Gov. Gavin Newsom is desperately trying to find a pathway to the White House. He’s got money, he’s got good hair and control of the largest and most broken state in the country. And he’s looking at a major gap between leaving office and running in 2028.

So he and his no doubt highly paid consultants are trying to throw anything and everything at the wall to see what sticks.

Unlike a lot of his rivals, Newsom did understand that the 2024 election was a sea change and that he has to position himself as a candidate who can appeal to the rest of the country which isn’t all that thrilled with his party and movement. But his efforts at centrism or populism are feeble, shallow and transparently fake. His podcast interviews with people on the right was phony pandering. On This is Gavin Newsom, he was willing to condemn men competing against women, but his state policy is to double down on it.

Now, Newsom is trying to roll out his own version of DOGE.

Continuing his strategy to make California government more efficient, engaged, and effective, Governor Gavin Newsom today is announcing a new initiative — the California Breakthrough Project — which brings together innovators and leaders from the Golden State’s top tech companies to help guide this work. The group will work closely with leaders and front-line employees from state agencies to identify opportunities to further streamline and improve government operations

What Newsom somehow took away from DOGE is that people like the idea of Big Tech tycoons running the government (they do not) rather than that they want the government to cut waste.

There is absolutely zero chance of any cuts happening in California because waste is how the whole government economy runs.

Consider the train-to-nowhere that would be the first item on any list of cuts. Or the billions in missing money in the homeless industrial complex.

That’s why I covered some of this stuff in my new pamphlet: Corrupt California: Political Criminals and Criminal Politicians

The number of homeless not only didn’t go down, but shot up, and despite billions of dollars, the annual shortfall was being estimated at $270 million. Homeless housing was being approved at a cost of $479,000 an apartment and total development cost for Measure HHH hit $869 million.

By 2020, the average cost of apartments for the homeless was at $531,000 and by 2022, a city audit found that one project was running to $837,000 for each unit. An audit blamed “a lot of consultants”. After 4 years of this, only 228 apartments for the homeless had been built.

Los Angeles then launched a pilot program to build 8×8 aluminum sheds for the homeless for only $130,000 each and then tent encampments for the homeless for only $2,600 per tent each month.

Gov. Newsom knows all of this. He knows nothing is going to change. His version of DOGE is a fake attempt to make him look like a reformer, but a reformer would never have overseen the current state of the state.