EXPOSED: Gavin Newsom vetoed a unanimously passed bipartisan bill, AB 2903, that would have forced annual public reports on where California's $20+ billion in homeless funding actually went — blocking the investigation multiple times.
The bill sailed through the California Legislature: 72-0 in the Assembly, 40-0 in the Senate. Not a single no vote from either party. It would have required state homelessness programs to annually report cost and outcome data to the California Interagency Council on Homelessness, with the numbers made public. Newsom killed it anyway.
The push for the bill came from a scathing state audit that found California had spent nearly $24 billion on homelessness and housing over five fiscal years without consistently tracking what the money achieved. The state auditor concluded California "did not consistently track and evaluate" its homelessness spending and lacked the data to determine whether any of it was cost-effective. All that spending, and the state could not say what it bought.
Meanwhile the crisis the money was supposed to fix kept growing. California's homeless population climbed from roughly 151,000 in 2019 to more than 181,000 in 2024 — a nearly 60 percent increase over a decade — even as tens of billions flowed out the door. The state with the highest homeless count in the nation could not account for where the money went.
Newsom's veto message said he fully supports accountability but claimed "similar measures are already in place." The bill's author, Assemblyman Josh Hoover, called that doubling down on failure: "Our state has spent billions of taxpayer dollars in recent years only to see the homeless population increase statewide. We will not solve this crisis until we get serious about accountability."
And AB 2903 was not the only one. Newsom also vetoed similar homelessness accountability bills, AB 2570 and AB 2093, each time citing existing oversight frameworks. Three bipartisan attempts at forcing the state to show its math on homelessness spending — three vetoes. The money keeps flowing, the audits keep getting blocked, and the homeless count keeps climbing.
Watch the report on the veto: