
