Can we have our national guard back please?

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• California bans heavy plastic bags for lying about recycling
• Trump election “monitors” to observe next week’s California election
• As federal food assistance ends, California national guard will help distribute food

   

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WHAT’S UP WITH THE NATIONAL GUARD?

Trump backs down on sending federal troops to San Francisco for immigration crackdown

Protesters flood streets in show of resistance, as president calls off deployment after speaking with city’s mayor and Silicon Valley leaders

Maanvi Singh and Dani Anguiano, The Guardian

The Bay Area region had been on edge after reports emerged on Wednesday that the Trump administration was poised to send more than 100 Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and other federal agents to the US Coast Guard base in Alameda, a city in the East Bay, as part of a large-scale immigration-enforcement plan. By early Thursday morning, hundreds of protesters had gathered outside the Coast Guard base, holding signs with slogans such as “No ICE or Troops in the Bay!”

But just hours later, the president said he would not move forward with a “surge” of federal forces in the area after speaking with the mayor, Daniel Lurie, and Silicon Valley leaders including Marc Benioff, the Salesforce CEO who recently apologized for saying Trump should send national guard troops, and Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia.

Can Trump send the National Guard to S.F.? What California’s AG says about the legal issues

Attorney General Rob Bonta’s team was the first to challenge Trump on taking over control of the California National Guard under a rarely used law that allows the president to do this in times of invasion, internal rebellion or when U.S. laws cannot be executed with “regular forces” — a contested term.

Mikjail Zinshteyn, CalMatters

Before news broke of federal agents arriving in San Francisco, California Attorney General Rob Bonta sat down with CalMatters today to talk about Trump’s use of the National Guard.

“It would be dangerous and wrongly decided to allow the president to do what he’s trying to do now, which is to act as if he’s above the law, act as if he’s a king, treat the National Guard as his royal guard,” he said. “He will deploy only to blue cities. He will use it to punish enemies. He will use it to target those people who didn’t support him.”

Bonta is a key player in that Blue State resistance. His team was the first to challenge Trump on taking over control of the state National Guard under a law that allows the president to do this in times of invasion, internal rebellion or when U.S. laws cannot be executed with “regular forces” — a contested term.

California is ground zero for this novel dispute. This is where Trump mobilized 4,000 of the state’s National Guard troops in June in response to two days of occasionally violent protests against federal immigration raids in the Los Angeles region.

Attorneys for the federal government have been consistent in maintaining that judges cannot even review the president’s decisions to federalize a state’s National Guard troops. However, California state attorneys wrote to the Supreme Court that “every court to consider the question has rejected that argument.”

Trump’s DOJ is sending election monitors to California with voting on Prop. 50 underway

It’s common to see election observers at voting stations, but generally less so for them to come from the federal government. Some from the Trump administration will be on the ground in several California counties next month.

Maya C. Miller, CalMatters

The Trump administration’s Department of Justice will deploy election monitors to five California counties on Election Day, the department announced Friday, in what it describes as an effort to “ensure transparency, ballot security, and compliance with federal law.”

The news comes as voters are already casting ballots on Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposal to redraw the state’s congressional districts to favor Democrats. Early in-person voting is set to begin this weekend in many counties.

Federal personnel from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division will be sent to Fresno, Kern, Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties. Harmeet Dhillon, the former vice chair of the California Republican Party and a Republican National Committee chairwoman, leads the division.

It’s unclear whether the federal monitors will be onsite during early in-person voting or just on Nov. 4. The Justice Department has not said whether monitors will be stationed at polling places in addition to county elections offices.

Newsom to deploy CA National Guard after millions at risk of delayed food assistance in shutdown

Now in its third week, the ongoing federal government shutdown will likely delay food benefits for millions of Californians — prompting Gov. Gavin Newsom to set aside $80 million in state support and deploy the California National Guard to assist food banks.

Lynn La, CalMatters

The governor unveiled the move today, days after the California Department of Social Services began notifying counties to prepare for the possibility that federally-funded food benefits, known as CalFresh in California, could be disrupted. Without federal intervention or the shutdown ending by Thursday, about 5.5 million low-income Californians enrolled in the program would likely not receive assistance for November — including nearly 3.5 million children and senior citizens.

California issues about $1.1 billion in CalFresh benefits every month. Though benefits for October have already been distributed, those who applied to the program between Oct. 16 through Oct. 31 would not receive assistance for the second-half of the month, as well as November.

Recipients of California’s separate food benefits program for eligible noncitizens who can’t receive federal aid, known as the California Food Assistance Program, should also expect delays.

