The Brief

The business of military contracting is booming in Southern California.

The total value of defense contracts won by companies in Los Angeles County more than doubled in the last 10 years after adjusting for inflation, according to an analysis by CalMatters and The Markup. In the same period, the defense budget rose by about 19% in adjusted dollars.

The $15 billion in contracts won in L.A. County last year went largely to old-school defense contractors with headquarters elsewhere, like Boeing. But startups claimed a growing share of the pie, selling defense systems like low-cost missiles, drones, surveillance satellites, AI tools and much more. In 2025, 10 startups in the L.A. area were crowned “unicorns,” becoming companies valued by investments at more than $1 billion, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal. Most of those 10 companies were aerospace or defense businesses.

In 2015, 14 of the top 100 defense contracts won in California went to businesses focused on drones or space, according to the CalMatters and Markup analysis. By 2025, that share was up to 21. The shift is similar if measured by dollars, from 13%to 18%.

Details like whether you count obligations for where businesses are based or where the projects are launched all affect those numbers. By some counts the increases in contract dollars could be larger.

The contracts have been kindled by a surge of venture capital. Private investment in aerospace and defense since 2008 has fueled massive gains, according to a report from The Aerospace Corporation, a federally-funded nonprofit.

But all the new money is now causing awkward political tensions.

The war in Iran, which has depleted American munitions, is poised to drive demand even higher. The Trump administration’s latest budget proposal includes a record-setting $1.5 trillion for the military. Meanwhile, the Defense Department has signed off on the earliest contracts for the “Golden Dome,” a proposal to build a missile-defense system above the United States that may eventually cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

Most of the Golden Dome winners are based in or have ties to the Southern California area.

“You saw this huge rise in capital and now you're seeing just much, much bigger government budgets for space,” said Sam Wilson, a researcher at the Aerospace Corporation.

The collision of venture capital and military spending has alarmed some advocates, who see a frightening trend toward privatization and the risk of a space arms race. Even Congressional Democrats are pushing back against the spending.

That’s noteworthy because it has tended “to be a bipartisan, equal effort to increase the budget” of the military, said Lindsay Koshgarian, director of the National Priorities Project, which tracks defense spending. “I think we are maybe seeing the limits of that now.”

Despite the pushback, some of the congressional districts that saw the largest defense contract increases in recent years are beneficiaries of signature Trump-era projects. Many are in solidly blue Los Angeles County, and among the most Democrat-leaning districts in the country.

California’s 36th Congressional District includes El Segundo, a high-tech defense hub outside Los Angeles. In the district’s 2024 House race, incumbent Democrat Ted Lieu took nearly 70 percent of the vote over a Republican challenger. The increase in defense contracts between 2015 and 2025 in that district alone was more than $3.3 billion.

Another district, California’s 43rd, is represented by Maxine Waters, who in 2021 signed on to the proposed No Militarization of Space Act, which described the Space Force as an unnecessary waste of resources and sought to abolish it.

Trump recently proposed to double the budget of the Space Force, another potential boon to the area. Meanwhile, Waters’ district has seen its share of obligated defense department spending grow over the last decade by more than $1.6 billion, or more than 500%, adjusted for inflation. Waters’ office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Seamus Daniels, who studies the defense budget at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the proposed $1.5 trillion dollar defense budget for fiscal year 2027 “would surpass the peak of defense spending during World War II.”

The administration is seeking that money in place of traditional Democratic priorities, like healthcare funding, he points out. “The budget requests of the second Trump administration have been contentious because, while they have sought to increase defense spending dramatically, they're also aiming to cut non-defense spending,” Daniels said.

Koshgarian said Democrats have largely been open to an increased defense budget, especially if it brings money to their congressional districts. But that may be changing.

“That tension is definitely real, even in left districts,” she said. “But I think we're reaching a level of extremity now that that might be starting to flip.”

A new chapter

There’s no question California has become a major player in defense technology.

