The Brief

California under Gov. Gavin Newsom has made sweeping changes to its behavioral health system, pouring billions of dollars into new services and support programs.

But the state’s ambitious plans face a looming threat: the proposed federal spending cuts that Congress is currently considering are seen as all but certain to impact Medicaid and could bring to a halt some of the headway the state has made in responding to its behavioral health crisis.

It’s not that all of California’s behavioral health policies are explicitly tied to Medicaid, but many state and local mental health programs draw funding from it. Less Medicaid money means less money for those efforts.

“When you remove resources of this size and scope everything is at risk,” said Alex Briscoe, principal with the nonprofit Public Works Alliance and who previously led the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency. “To be fair, the behavioral health reform landscape of California was just written, and we are still very much moving from promise to practice.

“So it's an extremely difficult time to see such fundamental threats to funding Medicaid,” Briscoe said.

It is unclear what these federal spending cuts will look like, but a budget resolution that passed the House last month proposed $880 billion in reductions over the next 10 years from the committee that oversees Medicaid. Both chambers still need to agree on a joint budget resolution.

Medicaid, the joint state and federal health insurance program for low-income people, pays for the care of four in 10 Californians. It’s through this program, also known as Medi-Cal in the Golden State, that millions can access behavioral health services such as therapy, medication, psychiatric evaluations and crisis support. About two-thirds of California’s $161 billion Medicaid spending comes from the federal government.

It’s also the Medicaid program that helps California pay for some of its social support services for its most vulnerable residents. They include housing navigation and food assistance, which help stabilize people and improve their chances of completing their course of mental health or substance use treatment.

The federal threats to Medicaid funding come at a time when close to half of adults in the state have reported symptoms of anxiety or depression, and about 1.2 million of them live with a serious mental health illness, according to figures by the National Alliance of Mental Illness. When it comes to children, 1 in 6 experience a mental health disorder every year.

Meanwhile, opioid-related deaths skyrocketed between 2018 and 2023, largely because of fentanyl use, state data shows. Opioid overdose deaths peaked at more than 8,000 in 2023 and have been declining since last year.

In response to the grim landscape, Newsom set out to revamp the state’s behavioral health system. This has included growing the number of treatment beds, training new mental health workers, expanding the reach of crisis hotlines and mobile crisis services, increasing the availability of opioid overdose reversal medication, and increasing mental health access in schools, among other changes.

Tents outside the Federal Courthouse in Los Angeles on April 22, 2024.

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Ted Soqui

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CalMatters

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The state pulls from multiple buckets, such as special taxes, to fund its public behavioral health system, but federal funding through Medicaid is an essential piece of it. Across the country, Medicaid is the largest payer for mental health services.

CalMatters asked the governor’s office what Medicaid cuts could mean for the state’s behavioral health system. It released a written statement from Health Secretary Kim Johnson in which she reiterated that the administration had an “unwavering” commitment to ensure that all Californians have access to mental health and substance use disorder treatment.

“Behavioral health care is essential health care for the well-being of individuals, families, and communities across California,” she said. “Investing in behavioral health services saves lives, reduces long-term costs, and strengthens our workforce and economy.”

But mental health advocates, health plans, and county officials put it this way: Medicaid funding cuts would result in more sick people going without treatment. That would increase the likelihood of them losing employment or dropping out of school and ending up in need of more acute care, or worse, on the street.

“There are tons of people on the streets who are struggling,” said Corey Hashida, a senior research associate at the Steinberg Institute, a mental health advocacy organization. “At a time when we're trying to move forward with doing these big things to help those folks, all this uncertainty and chaos is swirling around federal cooperation … it just infuses a little fear into the safety net.”

In a recent policy brief, Hashida explained that in addition to possible funding cuts to Medicaid, key federal behavioral health grants are also at risk. And California has already started to see some of this fallout. On March 24, the California Department of Health Care Services, which oversees the state’s Medicaid program, received termination letters from the federal Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration, pulling back $120 million in behavioral health grants.

Those grants, according to the department, were intended for initiatives at the state and local level, including work to reduce overdose deaths and expand access to medications for opioid use disorder.

California could lose billions in Medicaid funding

The feds could roll back Medicaid spending in a number of ways, such as imposing work requirements or restructuring funding formulas. They could also restrict how Medicaid funds are used by ending federal waivers that expanded how California and other states use money from the program.

Policy and budget experts say that it is difficult for states to make contingency plans when it is unclear how or if the cuts will play out.

