California Budget Hides Over $1 Billion in Earmarks

Somewhere in Sacramento, a gym is getting $29 million. A farmers market is getting $13 million. A fund for retired MMA fighters is getting $1 million. None of it went through a grant application, a scoring rubric, or a public hearing where a citizen could ask why. It went in because a legislator asked for it, in the final 48 hours before the budget passed, with no name attached to the request.

That is the mechanism behind the $1.3 billion in earmarks CalMatters identified in this year’s state budget, and as a financial controller, the dollar figure is not what stops me. What stops me is the process that produced it. California’s Legislature allows individual lawmakers to submit private funding requests, capped by leadership, that get folded into budget bills introduced days before the session ends. The requester’s name is not published. The review is not public. By the time anyone outside the building can ask a question, the money is already appropriated.

Some of what came out of that process is defensible on its face. Turning a defunct Alameda County horse track into $125 million of public parkland is the kind of project a normal grant process might also fund, just with more paperwork and more time. But defensible outcomes reached through an indefensible process are still a process problem, because the process is what determines which $125 million projects get funded and which ones with equal merit get nothing.

The distributional pattern makes that concrete. Los Angeles County pulled in more than $300 million. Tulare County, similar in population but represented by the opposing party, received $200,000. Seventeen counties got nothing at all. That is not what a merit-based allocation looks like. It is what a system organized around who has a seat at the table looks like, and the seats at that table are not evenly distributed by population, need, or even party control of the chamber — they are distributed by who chairs which committee and who negotiates with whom in the final 48 hours.

Look at where the earmarks landed geographically and a second pattern appears. Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón’s Santa Barbara district picked up $83.7 million in projects, on top of the $29 million gym. Governor Newsom’s home region picked up the $13 million farmers market and food hub. I am not suggesting either dollar was illegally directed. I am pointing out that a process with no public attribution of who asked for what will, predictably and every single time, favor the people who hold the most leverage in the room where the list gets finalized. That is not a scandal. It is arithmetic.

Eighty-six million dollars went to arts and culture organizations — museums, dance troupes, a mime company. Twenty-five million went to a UC Berkeley genomics institute. Twenty million went to a Holocaust education center. Each of those, evaluated individually, might well be exactly the kind of public investment California should be making. But “might well be” is precisely the judgment a transparent, competitive process exists to make with evidence, not the judgment a closed-door earmark list makes by default. Julie Baker of California for the Arts, whose sector benefited from $86 million of this money, still called the process “done all behind closed doors” and “somewhat inequitable.” When an advocate for the winning side says that on the record, the process problem is not a partisan complaint. It is a description.

Geoff Green, who runs CalNonprofits, put his finger on the real cost to everyone who plays by the rules that supposedly govern state grantmaking: organizations that spent months on standard grant applications watched $1.3 billion move through a side door in 48 hours, and were left asking, in his words, why they’d bothered spending all that time and energy at all. That is the actual price of an earmark process like this one. It is not just the money. It is the message it sends to every nonprofit, every city, every county that followed the rules and got nothing, while a gym in the right district got $29 million because someone made a phone call.

The fix does not require abolishing earmarks, which exist in some form in every legislature in the country and occasionally fund things a formal grant process would miss. It requires attribution and daylight: publish every earmark request with the requesting legislator’s name attached, publish it before the vote rather than after, and give the public the same three-to-five days of scrutiny that a normal grant application has to survive. A controller reviewing any organization’s books would flag $1.3 billion in unattributed, last-minute disbursements as a finding, not a footnote. Sacramento should hold itself to the same standard it would demand of any agency it audits.