Every year, the Silicon Valley Defense Group, an industry nonprofit promoting military technology, releases a list of the top 100 tech-forward national security companies. When they charted the companies’ headquarters by state for 2026, they found that 47 were based in California, more than five times those in the number two state, Colorado.

It wasn’t always that way for California.

The state became a hub of manufacturing during World War II, building the planes en route to the Pacific Theater. During the Cold War, it was home to pioneering aerospace firms like Lockheed, Northrop, and Convair. But by the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union gutted defense spending and consolidation stripped the region of its leadership, eventually sending Lockheed Martin’s headquarters to Maryland and Northrop Grumman’s to Virginia. Many were sounding the industry’s death knell. The nonprofit RAND Corporation noted that military aerospace sales peaked in 1987. They had declined by 32 percent just six years later.

The seeds of a comeback were sown when the Predator drone, built by General Atomics of San Diego, first took flight above the California desert in 1995. The craft, armed with Hellfire missiles, became the symbol of the War on Terror.

Then came the private investment surge, and an administration with new priorities.

As far back as the first months after Trump’s first inauguration, in 2017, aerospace industry

investors were celebrating massive stock gains. Government contracts have since turned defense companies like Costa Mesa-based Anduril into multi-billion-dollar operations.

Venture capital meets military dollars

Southern California likely benefits from the fact that the Space Force’s seed funding arm is based in El Segundo, where it decides where to send hundreds of millions of government dollars. The arm often chooses to fund companies in or around the small, seaside city, which has built buzz as ground zero for defense tech.

When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently went on tour to promote the "Arsenal of Freedom," a plan to massively increase munitions building, he told the workers at a Long Beach company, Rocket Lab, that “dominance of space” was key to the military’s future.

“This company, you right here, are front and center, as part of ensuring that we build an arsenal of freedom that America needs,” he said.

The partnership between private venture dollars and public defense contracts often unfolds like this: First, a startup comes up with a business plan for a product or service with military applications.

SpaceWERX, the El Segundo-based Space Force venture arm, selects some of these projects for early seed funding. Since 2021, SpaceWERX has awarded 380 contracts worth more than $461 million to businesses in California, more than any other state, SpaceWERX spokesperson Matthew Clouse said.

Private investors often follow on, seeing SpaceWERX money as a “demand signal,” said Arthur Grijalva, director of SpaceWERX. Billions have flowed into California-based companies in recent years this way.

Some local politicians have spent years pushing for similar investment in local military applications. El Segundo Mayor Chris Pimentel said he and his team traveled north in the state to personally court financiers while dealing with an enormous business dip early in the pandemic.

“It really paid off with large dividends,” he said. “We started showing up and being in the room with some of the larger venture funds and saying, ‘we can make these things happen down here. We can build stuff.’"

“Agnostic of politics and agnostic of individual ideologies, our core belief is that this is where the future has been made historically,” he said, pointing to Southern California’s long aviation history.

Some companies that take Defense Department contracts, like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which started in the Los Angeles area, are now valued at billions. SpaceX's recent initial public offering became, by far, the biggest IPO of all time in June.

Other small space companies are rapidly building with government contracts. True Anomaly, a space defense company, was founded in Colorado in 2022 but now has its largest office in Long Beach. “When you're building this type of company, it's frankly somewhat of a necessity to have a footprint here,” said Chief Financial Officer Mark Seidel.

The company has worked on Space Force missions and was recently announced as a contractor for the Golden Dome project. In April, a $650 million funding round put the company at a valuation of more than $2 billion.

The increasing spending, while bringing jobs to some parts of the country, continues to rile critics.

“We very much risk getting into a space arms race, where China invests more, so we invest more so China invests more and we invest more,” Koshgarian said. “Where does it stop?”

Data from usaspending.gov for Defense Department obligations to organizations listing a California address. Awards may be to California businesses for projects in another area. Download our data here. 