SUFFERING CALIFORNIA

When it comes to Trump’s energy cuts, California is the biggest loser

The numbers are in: The dust has settled on the Trump administration’s axing of $8 billion in energy funding, and California is the biggest loser.

Noah Baustin and Jessie Blaeser, with help from Alex Nieves and Camille Kaenel, Politico

Total hit to the Golden State: $3.3 billion in anticipated funding. (That’s $2.1 billion DOE had committed to recipients and $1.2 billion in expected funding for the ARCHES hydrogen hub.)

California’s Democratic congressional delegation has noticed the apparent target on the state’s back, and is calling foul.

“These unjustified terminations call into question whether DOE followed appropriations law and raise serious doubts about the Department’s ability to meet its contractual and grant obligations,” 30 Democrats, led by Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, wrote in a pair of letters to the agency on Monday, obtained exclusively by POLITICO. “Terminating grants based on partisan criteria suggests significant unlawful bias at the highest levels of the Department.”

DOE didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the letters. But in its Oct. 2 statement on the cuts, the agency said that the projects it canceled “did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.”

Trump plan would allow oil drilling all along California coast

If the Trump administration has its way, oil rigs could soon start drilling along the entire California coast, according to documents obtained by the Houston Chronicle.

Tara Duggan, SF Chronicle

Drilling could take place in the pristine waters off of Sonoma County and Big Sur, and theoretically even near the Golden Gate, if the administration were to find a way to bypass national marine sanctuary protections.

California elected officials, environmental organizations, and tourism and fishing industries expressed opposition to the plan, which they’d been expecting and dreading for months. The documents confirmed that the administration plans to open federal waters, which run 3 miles to 200 miles from shore in California, to oil and gas leasing as soon as 2027, according to the Houston Chronicle.

Such a move would override federal protections in place for decades and would have to overcome state and local environmental regulations. Many coastal counties have ordinances restricting or prohibiting onshore infrastructure for oil drilling, which would make it all but impossible to bring oil collected in federal waters to shore, experts say. Oil companies would also have to obtain permission from the state Coastal Commission.

Trump official warns California against arresting federal agents

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on Thursday threatened to prosecute California officials who support arresting federal immigration agents, sharpening the standoff between the Trump administration and local leaders.

John Yoon, NY Times News Service, Hawaii Tribune-Herald

Blanche conveyed the warning in a letter a day after several officials in San Francisco, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, and Brooke Jenkins, the city’s district attorney, said that they might seek to arrest federal agents who break California law during immigration raids.

The suggestion, Jenkins said, came from seeing agents confronting people in Los Angeles and Chicago. While she did not envision police officers handcuffing federal agents on city streets, she said she would use video footage to identify agents using excessive force and ask a judge for arrest warrants.

Their idea would be to prosecute immigration agents who overstep their authority, for example by using excessive force, state officials said. But the ability of states to arrest federal officers is without much legal precedent.

Blanche said in the letter that arresting federal agents performing their duties would violate federal laws against impeding enforcement operations. He posted the letter on social media, addressing it to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and the California attorney general, Rob Bonta, as well as Pelosi and Jenkins.

He also said that the Constitution’s supremacy clause prevents federal officers from being held on a state criminal charge if the alleged crime occurred while the officer was performing federal duties.

‘I have no regrets’: Ex-federal officials flock to California

California officials are using the government shutdown to recruit more federal workers.

Camille Von Kaenel, Politico

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s campaign to recruit former federal workers has yielded a steady stream of job applications since its launch in March, at the peak of the Elon Musk-led job cuts that saw tens of thousands leave the federal workforce. Applications peaked in May at 314 but have largely kept up, numbering 239 in September, according to state data provided to POLITICO.

The result is at least dozens of hires, from entry-level staff to high-profile scientists and regulators with decades of federal experience who moved West to preserve their life’s work and lead California departments at the front lines of backfilling federal rollbacks.

Now, the state is hoping to further capitalize on that insider experience as this spring’s deferred resignations start running out and the White House drafts further layoff plans (which a judge paused last week, for now.) The state currently has about 3,000 job postings across all agencies and counties.

POLITICAL CALIFORNIA

Five Fast Facts on California Voters

As a special Election Day approaches, here’s a look at the numbers that define California voters along with a glimpse of their views on government.