President Donald Trump has said that he will not touch Medicare and Medicaid as he looks for spending reductions to fund extending his 2017 tax cuts. He has said he will only go after eliminating fraud in the programs. However, the Congressional Budget Office has found that if cuts to Medicare, the insurance program for seniors, are off the table, then Congress would have to make deep cuts to Medicaid to reach House Republicans’ savings goal.

By some estimates, Republican proposals to reduce spending in Medicaid could translate into an annual loss of $10 billion to $20 billion in federal funds for California.

For example, Congress may choose to reduce the matching dollars that the federal government pays states for adults who gained coverage under the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. The federal government pays California 90% of the cost for this expansion population — that’s more than the 50% matching rate the feds pay the state for other enrollees.

This expansion allowed many childless adults to access critical mental health treatment, including many struggling with psychosis, said Michelle Doty Cabrera, executive director of the County Behavioral Health Directors Association. Psychosis is a condition that can result in hallucinations. It typically emerges in late adolescence or early adulthood, but can be treated with medication and therapy.

That expansion “was a game changer,” Doty Cabrera said. “Taking away funding for that population would be devastating.”

Counties are responsible for providing specialty mental health services to people with more serious mental health conditions and substance use disorders. Counties fund these services with their own local revenue, some state dollars and matching federal Medicaid funds.

“There's really nowhere else to go in terms of funding,” Doty Cabrera said. “We're already maximizing local spending to try to support these services, and if the federal funding were taken away, it would just put additional pressure on the state budget that obviously is already facing a tremendous number of pressures.”

Federal Medicaid dollars are a significant portion of counties’ mental health budgets. In Los Angeles County, for example, 30% of the county’s annual budget for its behavioral health services department comes from Medicaid, according to the department. In Santa Clara County, about a quarter of it does.

“So when you're talking about a quarter of the funding for a system, you're talking about the ability of the entire system to function,” said James Williams, county executive for Santa Clara County.

Will Trump extend California health waivers?

California relies on special permission, or “waivers” from the federal government to be able to use Medicaid dollars to fund non-traditional services, such as access to a care coordinator, housing navigation, rental deposit aid, and medically tailored meals. Experts say these types of support services go hand-in-hand with successful behavioral health care, and in the long run should save the state and feds’ money by helping people avoid costly emergency room care.

“Waivers are about granting some flexibility so that you can deliver more holistic services,” Williams in Santa Clara County said. “And one of the biggest challenges in behavioral health care, and this is especially true for substance use care, is having people make it through a course of treatment.” To increase people’s chances, you need things such as stable housing.

Some of these support services are just now starting to reach people. But their continuation is also in the feds’ hands. The federal government has the power to rescind the waivers or let them expire.

Two waiver programs are seen as key to California’s behavioral health transformation because they extend Medicaid funding and flexibilities for these support services. These are BH-Connect, which was just approved by the Biden-Harris administration in December, and CalAIM, for which federal approval is set to expire at the end of 2026.

The Trump administration has not indicated whether it will renew the CalAIM permissions, but given the discussion of Medicaid funding cuts, it is creating some anxiety over the future of the program.

Michael Schrader, chief executive of the Central California Alliance for Health, the local Medicaid plan for people in Merced, Santa Cruz and neighboring counties, said he has been hearing concerns about this from providers in his network.

“Providers are wondering, ‘Do we keep making investments in CalAIM?’” Schrader said.

“I’ve got clinics saying, ‘I did what you asked me to do. I stepped up and I hired community health workers, I hired enhanced care managers, I put together structured programs, we're serving these people, and I continue to make these investments thinking this is long term, and now I don't know.’”

Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.

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

In October 2023, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass appointed herself to the board of the regional Homeless Services Authority, also known as LAHSA.

No other mayor had done that. It was a bold move designed to signal she wasn’t going to stand by and allow others to make important decisions on the homelessness crisis without her.

Two years later, Bass touted a 17.5% drop in the number of people living on the streets in the city.

But that downward trend did not continue. The latest LAHSA homeless count numbers showed overall homelessness — referring to people without a fixed nighttime residence — crept back up 3.4% last year. Street homelessness — referring to people living in tents, cars and outdoors — jumped 7.9%.

More than 45,000 unhoused people live in the city of L.A., about 36% of whom live in shelters, according to LAHSA.

Homelessness remains a key issue for L.A. voters, and the latest homeless count numbers were a blow to the incumbent mayor who put homelessness at the top of her agenda.

They could threaten her reelection bid in November.