Mohamed Al Elew contributed data editing to this report.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is losing control of responsibilities tied to about $239 million in federal taxpayer funds as the Trump administration continues a push to strip power from the joint city-county agency. Now, Los Angeles and L.A. County are competing for control of some of those federal roles.

A key vote scheduled for Monday could help chart the future of the region’s response to its homelessness crisis.

And it’s happening in a unique format. Anyone, including you, can join and likely cast a vote.

Here’s what to know about what’s happening and how to get involved.

How we got here 

A regional planning group called the L.A. Continuum of Care voted earlier this month to designate L.A. County to take over at least two federal roles currently managed by the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA — running the homeless count and managing the region’s federal funding application.

The city and county have been competing for two other federal responsibilities currently held by LAHSA — managing a database that tracks unhoused people receiving public services and administering a system used to match people who need help with housing and shelter.

The local process to select LAHSA’s replacements began after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development suspended the embattled agency from these federal roles in June, citing financial mismanagement.

Independent reviewers scored the county’s applications higher than the city’s. On Oct. 6, the L.A. Continuum of Care’s 21-member board voted to recommend L.A. County for all four roles.

The following week, the L.A. City Council instructed its attorneys to explore potential legal challenges to the L.A. Continuum of Care’s selection process while negotiating with L.A. County for shared control of these responsibilities.

This week, city officials said those negotiations paid off. On Friday, the City Council voted 10-0 to support a tentative agreement with the county on the two remaining federal roles.

How to participate

The L.A. Continuum of Care’s general membership meeting is scheduled Monday at 3 p.m. The group will vote on whether to approve designating L.A. County for the two federal roles still up for grabs: managing the unhoused database and the housing matching system.

You can attend in person or online via Zoom, and anyone who attends might be eligible to vote.

The L.A. Continuum of Care is a regional planning group required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that chooses which agencies handle the region’s federal homelessness responsibilities. It’s a nebulous body without a fixed roster. It technically includes all “persons and entities interested in collaborative, solution oriented planning to address homelessness in L.A. County (with the exception of Glendale, Long Beach, and Pasadena)," according to its charter. Anyone who fits that description is allowed to vote.

Because L.A. County is the only candidate under consideration in the vote, county officials encouraged county employees not to vote to avoid potential conflicts of interest, according to an email from the county’s homelessness department.

Attend in-person at 637 Wilshire Boulevard, 1st Floor Commission Room, Los Angeles, CA 90017

Register to attend online here.

Worth noting: These are yes-or-no votes. If L.A. County is not approved, no decisions will be made.

How might this change things?

Since 2020, the homeless population has increased by nearly 10% in both the city of L.A. and across L.A. County, according to the official homeless counts.

The region’s homelessness budgets swelled over that same period, with hundreds of millions more spent on shelter beds, housing and services for unhoused Angelenos. Much of that money was available because of local voters who in recent years approved several sales taxes and other measures to fund homeless services.

The decisions getting voted on by L.A. Continuum of Care determine who runs the systems that track and direct that money and who answers to the public when results fall short.

After Monday’s vote, the L.A. Continuum of Care’s selections will go to a federal judge for review on Tuesday. The court will then largely determine when and how the transition away from LAHSA happens in the coming months.

It’s unclear how the shift in control will impact homeless services on the ground. LAHSA leaders and employees have warned that transferring these responsibilities is complex and could take up to a year.

A bitter fight over the best path forward played out ahead of the vote.

L.A. city officials, including Mayor Karen Bass, said they want collaborative governance, and argued giving the county sole authority over federal responsibilities would hurt city residents.

“The City of Los Angeles provides the overwhelming majority of housing for the region,” Bass and several city council members said in a statement earlier this month. “The City must be able to help the people on our own streets by placing them into the housing that we build and fund in order to solve the homelessness crisis,” the statement continued.

