California was once a beacon of opportunity. Today, our great state maintains its natural blessings and abundance of potential, but both are being smothered by government inefficiency and fraud on a staggering scale.

From unemployment benefits to homelessness programs, billions flow through Sacramento with little real oversight — and that’s by design.

California didn’t stumble into this accountability vacuum; it engineered it. Lawmakers dismantled the Assembly’s dedicated oversight committee and buried its responsibilities within a budget subcommittee that’s proven unwilling — or unable — to demand answers.

The result is predictable: Waste goes unchecked. Even when the independent state auditor flags fraud risks, those warnings are ignored roughly75%of the time.

This isn’t just mismanagement; it’s a systemic failure.

Fraud is not unique to California, and every state faced challenges during the pandemic. But California’s failures stand apart, not just in scale, but in how long they’ve persisted.

Thousands of inmates, including murderers, rapists, and death row inmates, received up to$1 billionin unemployment benefits. An estimated$146 billionwas lost to fraud from Medi-Cal. At least$32 billionwas lost in fraudulent payments from the Employment Development Department (EDD) under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s leadership.

It has become so bad that Newsom recently hired a New York PR firm to rehabilitate California’s brand, using$19 millionin taxpayer money. He’d rather deflect attention than confront the failures of his policies.

Real oversight requires independent, continuous scrutiny. Without it, the result is predictable: wasted taxpayer dollars and broken public trust.

During the pandemic, Newsom instituted a “pay now, verify later” policy for benefits, virtually guaranteeing abuse. The rapid expansion of benefit programs without corresponding oversight did exactly what many predicted: it invited exploitation. His own administrationadmittedthat California’s response “lacked traditional safeguards” to stop fraud.

Source: California Post – Breaking California News, Photos & Videos