From government fraud and waste, to growing homelessness and pay-to-play politics, Senate Republicans have compiled 15 of Governor Newsom’s worst flip-flops and failures to help Californians connect the dots from his policies to our declining quality of life.
- Worsening Homelessness: When Newsom was mayor of San Francisco, he proclaimed he would end homelessness in the city. But as governor he has spent $37B in taxpayer money on homelessness over the past six years. To what effect? California became the nation’s homeless capital. Moreover, he’s failed to track where all that money went and whether it worked, shifting the blame for that to anyone but himself.
- Closed for Business: Remember in 2020 when Newsom forced businesses to close, leaving hundreds of thousands of Californians unemployed even as he dined unmasked with his friends? We do. During that time, his woefully unprepared EDD bungled payments and got taken for an estimated $33B in fraud.
- Bad for Business: During that time (the pandemic), California had a record budget surplus thanks to assistance from the federal government. Instead of using that surplus to pay off the federal unemployment insurance debt like every other state did, Newsom decided to stop making payments, racking up nearly $20 billion more debt and putting the financial burden on businesses. His solution? Make the businesses he closed pay it back through higher taxes. Make it make sense!
Suffering Students: In addition to putting people out of work, his mandated school shutdowns caused major damage to California’s school children. Two-thirds of students fail to meet math standards, and more than half don’t meet English standards. Thanks to Senate Republicans, at least Newsom can no longer sit on the annual state test results until he feels it’s convenient to release them.
- Nation’s Highest Gasoline Prices: Even after coming down from 2022’s mindboggling price of $7 for a gallon of regular gas, California’s average price of $4.25 a gallon still tops in the nation and is $1.43 higher than the national average of $2.82. Even Hawaii has lower prices, and they’re a literal island in the middle of the ocean. Why are our prices so high? Taxes, fees, red tape and bad policy.
- Energy Egg Face: After years of punishing drivers, Newsom finally had to backpedal his bad policies in the face of several refineries shutting down and/or leaving the state. In July 2025 he took a dose of reality, backing new policies to boost in-state oil production and to abandon his long-threatened cap on oil industry profits. Ultimately, his failure to have any sort of credible transitional energy plan is to blame for those refinery closures, supply constraints, higher costs, and a greater reliance on foreign oil.
- Housing Promises Not Kept: Running for governor, candidate Newsom promised to build 3.5M homes by 2025. Instead, housing construction declined for the first time ever. By 2022, only 452K building permits were issued. When called on it, he said the promise was a “stretch goal.” In the seven years since he took office, a total of 868,709 permits have been issued and 640,873 homes built. Only 2,859,127 homes to go in the next 12 months!
Rising Cost of Living: Homeownership is a distant dream as families in California face a median sales price of $874,290 for a home. And if you can afford a home, keeping the lights on will break the bank too. At 32.68 cents per kWh (as of November 2024) residential electricity rates are close to double the national average of 17.01 cents per kWh and are second highest in the nation. Rates are up almost 11% from November 2023, and the increases just keep coming.
- Unsafe Streets: The overall violent crime rate in California in 2023 – the most recent year for which complete reporting is available – was 51% higher than the rest of the nation. The overall property crime rate was 30% higher. Most notably, California’s robbery rate was 124% higher than the rest of the nation, its arson and motor vehicle theft rates were each 77% higher, its burglary rate 51% higher, and its aggravated assault rate 44% higher.
- Failing to Fully Fund Proposition 36: After voters overwhelmingly approved Prop. 36 to address rising crime, Newsom attempted to derail it with a competing ballot measure. When that failed and the initiative passed with nearly 70% support, he still refused to provide the funding needed to fully implement it. If it’s not my way, it don’t play. That’s how he rolls.
Policy-Driven Wildfires: As wildfires consumed vast swaths of California, an investigation found Newsom misled the public, overstating by 690% the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns. He claimed 90K acres were treated (in 2020), but actually it was just over 11K. Later, he eliminated $101M from seven wildfire and forest resilience programs – just months before the deadly Southern California wildfires erupted. His failure to reduce wildfire threats have also created an insurance crisis, with the state’s insurer of last resort now covering nearly three times the number of homes it did in 2019.
- High-Speed Rail Fail: Newsom danced around pulling the plug on the massive public works failure while at the same time trying to claim victory for keeping it alive. Then he blamed the media for misinterpreting his words. The HSR project now is estimated to cost roughly $135B and is running decades behind its construction schedule. It has become the poster child for the state’s inability to build anything.
- No-Bid Contracts and Pay to Play: A whistleblower exposed major problems at a state COVID-19 testing lab awarded a $1.7 billion no-bid contract, problems the state investigated but kept hidden until after the contract auto-renewed. Then came “PaneraGate,” where a bizarre minimum-wage carve-out appeared to benefit Panera Bread, whose largest California franchisee is a longtime Newsom donor and personal friend. Different scandals, same pattern: Insiders win, taxpayers lose.
- Risky Business: Seven state agencies are now officially labeled “high-risk” under Newsom, a designation reserved for waste, fraud, abuse or severe mismanagement. The latest addition is the Department of Social Services for its CalFresh program. DSS joins the EDD (UI program), the DHCS (Medi-Cal), and multiple four other departments auditors say are failing basic oversight.
Rig the Vote: In his quest to become the Supreme Leader of Democrats and vault himself into the Oval Office, Newsom’s Proposition 50 scheme breaks apart the state’s longstanding independent redistricting system. He and the other Democrat politicians hiding behind the curtain claim the power grab is only temporary, but as Ronald Reagan famously warned, temporary is government speak for forever.