This month, Bass and a group of L.A. City Council members sent a letter to the L.A. Continuum of Care, arguing that the city’s applications should have scored higher, and urging more support for the city’s bid.

Leaders of the L.A. County Department of Homeless Services and Housing said the county applied for all four functions because it’s best positioned to represent and collaborate with the region's 85 cities and hundreds of service providers.

Ben Kay, chair of the L.A. Continuum of Care board, wrote to the mayor, City Council and county supervisors on Oct. 14 that the dispute had shifted from “a united front against federal encroachment to splintered infighting.” Kay warned that it could squander the chance to keep local control of these systems and head off further federal involvement. He defended the scoring and selection, saying the board “stands firmly behind the integrity of that process.”

The L.A. City Council held a special meeting on Oct. 14 to discuss the city’s next steps. City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo laid out some options: negotiating with L.A. County for co-leadership of federal roles, separating from L.A. County and forming a city-only continuum of care or potentially filing a lawsuit challenging the whole court-ordered selection process.

After a closed-session discussion, City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson announced the council was formally requesting that the L.A. City Attorney’s Office “develop options for litigation to protect the city and to protect our constituents, both housed and homeless.”

The council also asked the city administrative officer to keep negotiating with the county.

Those talks produced a tentative agreement, which the council voted to support on Friday.

It covers the two federal roles still up for a vote Monday. If the county is picked to run both, the agreement would give the city a bigger role in each.

For the database, city staff would keep their current access. The city would also get all data in the system on unhoused people within city limits, including those enrolled in county-funded programs, according to the agreement.

Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, who chairs the council’s homelessness and health committee, said the city would get the raw data behind the system so it can build its own reports and dashboards. “That’s something we’ve never had,” she said.

For the matching system, the city funds the vast majority of permanent supportive housing in the city, but it doesn’t currently manage matching for any of those units, Szabo said. LAHSA does. Under the agreement, the county would contract with the city to do that matching in buildings funded by the city or its housing authority.

“We’re going from nothing to something, and something substantial,” Jurado said.

The deal isn’t final. Its terms still have to be turned into binding agreements approved by both the City Council and the county Board of Supervisors, according to a report from Szabo’s office.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development told the court in an Oct. 20 filing that L.A. County’s homelessness department is an acceptable applicant and that it “prefers” the county over the city.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter’s court order requires the L.A. Continuum of Care to make its selections by Tuesday. Then, these complex federal responsibilities, supported by scores of LAHSA staff, have to move away from LAHSA on a timeline that will be set by the federal court.

LAHSA workers represented by union SEIU Local 721 have urged both the city and county to protect their jobs during that transition. They argue competent and experienced employees shouldn’t be sidelined because of leadership’s failures.

“We have spent years building relationships, learning these systems, and helping people move from homelessness into housing,” said Heather Varden, a LAHSA employee who posted an open letter from the union. “That experience should not be thrown away because the name at the top of the contract changes.”

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA, is losing its federal responsibilities.

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Aaron Schrank/LAist

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How to understand the context 

City and county officials created the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA, in 1993 as a joint powers authority between the two overlapping jurisdictions. Both the city and county appointed members to LAHSA’s governing commission and relied on the agency to manage public homelessness dollars for the region.

The federal roles were delegated to LAHSA by the L.A. Continuum of Care, an obscure but newly powerful planning group that HUD requires regions across the country to maintain if they want federal money.

Since late 2024, LAHSA has faced a string of critical audits and other scandals, putting its management of L.A.’s growing homelessness crisis under scrutiny.

L.A. County’s Board of Supervisors voted last year to divert more than $300 million in county homelessness funding from LAHSA and manage the funds itself. The county's new Department of Homeless Services and Housing took control of those funds in July.

On June 11, HUD suspended LAHSA from federal programs, citing alleged failures in financial management, internal controls, grant oversight and conflict-of-interest policies.

