Kamala Harris Demands Gov. Newsom Hide California’s Homeless
Written by Chriss W. Street
Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order directing all state and local law enforcement agencies “to move urgently” remove the visibility of California homeless encampments in the final 100-days before the 2024 elections on November 5th.
California is home to 12% of the nation’s population, 30% of the nation’s homeless, and over 50% of the nation’s unsheltered population. Despite the state spending an average of over $31,000 on each homeless person per year, the homeless population has increased from 150,000 in 2019 when Harris was California Attorney General to over 181,000 when she inherited the Democrat nomination last week.
During Harris’ three and a half years in the Biden Administration, funding level for the 24 ‘Targeted Federal Homelessness Funding’ grants that flow to California each year has increased by almost 50% to $5 billion, or $27,600 per unsheltered person.
But the California State Auditor recently warned that state spending lacked basic controls:
The State lacks current information on the ongoing costs and outcomes of its homelessness programs, because California Interagency Council on Homelessness (Cal ICH) has not consistently tracked and evaluated the State’s efforts to prevent and end homelessness. Although Cal ICH reported in 2023 financial information covering fiscal years 2018–19 through 2020–21 related to all state-funded homelessness programs, it has not continued to track and report this data since that time, despite the significant amount of additional funding the State awarded to these efforts in the past two years. Cal ICH has also not aligned its action plan to end homelessness with its statutory goals to collect financial information and ensure accountability and results. Thus, it lacks assurance that the actions it takes will effectively enable it to achieve those goals.
Stanford’s Hoover Institution described the Auditor’s findings that California failed to adequately invest in the “information technology infrastructure and data collection” to track $24 billion of homeless spending, as similar to the state’s Employment Development Department (EDD) failing to prevent “about $32 billion in unemployment benefits fraud.”
The Hoover Institution highlighted a CalMatters investigative report that obtained thousands of pages of emails, meeting notes and state contracts to reveal that California missed the obvious “red flags” that led to the “biggest wave of fraud in U.S. history.”
As former Deputy Director of Unemployment Insurance Greg Williams commented regarding California’s unwillingness to fund adequate systems and oversight to prevent fraud: “The best way I can describe it is like going to a gunfight with a squirt gun.”
Prior to President Biden’s announcement that he was dropping out of the presidential race, Vice President Harris in May trumpeted her efforts to increase Department of Housing and Urban Development funding by $5.5 billion to “boost affordable housing, invest in economic growth, build wealth, and address homelessness across America.”
Vice President Harris’ campaign is scrubbing her record as the most liberal politician in America, to reinvent herself as the tough former California prosecutor who can make the case against Donal Trump, who she now refers to is a convicted criminal.
Gov. Newsom is doing his part by authorizing state and local law enforcement to give 48 hour notice, and then begin immediate removal of the “roughly 123,000 homeless living people living outside on the streets in tents, trailers, cars and makeshift shelters.
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