Stephanie Barton, Public Policy Institute of California

1. Voter registration is very high. In 2025, more than eight in ten eligible Californians were registered to vote—or over 23 million of California’s 27 million eligible adults as of September. Adults age 66+ make up the largest share of registered voters (23%) followed by adults 26–35 (18%) and 35–45 (17%); younger adults are the smallest registered share (12%).
2. Close to a third of registered voters are neither blue nor red. Forty-five percent of eligible Californians have registered as Democrats, 25% as Republicans, and 23% as independents. The registered share who now align with a minor political party has ticked up from 6% in 2021 to 7% today.
3. Many likely voters are displeased with the major political parties. Of the registered voters who vote regularly and engage with politics, also known as likely voters, about six in ten hold unfavorable views of the Democratic Party while seven in ten hold unfavorable views of the Republican Party.
4. Few Californians trust the state and federal government. Although Californians profess more trust in their state government than in the federal government, the numbers still reflect a dim view of both: 44% of likely voters say they trust the state government in Sacramento to do what is right, while 29% say the same of the federal government in Washington. Likely voters are also dissatisfied with the California Legislature (53% disapproval).
5. Likely voters represent a small slice of the population. Californians who are most likely to vote also tend to be white, affluent, college educated, and homeowners. Today, white adults make up 50% of likely voters but 36% of the California population. In contrast, Latino adults are 29% of likely voters and 38% of the population, Asian-American residents are 12% of likely voters and 16% of the population, and Black residents are 4% of likely voters and 5% of the population. PPIC’s population sample includes naturalized immigrants.

California secession? It’s already happening

Joe Mathews on the state of the nation-state and his new book.

Paul Thornton, Golden State Report

But that breakup might not simply be California declaring independence. In an interview with Golden State Report co-founder Paul Thornton, Mathews discusses “soft secession” — where California still maintains its place in the union but acts more like its own country — and envisions a future where his children and grandchildren travel the world on passports issued by Los Angeles County.

‘The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act’: Emergency proposal aims to fight back against Trump attack on Medicaid

A coalition of frontline healthcare workers, unions, and economists launched an effort Thursday to build support for a proposed ballot measure in California that would impose a one-time tax on the state’s billionaires to avert a looming crisis spurred by national Republicans‘ unprecedented Medicaid cuts.

Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

The proposed ballot initiative, titled “The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act,” would levy a single 5% tax on the wealth of California’s roughly 200 billionaires to offset healthcare funding shortfalls caused by the roughly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts that US President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans approved over the summer.

Service Employees International Union–United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), one of the largest healthcare worker unions in the country, is spearheading the organizing push to get the proposal on the California ballot in November 2026. The union expects support for the measure to grow quickly in the coming weeks, and organizers said they hope the effort can serve as a “playbook” for other states working to mitigate the increasingly devastating impacts of the GOP assault on Medicaid.

Dave Regan, the president of SEIU-UHW, said during a press call Thursday that “it is a 100% certainty that we have the ability to put this on the ballot in 2026, and we intend to do so.”

Experts estimate that the one-time tax would raise $100 billion—a fraction of the staggering $2 trillion in combined wealth controlled by the 200 wealthiest Californians. Billionaires impacted by the tax would include Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, two of the richest men in the world.

Unveiled today: The first politically viable wealth tax

A proposed 2026 California ballot measure would tax billionaires’ fortunes to fund imperiled health access for 15 million state Medicaid recipients.

Harold Meyerson, American Prospect

The ballot measure they unveiled is an emergency billionaires’ tax aimed at making up the $100 billion hit to California’s Medicaid program over the next five years that the Republican Congress and President Trump delivered by enacting their One Big Beautiful Bill that disproportionately cut taxes on the wealthy and reduced federal allotments for Medicaid. If it qualifies for the November 2026 ballot and is enacted by state voters, the initiative would levy a 5 percent tax on the wealth of the state’s roughly 200 billionaires and direct 90 percent of those funds to California’s Medicaid recipients and the institutions that serve them, with the remaining 10 percent going to the state’s K-12 schools. (This latter provision likely ensures the support, or at least the neutrality, of the state’s teachers unions, which are accustomed to seeing schools getting 40 percent of any state tax increases.)

The stated purpose of this measure is to address what will surely be a crisis for many Medicaid recipients and the hospitals and clinics that treat them, where many of SEIU UHW’s members work. But its implications, at a time when the fortunes of the very wealthy are reaching stratospheric levels even as median incomes are largely stagnant and public funding is under attack, may have even greater significance. It comes at a time when proposals to hike taxes on the very rich (something that polls have long shown to be popular) are beginning to bubble up.