The move, according to the Trump administration, meant LAHSA wasn’t able to do the jobs the continuum of care had delegated to it, including applying for $239 million in federal funds on the region’s behalf.

The federal housing department said that with LAHSA suspended, it intended to have L.A. service providers apply directly to HUD for the funds — a move that would have ignored regional priorities.

LAHSA sued. In August, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter issued a preliminary injunction on LAHSA’s suspension through Oct. 27.

This allowed LAHSA to submit the region’s collaborative application for federal funds by an Oct. 14 deadline. (The agency has since provided notice that it has submitted the application on time.)

Carter also ordered the L.A. Continuum of Care to start taking applications to consider replacing LAHSA as soon as possible. The group hired consultants and ran an application process over about a month, beginning on Sept. 11. LAHSA leadership decided the agency would not compete in it.

L.A. County applied for all four federal roles and was the only applicant considered for two of them. The city applied for and competed against the county for the other two.

A panel of reviewers (whose identities were kept private) scored written applications and interview responses for each of the federal roles up for grabs. L.A. County’s pitch to operate a key database, known as HMIS, used to track service participants through the system earned a score of about 87 out of 100, compared to the city’s score of about 82. On Oct. 6, a committee focused on the database voted 8-0 in favor of the county’s application. Later that day, the board voted 10-4 to pick L.A. County for that role.

The county scored about 91 on its application to manage the system that matches unhoused people with available shelter and other resources — known as the Coordinated Entry System or CES — compared to the city’s score of about 73. The board voted 12-1 to select the county to run CES.

A 21-member board speaks for the L.A. Continuum of Care and guides decision-making. That board voted Oct. 6 to recommend L.A. County for all four federal roles currently held by LAHSA. Bass and several city council members had been urging people to attend the upcoming meeting and vote against the L.A. Continuum of Care board’s recommendations and in favor of the city.

Reba Stevens, a community advocate who serves on the 21-member L.A. Continuum of Care board, reviews materials in October 2026.

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Aaron Schrank/LAist

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How does the Continuum of Care operate?

Communities like L.A. must form and operate a “continuum of care” if they want federal homelessness money. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, introduced the model in 1994 to promote communitywide collaboration toward ending homelessness. Congress wrote it into law in the 2009 HEARTH Act.

The L.A. Continuum of Care is the largest in the U.S. — covering all of L.A. County, except Long Beach, Pasadena and Glendale, which each run their own.

It isn't a government agency with its own staff. It’s a group of service providers, city and county agencies, housing authorities, advocates and people who have experienced homelessness. Known as the L.A. CoC, it operates under a governing charter.

Federal rules require the L.A. Continuum of Care to apply for HUD funding each year, decide which local projects receive it and oversee how the money is spent and how programs perform. The group must delegate who operates a shared database, runs a system for matching people to housing, applies for federal funding and counts the region’s homeless population.

Because it has no staff of its own, the Continuum of Care delegated those jobs to “lead agencies.” Until now, the group had chosen the city and county’s shared homelessness agency, LAHSA, to perform all four of those federal functions:

• Federal funding (Collaborative Applicant): submits the region’s annual funding application to HUD.
• Homeless Count (Point-in-Time count administrator): conducts the annual unhoused population census that shapes funding and policy.
• Homeless Database (HMIS Lead): runs the database where homeless service providers track who they serve and what housing and services those people receive. In Los Angeles, about 400 agencies feed into a system holding about 175,000 active participant profiles.
• Housing matching (CES Lead): manages the system that assesses people and matches them to shelter and housing. That system runs on the HMIS database. 

Sarah Mahin, director of the L.A. County Department of Homeless Services and Housing, made the county's case to the L.A. Continuum of Care board at meeting in October 2026.

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Aaron Schrank/LAist

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Canceled meeting stirs controversy

On Oct. 9, the Continuum of Care’s general membership held a meeting to formally designate the county to fill the administrative roles. Because that general membership is broad, the vote was likely to be decided based on turnout.

