With 187,000 residents homeless, California leads the nation—not in solutions, but in expensive failures. This year, major cities like Oakland saw a 9% increase in homelessness. If the state’s goal was to increase homelessness, its policies are a resounding success.
The state isn’t short on resources. California has some of the nation’s highest taxpayers and receives $322 billion in annual revenue. But it burned through $24 billionof that on homelessness over the past five years—and it’s still failed to halt the bleeding.
In large part, this failure is due to incompetence. The crisis keeps spiraling because no one has bothered to track where the money is going. A state audit confirmed that the government had no idea what it was doing.
Local governments aren’t any better. San Diego and San Jose funneled millions into homeless programs with little oversight and unreliable success metrics. San Diego didn’t track its funds, while San Jose renewed an $8 million contract based on wildly inflated data overstating the program’s effectiveness.
California’s homelessness crisis isn’t just a state failure—it’s a case study of reckless government spending.
At the same time, California pretends its budget is balanced, claiming a $363 million surplus. But in reality, the state is pulling $7.1 billion from its reserves just to stay afloat. This isn’t fiscal responsibility—it’s creative accounting, raiding emergency reserves to magically turn a deficit into a “surplus.”
The same lack of oversight plaguing California extends to the federal level, where billions vanish into mismanaged programs with no accountability.
Washington is just as good as California at setting taxpayer money on fire.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development, the federal agency overseeing housing assistance, put $319 million in homeless funds at risk by sinking money into programs that cost more and accomplish less.
At the federal level, spending without accountability isn’t a crisis to politicians—it’s a time-honored tradition. But the U.S. debt is climbing by over $3 trillion a year. Misuse of taxpayer dollars isn’t just inefficiency, it’s theft.
Like California’s homeless programs, federal initiatives also suffer from poor oversight and wasteful spending.
Both the federal and California governments practically beg for DOGE auditors –independent watchdogs with the power to track taxpayer dollars, root out inefficiency, and expose failed spending. Without this kind of oversight, taxpayers will keep footing the bill for incompetence.
DOGE has already proven targeted audits work. In one recent example, it shut down 146,000 government credit cards just two weeks after uncovering $40 billion in wasted spending. By expanding its authority and adopting similar oversight measures at the state level, we can ensure every dollar is accounted for and prevent future misuse.
But oversight is just the beginning. The government should also implement a public spending scorecard, which would bring real transparency by requiring agencies to show where every dollar goes and what it actually achieves.
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Eric Preven: The real obscenity at LA City Hall The hidden costs of CalPERS: How taxpayers pay the price Transgender Americans are entitled to the blessings of liberty, too The One Ring of Washington: Big Government’s seductive evil Billions over budget. No answers. Medi-Cal needs an audit. If a program wastes money or fails to meet its goals, taxpayers deserve to know who’s responsible so they can demand accountability. Bureaucrats can’t be allowed to continue hiding failures behind empty rhetoric. By implementing a scorecard, the government could force bureaucrats to release spending reports that rely on real data, not on whatever numbers look good on a press release.Transparency alone isn’t enough. Taxpayers aren’t just funders for government programs—they’re investors, and they deserve returns, not excuses. Every federal program should have a designated agency head responsible for tracking outcomes and proving that spending delivers measurable results, not political talking points.
Government waste isn’t just bureaucratic failure—it’s a system built to squander billions with no consequences. If agency heads can’t justify their budgets, then they shouldn’t have them.
Richard Stern is Acting Director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation and Director of its Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget. Katherine Miller is a former member of Heritage’s Young Leaders Program.
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