For California laws, the buck does really stop at Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk.
While the Legislature approves hundreds of bills each session — and will add to that list before adjourning Saturday — Newsom decides whether they become law.
As of Aug. 15, Newsom had signed 164 bills and vetoed four. He has already signed a contentious package of bills to address retail theft. And he agreed to a deal — not written into legislation — to help fund local newsrooms and AI research.
Newsom has until Sept. 30 to decide on bills passed in the final days; he sometimes waits until right before the deadline to weigh in on contentious ones. The governor gives a few typical reasons for vetoing bills: He deems them redundant, or calculates that their potential cost threatens to worsen the state’s budget situation. But he also blocks bills because they’re controversial, or opposed by powerful special interests.
Last year, Newsom vetoed 156 bills and signed 890, or about 15%, a similar ratio as in 2022, when he blocked some very significant ones. In 2021, he vetoed less than 8%. While the Legislature can override vetoes, it takes a two-thirds vote in both the Assembly and Senate and that rarely happens. Governors can also allow bills to become law without their signature, but that doesn’t occur very often, either.
Here are some noteworthy bills being tracked by CalMatters reporters. Bookmark this page for updates.
Make undocumented immigrants eligible for homebuyer and jobless aid
AB 1840 and SB 227, written by Assemblymembers Joaquin Arambula and María Elena Durazo, respectively, aim to ensure Californians are not excluded from assistance programs due to their immigration status.
AB 1840, written by Arambula, a Democrat from Fresno, makes clear that undocumented first-time homebuyers can apply for a program that offers 20% downpayment assistance of as much as $150,000. The bill has drawn national media attention, with Republicans claiming it follows “a long litany of taxpayer dollar giveaways…that encourage and reward illegal immigration.” A spokesperson for Arambula said the bill only clarifies that undocumented Californians can participate in “Dream for All” and other home purchase assistance programs if they meet all other eligibility and financial criteria. The program ran out of $300 million in funding 11 days after launching in 2023. Because of the state budget shortfall, no new funds were appropriated this year.
SB 227 requires the Employment Development Department, by next March, to come up with a plan on how to give undocumented workers who lose their jobs access to unemployment benefits. Employers pay into the unemployment fund; an expansion would likely need to be funded by the state. Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2022 vetoed a similar bill directly requiring the new program because lawmakers hadn’t identified a funding source. This version would make the administration figure out how to create the program, including how much it would cost, and then send the plan back to lawmakers and the Department of Finance for review.
WHO SUPPORTS THEM
A large coalition of immigrant rights advocates, including the ACLU, CHIRLA, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, and the Mexican American Opportunity Foundation.
WHO IS OPPOSED
California Republicans argue that programs providing aid to undocumented residents act as a magnet for illegal immigration, even as many Californians can’t afford to buy houses. Elon Musk posted on his social media site X that “half of earth should move to California given all the incentives to do so.”
There are no registered opponents for the unemployment bill. Newsom’s finance department last year opposed the bill because the state hadn’t budgeted funds for it, and called its timelines “infeasible,” but the bill has since been amended to require a plan rather than the program itself.
WHY IT MATTERS
Decades of work went into building a social safety net for California’s roughly 2.3 million undocumented immigrants, who still have the highest poverty rates in the state. Some argue that because undocumented immigrants pay taxes, they should also have access to taxpayer-funded programs, like unemployment insurance. According to USC’s California Immigrant Data Portal, undocumented immigrants paid an estimated $3.7 billion in state and local taxes in 2019.
In recent years, natural disasters such as winter storms and extreme heat have shed light on how farmworkers, over half of whom are undocumented, can lose work with little notice. But with a tight state budget, Newsom has cited costs in halting or slowing down the state’s expansions of social services.
Require state prisons to provide menstrual products
AB 1810 by Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, a Democrat from Culver City, would require state prisons to provide incarcerated people with free and ready access to menstrual products without inmates having to request them. Currently, state prisons, local jails and juvenile facilities are required to provide sanitary pads and tampons products only “upon request.” A 2023 report by the attorney general’s office found half of the facilities surveyed were not complying, including 25 county jails that were not providing free period products.
WHO SUPPORTS IT
A coalition of human and prisoner rights advocates, including the ACLU California Action, the San Francisco Public Defender, the Western Center on Law & Poverty and the Legal Services for Prisoners With Children organizations. Bryan said there were documented cases of California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation officers withholding sanitary products as retaliation or punishment. Alissa Moore, the re-entry coordinator for Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, testified at a hearing on the bill that she was sexually assaulted several times during her 25 years in prison: “I often felt humiliated, and ashamed and embarrassed when I would have to, on occasion, ask the same staff that had victimized me for sanitary supplies.” The bill passed the Senate and Assembly without any “no” votes.
WHO IS OPPOSED
The California Family Council voiced opposition to the bill, arguing that the legislation does not clearly identify a person who menstruates as a woman. Some correctional officers have said male inmates sometimes ask for pads to make cushions for seats or for their sandals. State mandates that cost money for local jurisdictions, like county jails and juvenile detention facilities, are usually reimbursed by the state. According to the Senate Appropriations Committee, the bill does not have significant costs.
WHY IT MATTERS
There are more than 3,700 women in state prisons, plus more than 9,800 in county jails. Formerly incarcerated people have described being humiliated by having to ask for personal hygiene products. Advocates say it can lead to unsafe and unsanitary conditions and lead to an imbalance of power between correctional officers and inmates.
California is reckoning with how it treats its prisoners. Proposition 6 is asking voters whether to change the state constitution to expressly ban involuntary servitude so that inmates in California jails and prisons can no longer be compelled to work and punished with solitary confinement or the loss of privileges for declining jobs, most of which pay less than $1 an hour.
Test AI for critical harm to society
SB 1047 by Senator Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco, requires the makers of advanced artificial intelligence models to test their likelihood to cause critical harm to society. The bill also protects the rights of whistleblowers to raise concerns to the attorney general. The bill attempts to codify, oversee, and enforce safety testing similar to what major companies voluntarily agreed to in deals with the White House and governments in the United Kingdom and South Korea. The bill also takes steps toward establishing a public cloud computing cluster known as CalCompute to advance AI development.
WHO SUPPORTS IT
In the weeks leading up to passage, X CEO Elon Musk and prominent researchers Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton voiced support for the bill. Other supporters include AI company Anthropic, youth AI nonprofit organization Encode Justice, the Economic Security Project California, and experts including Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, the first director of the Joint AI Center at the Pentagon; Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety; and Daniel Kokotajlo and William Saunders, former OpenAI employees and whistleblowers.
WHO IS OPPOSED
Major AI developers including Google, Meta, and OpenAI strongly oppose the bill, arguing that it will stifle innovation and the availability of open source software. Eight members of Congress who represent California districts, all Democrats, took the unusual step of urging Gov. Newsom to veto the bill. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco also opposes the bill, saying in a letter that it does more harm than good.
WHY IT MATTERS
California is home to the majority of the top AI companies in the world, so tough regulation of them could set a standard for the entire industry and for Congress. Supporters of the bill say now is the time to act because they don’t trust the makers of AI to self regulate particularly as profit pressures mount. Kokotajlo told CalMatters that if SB 1047 were in effect when he worked at OpenAI, it would have prevented or at least helped expose a violation of internal safety protocols he witnessed there.