The day prior, the L.A. mayor’s office sent text messages to “thousands of community members,” according to that office, urging them to attend the meeting and vote against the Continuum of Care Board’s recommendations and in favor of the city.

County agencies also sent out notices about the vote, including a warning to county employees not to participate because of conflict-of-interest concerns.

More than 1,000 people attempted to attend the meeting online, exceeding the Zoom call’s capacity, according to organizers. The meeting was immediately adjourned by organizers, who told attendees they had to stop the meeting to avoid violating California’s open meeting law.

Katie Hill, CEO at Union Station Homeless Services in Pasadena, called the L.A. mayor's office’s efforts to stack the meeting with voters “outrageous” in an interview with LAist.

“There’s a process that everyone has agreed on that is fair and represents our collective best interests,” Hill told LAist. “We were supposed to ratify it in the same way that Congress ratifies electoral votes. And then all of the sudden they said they didn't like the outcome, and now they want people to not ratify it.”

Some city officials defended the mayor’s push to involve the public. Councilmember Tim McOsker said the board’s recommendations are “not a rubber stamp.”

“The [Continuum of Care] has a responsibility to scrutinize the recommendations, evaluate the scores, and exercise its own judgment rather than blindly accepting them,” McOsker said in a statement. “Public meetings should be attended by the public,” McOsker’s statement continued.

Hill’s organization has several contracts with L.A. County and just one with the city of L.A., she said. Hill previously served on LAHSA’s governing body as an L.A. County appointee.

While Hill thinks the county is better suited to run the system, some homeless services providers are staying neutral.

“We did not mobilize participants for Friday’s meeting,” Jerry Jones, executive director of the Greater L.A. Coalition on Homelessness, a network of more than 60 service providers, told LAist. “The best path forward is for both groups of elected officials to work together.”

“Regardless [of] who the [Continuum of Care] lead is, there are 20,000 people being served — we need to keep that funding,” Ivet Samvelyan, vice president of Hope The Mission, told LAist.

After the capacity issues, the Continuum of Care upgraded its Zoom account and now has capacity for 10,000 people for Monday’s meeting, according to a report the group submitted to the court on Oct. 13.

The group must make its final selections by Oct. 27, the same day the preliminary injunction is set to expire.

Local election officials across California are confused and frustrated after receiving letters from President Donald Trump’s Justice Department demanding that county registrars sequester ballots that the federal government believes were sent to noncitizen voters ahead of the midterm elections.

The letters, which were sent on Friday, ask for sensitive information, including Social Security numbers, on roughly 20,000 voters. It is illegal for noncitizens to register to vote or cast a ballot. The administration has insisted that immigrants voting is a major problem nationwide, when in fact it is quite rare, as even its own investigations have shown.

“All of this is simply meant to raise huge doubts about the integrity of this election,” said John Tuteur, the registrar of voters for Napa County in California’s wine country.

Tuteur and other election officials who spoke to The Associated Press on Saturday said they have already started to count ballots that have trickled in from the state’s 23 million registered voters.

“We’re not changing anything we’re doing. We’re proceeding with the election,” he said.

The federal government set a 48-hour deadline to provide information, and it warned that legal action could be taken against any official who knowingly counted a noncitizen’s vote.

However, the California Attorney General’s Office said the letters contained errors. For example, Mendocino County officials received a list of people who were not residents there, according to the state’s court filing.

The letters are the latest escalation in a legal battle between Democratic-dominated California and Trump’s Department of Justice ahead of the midterms. The federal government sued on Oct. 15, roughly three weeks before elections, asking a judge to bar the state from counting mail-in ballots from people the federal government has identified as likely noncitizens. A panel of 9th Circuit appeals court judges will hear arguments on Sunday about whether California can be compelled to comply with the federal government’s demands.