“It really undercuts her core reelection pitch,” said Sara Sadhwani, associate professor of politics at Pomona College. “This increase is a major step back for Bass.”

The mayor blamed cuts in funding for the increase.

Mayor Karen Bass at a LAHSA meeting on Feb. 28, 2025.

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Nick Gerda

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LAist

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“Last year our efforts ultimately couldn’t keep up with policies and funding cuts at the federal and state levels that pushed more people onto the streets,” Bass said in a statement last month following the release of the count results.

Bass’ challenger in the mayoral election, L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, has pointed out that the funding cuts occurred after the homeless count, which took place in January.

The numbers from the count looked good for Raman, whose council district saw a drop in street homelessness.

But Bass has said that decrease is due, at least in part, to her signature Inside Safe program, which targets encampments for removal while offering people living there temporary shelter and services.

Effects of Inside Safe

Raman, who was elected to the council in 2020, said there’s been a lack of oversight of Inside Safe. She said people brought in off city streets have lingered too long in temporary shelters, like motels, without moving on to permanent housing and haven’t been given the social services they needed to get back on their feet.

“The city has spent millions of dollars moving encampments from one block to the next without actually bringing people indoors, and a LAHSA analysis found that 81% of those sites were repopulated,” Raman said at a news conference last month.

Nithya Raman, an L.A. City Councilmember at a mayoral campaign event in May 2026.

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Aaron Schrank

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LAist

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Raman, who chairs the City Council’s housing and homelessness committee, hyped a 49% drop in unsheltered homelessness in her council district during the homeless count period from January 2025 to January 2026. Her district stretches from Silver Lake over the Hollywood Hills to Sherman Oaks.

However, hers had a smaller number of unhoused people to begin with compared with other districts.

“We have one of the most aggressive interventionist approaches across the entire city,” she said. “My office pioneered having a homelessness team embedded in the council office when I first started.”

She said her staff knows many of the people experiencing homelessness in the district by name. And she said staffers are tracking homeless encampments on maps.

Raman contends the mayor’s Inside Safe program has fallen short. But Bass stresses that Raman’s district has benefitted from the program.

“It is hard to believe both statements could be true,” said Bass campaign strategist Julie Chavez Rodriguez. “Inside Safe is ineffective and yet it drove down homelessness in council district four — Councilwoman Raman’s district.”

Credit vs. criticism on homelessness

A UC Berkeley/L.A. Times poll found 66% of voters see moving homeless residents indoors as “very important.”

“It's one of the big issues, if not the top issue,” Grose said. “I think it's part of a broader quality-of-life discussion.”

Zev Yaroslavsky, who directs the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, said Bass should get credit for taking on the issue.

“She is the first mayor in my lifetime who actually said from day one that this is an issue she’s going to take on. She put it on her shoulders,” said Yaroslavsky, a former county supervisor and City Council member for four decades.

But Yaroslavsky said Bass overpromised on the number of people who could get housed. During her 2022 campaign for mayor, Bass said she would move 17,000 people into shelters during her first year in office.

According to the Mayor’s Office, Inside Safe has moved more than 6,000 people into motels and other types of interim housing so far.

That’s progress Bass probably isn't getting credit for, said Yaroslavsky.

“When you’re not popular, you have a harder time getting people to believe that you’re making progress,” he said.

In June, the federal government suspended LAHSA from future federal funding opportunities, threatening more than $240 million in annual grants. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development cited a pattern of financial mismanagement, unverified housing sites and conflict-of-interest violations at LAHSA as reasons for the suspension.

Los Angeles County in February slashed nearly $200 million from homelessness programs, driven by lower-than-expected sales tax revenues and expiring pandemic-era relief funds.

USC political science Professor Christian Grose said it's not surprising that the mayor pointed to those federal and state funding cuts for the overall increase in homelessness.

“It's normal for a mayor who is facing a tough reelection fight to blame other levels of government,” he said. “It's also a smart political move to blame the Trump administration for a reduction in funding.”

Raman said the mayor should take more responsibility.

“The mayor’s job is not to explain why someone else is responsible," she said. "The mayor’s job is to take charge of the system and deliver results.”

Raman said, if elected, she would reduce street homelessness by 50% before the 2028 Olympics and eliminate it entirely by the end of her first four years in office.

Yaroslavsky said that’s unrealistic, given the enormity and complexity of the challenge.

Rodriguez told LAist the mayor remains committed to reducing homelessness.

