Gavin Newsom’s legacy: Big promises undercut by costly mismanagement

Whatever accomplishments Gavin Newsom might claim from his eight years as governor, he will also leave a legacy of mismanagement that has squandered untold billions of taxpayers’ dollars.

There is a running thread in that record — grandiose, self-serving promises of benefits and sloppy, sometimes fraudulent implementation.

The largest managerial mess, in terms of both dollars and impact, has been the state budget.

Newsom inherited a workable budget in 2019 from predecessor Jerry Brown, who had cleaned up a fiscal disaster, including a “wall of debt” left over from the Great Recession. However, Newsom and legislators have habitually overspent revenues and built a new wall of debt several times larger than the one Brown faced.

In 2022, Newsom proclaimed the state had a $97.5 billion surplus, boasting “No other state in American history has ever experienced a surplus as large as this.”

He and the Legislature immediately increased spending, such as extending Medi-Cal health benefits to undocumented immigrants. But that cost $6-billion more than Newsom estimated, and state Auditor Grant Parks, in a recent report, says the Department of Health Care Services has failed to stop pervasive abuse and fraud in Medi-Cal.

Eventually, Newsom’s administration acknowledged that the phantom surplus resulted from a $165 billion error in estimating future revenue. The state is left with a “structural deficit” that’s expected to remain at least through the next governor’s first term.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, Newsom assumed one-man control of the emergency. He issued decrees to shut down schools and many businesses and spent billions of dollars on no-bid contracts.

Money was being shoveled out the door to vendors with scanty or no credentials. Meanwhile, Newsom’s Employment Development Department was granting billions of dollars in unemployment insurance benefits to fraudsters, some of them inmates of state prisons.

While Newsom was telling Californians to avoid human contact, he attended a birthday dinner at a Napa restaurant where no one wore a mask. When his hypocrisy was exposed, Newsom apologized, but it didn’t explain why he had willingly done what he had told everyone else not to do.

More recently, Newsom has also acknowledged he went overboard in shutting schools, which worsened achievement in a state that already was faring poorly in tests of academic skills, such as reading and math.

Newsom has often touted the state’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but specific projects have been plagued by mismanagement.

Newsom at first hinted that he might throttle back the state’s bullet train project, then backtracked and shored it up with billions of new dollars. The project is stuck in neutral, and its inspector general reported recently that the High Speed Rail Authority had blown nearly $600,000 on travel to “questionable locations that appear unrelated to state business,” such as gyms, a nightclub, a tiki bar and a cigar lounge.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times revealed that the state has spent more than $1 billion to subsidize purchases of zero emission buses and trucks, but the program has been riddled with fraud.

Finally, there’s homelessness.

Upon becoming governor, Newsom named himself a czar to attack the crisis and began castigating local governments for not spending state grants effectively. However, in 2024, state Auditor Parks said Newsom’s Interagency Council on Homelessness had failed to effectively oversee programs. Despite more than $20 billion in state spending, the crisis remains at least as serious as it was when Newsom took office.

There are many other examples. Taken as a whole, they reveal an administration that doesn’t administer very well, though it has promised much.