Some clerks say they will proceed with counting ballots

Tuteur said that two uniformed Department of Homeland Security officers delivered a letter to his office late on Friday afternoon. The letter included the names of 42 people whom the federal government accused of being noncitizens illegally registered to vote. There are roughly 86,000 people registered to vote across the county of over 130,000 people, Tuteur said. Approximately 11,000 people had already cast a mail-in ballot as of Friday. In larger counties like Los Angeles, that number has already reached over 331,000 counted mail-in votes.

He said his employees and his relatives were worried about what could come next.

“My family’s upset, worried about what’s going to happen to me,” he said.

The letter sent to Clerk-Recorder Kim Grady’s office in rural Amador County listed four people allegedly illegally registered to vote in the county. Grady was waiting on more guidance from the state about what she should do, and she wasn’t sure if she would get any clarity before the deadline.

DOJ threatens to prosecute

Department of Justice spokeswoman Kiersten Pels emphasized in a statement on Saturday that the department is explicitly “not requesting a purge, cancellation of registrations, or any programmatic action.”

Instead, Pels wrote, federal officials are asking for collaboration to “ensure the most secure election in California history.”

The letters on Friday came on the heels of a statewide sweep by federal authorities on Monday, where 28 people from the list of 20,000 were charged with illegally registering to vote. Some were also charged with illegally voting and lying on naturalization paperwork. Those charges could lead to years in prison.

Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said that the clerks who didn’t comply with the government’s demands could face prosecution as well.

“The letters speak for themselves. Any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy,” Essayli said in a statement.

Noncitizen voting is very rare. For example, earlier this month Attorney General Todd Blanche announced federal charges against 10 people in Minnesota alleged to have voted illegally over the last three elections, a period in which more than 8 million ballots were cast in the state.

But Essayli said on Monday that even a small number of illegal voters could “dilute” the vote and undermine confidence in elections.

Concerns about the accuracy of federal data

Some election officials who spoke to The Associated Press on Saturday have questioned the accuracy of the federal government’s list of 20,000 voters.

“I expect this accusation to fall apart like we saw recently in Nevada,” Kristin B. Connelly, the Contra Costa County Clerk-Recorder and registrar of voters, said, referring to remarks Trump made in July, when he claimed the neighboring state had 1,500 noncitizen voters on its rolls. After his administration was asked to identify them, the number of actual registered noncitizens turned out to be zero.

Officials in Los Angeles County, who are named as defendants in the federal lawsuit, have echoed Connelly’s concerns about the federal government’s data. A preliminary analysis of 200 names from the statewide list of 20,000 found that over 40% had canceled registrations, according to a court filing from county officials on Wednesday. More than 70% of that sample had no voting history whatsoever, and nearly 4 in 10 were born in the United States.

Master escape artist and world-famous entertainer Harry Houdini had been dead for decades by the time teenager Kevin Connolly sat down with his dad in their New Jersey home in the late 1960s to watch Houdini, the biopic with actor Tony Curtis in the title role.

“I'm so engrossed in the movie that I'm crying that he passed away. And my dad looks down at me and says, 'What's the matter, son?' I said, 'Houdini died,'" Connolly said.

His father then comforted him.

That experience with the movie and with his father sparked a five-decade-plus collector’s obsession in the teen that led him to amass thousands of items from Harry Houdini’s life and career.

The collection includes handcuffs owned by Houdini, a signed life-size portrait of Houdini in chains, a linen bag his wife, Bess Houdini, made him and a pocket watch she gifted him on his birthday in 1910, at the height of his career.

Signed Cabinet Card Photograph of Houdini in Chains.

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Connolly Collection courtesy Potter & Potter Auctions.

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“Engraved inside the cover is a very personal note from her to him that also contains a little hidden code in the inscription,” said Gabe Fajuri, president and principal auctioneer at Potter & Potter Auctions. The watch has the highest valuation of the items, with an estimate between $20,000 and $40,000.

