KMJ talk hosts take Gov. Gavin Newsom to task after he said at a Monday news conference “We’ve been working, I dunno, before DOGE was DOGE.”
“I dunno, this is like a promo project,” Newsom said mockingly of DOGE, then bragged, “We’ve been doing civil service reform in this state; we’ve been consolidating job classifications; we’ve been updating job descriptions in this state, and we waived those requirements…. I’ve always been a leader in that space.”
Last June, the AP reported that California had “an estimated $46.8 billion budget deficit,” adding that the surpluses Newsom bragged about in 2022 were the result of “hundreds of billions of dollars of federal COVID-19 aid and a progressive tax code that produced a windfall of revenue from the state’s wealthiest residents.” The AP added that the deficit in 2023 had been about $32 billion.
