If Gavin Newsom really wanted to cut down on waste in California, instead of flushing $20 million down a consulting firm, he would stop allowing massive welfare fraud.

From City Journal:

From unemployment insurance and Medicaid to failed homeless initiatives and welfare programs, seemingly every state program has been compromised by criminals. The best estimates suggest that, on the governor’s watch, fraudsters, scammers, and organized crime rings have stolen at least $180 billion from taxpayers.

The fraud has been out of control since barely a year after Newsom took office, when California’s tyrannical overreaction to Covid shut down the economy, throwing millions out of work while Newsom dined with his fellow rich moonbats at the French Laundry.

In response to the crisis, Newsom sought to dump pallets of cash across the state—as quickly as possible.

It was dumped largely into the pockets of fraudsters.

Not only did the state have some of the most generous welfare programs in the country; its bureaucrats had also failed to implement some basic fraud controls during Newsom’s tenure.

Scammers have been robbing California taxpayers from as far away as Romania. Others do it from Tennessee:

Around September 2020, Fontrell Antonio Baines, a rapper from Memphis known as Nuke Bizzle, released a music video on YouTube entitled “EDD.” In the song, Baines bragged about ripping off California’s UI [unemployment insurance] program. “Go to the bank with a stack of these,” Baines rapped, holding up EDD envelopes. Another rapper can be heard saying: “You gotta sell cocaine, I just file a claim.” All told, Baines obtained more than $700,000 in stolen funds using preloaded EDD debit cards.

Democrats know how to take care of their base.

California’s prison population apparently got in on the action, too: the EDD allegedly paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent claims in prisoners’ names, including those of at least 133 inmates on death row.

Covid was a looting spree:

State officials eventually admitted to having paid out approximately $20 billion in fraudulent claims during the pandemic, and to making an estimated $55 billion in improper payments.

Actual numbers are of course higher. According to fraud expert Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government,

“In California, at one point, you had more people applying for unemployment insurance benefits than you had people over the age of 18.”

The looting did not stop after Covid hysteria ran out of gas. Just considering the California implementation of Medicaid,

California’s attorney general has conceded that “Medi-Cal fraud could reach billions of dollars annually.”

That is to say, many billions.

Based on state experts’ best guesses of annual Medi-Cal expenditures and applying a conservative, 15 percent fraud rate to each fiscal year since 2019, Medi-Cal has lost some $146 billion in taxpayer funds to fraud on Gavin Newsom’s watch.

The fraud is too massive to ignore indefinitely. Democrats have been forced to respond — by making fraud even easier:

State Senator 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.

Thanks to Trump being in office, the Feds are stepping in.

Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, announced the creation of a federal task force to combat fraud and corruption in the state’s homelessness programs. The task force has already brought charges in several multimillion-dollar homelessness-fraud cases—and Essayli has vowed that more are coming. “California has spent $24 billion in the last five years on homelessness, and no one can account for where that money has really gone,” Essayli said in January. Gavin Newsom, he added, is the “king of fraud.”

With fraud on this scale, it is no wonder California is crumbling and cannot pay its bills. But at least Democrats are innovative when it comes to finding new ways to confiscate other people’s money so they can waste it. For example, a San Francisco homeowner was fined $50,000 for trimming trees that required it:

A San Francisco California resident is facing a $50,000 fine for trimming 5 trees he through was on his property

“The city explains, they’re not his, and he wasn’t authorized to do it”

The man trimmed 5 trees right in front of his unit because branches were touching the… pic.twitter.com/DsrzmdDGuD

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) April 2, 2026

On tips from abcanc and Wiggins.

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