The auction house has been displaying these 100 items at its Chicago offices and will transport them to the Magic Castle in Hollywood for display on Oct. 30 and the final auction the day after.

“ These are things that potentially have his DNA on them. These are things that Houdini himself owned, handled, used, treasured,” Fajuri said.

The auction marks two milestones: 100 years since Houdini's death and the winding down of 71-year-old Connolly's collecting efforts, which enriched his and his family’s life.

“It broadened our world, and it was nice to be recognized for your collecting abilities,” he said.

Connolly’s collection has turned him into a Houdini authority, attracting the attention of Houdini biographers, film documentarians, as well as museums and galleries.

Houdini was born in Hungary in 1874. He came to the U.S. as a young child and moved to New York with his father, a rabbi, at 13. He began performing as a magician four years later and shot to stardom on the vaudeville circuit with bold escape acts. There wasn’t a straitjacket, chains or ropes that he couldn’t escape.

Connolly admires how Houdini inspired a generation of immigrants with these stunning feats.

A photo of an escape stunt by Harry Houdini. It's the first Houdini item Kevin Connolly bought as a teen during his 50-plus years of collecting Houdini memorabilia.

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Courtesy Kevin Connolly

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One of those acts is captured in the very first Houdini item Connolly bought after watching that Houdini movie. It’s a photo of Houdini hanging upside down from a rope in front of a building, two stories up. His arms are bound to his body. Crowds look up from the street, staring at Houdini as he attempts to escape. “TORONTO OCT. 18/’16” is written along the bottom edge of the photo.

“That one is not in the auction,” he said. Oct. 18 is Connolly’s father’s birthday, which makes it special. Plus, “That would be probably the last one I'd let go, because that's the one that started it all.”

With Halloween approaching, a women’s walking group is helping Angelenos explore the city’s spooky and historic landmarks. Their next outing is Angelino Heights — home to century-old Victorian homes and an iconic piece of pop culture history.

Los Angelistas organizes weekly walks throughout Los Angeles. October draws some of its biggest crowds, according to the group. Earlier this month, the group visited the Spadena House in Beverly Hills for a witch-themed walk and explored Los Feliz for a murder-themed tour.

Members of Los Angelistas stand in front of the "Spadena House" in Beverly Hills in 2025.

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(Jillian Goodman/Los Angelistas)

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Exploring LA’s spooky side

On Nov. 1, the group heads to Angelino Heights, a tiny neighborhood next to Echo Park known for its Victorian homes.

“It has so much history, but also really beautiful, stunning Victorian architecture,” said Jillian Goodman, one of the group’s three co-founders. “It’s such a cool place that I don’t think many people know about.”

Some of the homes have been backdrops for films and TV shows, including Michael Jackson’s 1983 “Thriller” video — which will be a stop on the tour.

Los Angelistas visit the "Charmed" house while on a walk through Angelino Heights in 2024.

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(Jillian Goodman/Los Angelistas)

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Building friendship beyond the walks

Los Angelistas began in April 2023, when Goodman and a few women who met through another social club decided to continue spending time together through walks.

The group has since grown to more than 7,000 members, Goodman said. Its organizers live across L.A., allowing them to host events in neighborhoods like Brentwood, Mid-City and Glendale.

Goodman said the walks encourage women to discover parts of L.A. they might pass by without stopping.

“Everyone thinks of L.A. as a driving city. No one ever really stops and takes a breath,” Goodman said.

For Goodman, watching members build friendships that extend beyond the walks has been one of the most rewarding parts of the group’s growth.

“They go to each other’s weddings. They go to concerts. Seeing people connect, not just in the group, but then having that extend outside has been amazing to watch,” she said.

The group has also helped members support one another during devastating times. Amid last year’s Eaton and Palisades wildfires, some members helped others find places to stay, despite having only met on walks.

“I thought that was so beautiful and wonderful that without us they wouldn’t have known each other,” Goodman said.