Governor Newsom long-form interview on KQED

Newsom on Prop. 50, the Democratic Party, DOJ election monitors, and more

Marisa Lagos, Scott Shafer, Political Breakdown, KQED

Watch on Youtube here

CULTURAL CALIFORNIA

John Freeman sees California as America’s literary center

John Freeman, author of “California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature,” talks about how California has become America’s new literary center, challenging New York’s dominance.

California Sun Podcast

He discusses the pandemic book club that sparked his journey, the state’s evolving mythology, and how diverse voices are redefining what it means to imagine America’s future.

Transitional kindergarten in California, explained

California has expanded its transitional kindergarten (TK) program to all four-year-olds this fall—making it one of the largest programs in the nation. What is transitional kindergarten, and what does it look like in California?

Laura Hill, PPIC Explainer on Youtube

CALIFORNIA ECONOMY

Food Costs and Household Impacts

Inflation has been top of mind recently. In PPIC’s June 2025 Statewide Survey the top choice for the most important issue facing Californians today was cost of living, economy, and inflation, at 37% of adults.

Caroline Danielson, Public Policy Institute of California

Among all families, housing is the largest expenditure (38%), but spending on transportation (15%) and food (13%) come next in family budgets, followed by health care (8%). Spending on groceries (“food at home”) is $6,900 per family annually on average in California, or $2,500 per person. Food away from home totals $5,300 ($1,950 per person). Compared to those in western states, people in the Midwest spend 3% less per person on groceries, those in the South spend 12% less, and those in the Northeast spend 11% more.

The result is pressure on family budgets that can extend to concerns about affording enough food or cutting back on the variety or quantity of food—collectively known as “food insecurity”. About 1.8 million California households experienced food insecurity in 2023, according to the most recent USDA data, translating to a rate lower than the national rate (11.4% vs. 12.2%). It can also mean cutting back on other expenditures to afford food.

The largest programs in California’s nutrition safety net are CalFresh, WIC, and school meals, making up about $18 billion in state and federal expenditures. Funding for emergency food, including food banks, totals another $160 millionand in 2025–26, includes a one-time state appropriation of $72 million to support food banks. All told, 4.2 million California households access one or more of the three largest programs to help them afford the cost of food. These programs help with rising food costs because they serve meals or they increase benefits when food costs rise.

California says 4 plastic bag makers will stop sales in state in recycling settlement

Four major plastic bag producers will no longer sell their grocery bags in California and will pay fines in a settlement. The companies had labeled the bags as recyclable when they actually are not.

Tara Duggan, SF Chronicle

State law requires plastic grocery bags be recyclable in the state. [California Attorney General Rob] Bonta also announced Friday that he had filed a lawsuit against three additional bag producers for the same reason. Consumers may continue to see plastic bags from those additional producers in stores until January, when a new state ban of all plastic bags from grocery stores goes into effect.

“Even when consumers follow the instructions printed on these plastic bags and return the bags to designated recycling bins at stores or other locations, these bags generally end up in landfills or incinerators rather than getting recycled,” Bonta said. “And inevitably some of them end up in our state’s waterways and other ecosystems.”

Exxon sues California over new laws requiring corporate climate disclosures

Exxon Mobil has filed suit in federal court challenging two California laws that would require the oil giant to report the greenhouse emissions resulting from the use of its products globally.

Doug Smith and Susanne Rust, LA Times

The 30-page complaint, filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, argues that the laws violate the company’s free speech rights by requiring it to “trumpet California’s preferred message even though ExxonMobil believes the speech is misleading and misguided.”

Senate Bill 253, the 2023 legislation known as the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act, requires the California Air Resources Board to adopt regulations by this year to mandate public and private companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue to begin publicly disclosing their emissions across three “scopes.”

Scope 1 emissions are defined as direct greenhouse gas emissions from a company and its branches. Scope 2 includes indirect emissions, such as electricity bought by the company. Scope 3 are emissions from the company’s supply chain, including waste, water usage, business travel and employee commutes, which account for about 75% of a company’s greenhouse emissions for many industries. Reporting begins in 2026 on scopes 1 and 2 and in 2027 on scope 3.

ICYMI: ON OUR WEBSITE

Poll: 72% of Californians want police to arrest certain ICE agents

Poll: Californians ready to govern themselves, but slim majority would sink secession initiative

Read the questions on our June 2025 poll

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The not-so-subtle connection between ICI and ‘Uncle Patrick’s Secessionist Breakfast’

The Drain (podcast): California Independence, with Coyote Marin of the Independent California Institute

Texas v What? Debunking 5 big myths about secession

The High Price of Fear: California could defend itself for a fraction of the cost

Fire and Flood: Why California should control our own water system

Just 9 states make up more than half the U.S. population