“She remains focused on addressing this critical issue,” Rodriguez said. “Before she came into office, homelessness was on the rise and she’s going to continue to focus on bringing it down.”

A piece of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is expected to slam into the moon on Wednesday, according to scientists.

The piece is expected to hit the moon around 2:35 a.m. ET at more than 5,000 mph according to analysis by Bill Gray, who develops software that tracks objects in space. It is part of the rocket's upper portion and about the size of a five-story building.

It was part of the Falcon 9 rocket that carried two lunar landers and scientific instruments to the moon in January 2025.

The piece is expected to hit a sunlit side of the moon facing Earth, which will be partially illuminated, in the northwestern portion near the Einstein Crater, according to Gray. The impact could leave a crater at least 17 meters in diameter, he said.

SpaceX did not intend for the defunct piece to hit the moon, according to the Associated Press. NPR reached out to SpaceX for comment but has not received a response.

Brent Garry, a project scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, said the orbiter will pass over the region before and after the impact to get a sense of any changes to the surface.

"After the impact we might have a little bit more knowledge of where it is. We can do some additional targeting about a week after the impact and get some targeting over where the site is," Garry said in June during a discussion about the upcoming impact held by NASA's Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute.

The impact may not be visible. Even a plume of dust may be difficult for professional telescopes to pick up, according to some researchers.

"Rocks ejected by the impact may form a 'plume' that will be visible against the dark background once they're off the moon," Gray wrote on his website. "As with much in science, the answer is 'we don't know; let's find out'... . Maybe we'll see rocks ejected from the crater."

But some researchers also say that while viewing may be challenging, it could be visible with sensitive telescopes. It also presents an opportunity for scientists to get a glimpse of impacts to the moon.

"Given these are so rare, I would encourage people who are interested and aware of the risks to take a look," according to Ben Fernando, postdoctoral fellow and researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who was part of the discussion.

"To be clear, this is not something that you're going to see by pointing a pair of binoculars at the moon, but if you have the right equipment and the right time…why not take a look?"
Copyright 2026 NPR

The largest food assistance program in the U.S. is undergoing a massive overhaul. But even before the most drastic changes take effect, more than 4 million people are estimated to have already lost the critical food aid between last July and April — many of whom are children.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP or food stamps, has seen a rapid and consistent decline in participation since last July, the same month that a sweeping Republican tax and spending package became law. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act included major changes to the food assistance program. At the time, the White House called SNAP "bloated" and said it was failing its mission to serve as "temporary help for those who encounter tough times."

Starsky Wilson, the president of the Children's Defense Fund, a child advocacy group, says he has been alarmed by the speed of the tax law's impact.

"We're upset about how quickly this has happened," he says. "There are some supports that are still staged to go away later this year. So there could be an even greater sense of desperation among children and their families as we come to the end of this year."

The food assistance program has already begun tightening eligibility. But the biggest shift, the restructuring of SNAP's funding model, starts in October. Each state will soon have to pay millions in additional costs to keep the program going. Food policy experts warn that these new costs could drive states to scale back or withdraw from SNAP. If that happens, neither food banks nor existing government programs would have the capacity to fill the gap, according to Wilson from the Children's Defense Fund. 

" There's no replacement for SNAP if a state gets rid of it," he says.

Here's how the program works, where things stand and what's changed.

Changes in eligibility

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, more adults need to prove they work or volunteer for at least 80 hours a month to access food benefits. These work requirements now apply to veterans, homeless individuals, young adults aging out of foster care, parents with a child between 14 and 17, and people between 55 and 64.

Changes to work requirements alone are expected to reduce SNAP participation by 2.4 million people in an average month over the 2025-2034 period, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Last summer's tax law also cut food stamp eligibility for certain immigrants. While almost all recipients are either native-born or naturalized citizens, a tiny fraction are noncitizens, according to federal data. Members of that small group — refugees, people seeking asylum and victims of domestic abuse or trafficking — are now no longer eligible for federal food aid.

The current fallout

Last year, an average of 42 million people received food stamps to use toward groceries each month. That's about 1 in 8 Americans. As of April, the total is now 37 million people, according to preliminary data from the Agriculture Department.

Nationally, SNAP participation is down by 11% between last July and April, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a left-leaning think tank. So far, the biggest impact has been in Arizona, where SNAP enrollment is about half the size it was a year ago, or over 400,000 fewer participants. For the first time, there are more Arizonans visiting food banks each month than enrolled in food stamps, according to the Arizona Food Bank Network.

"We think of ourselves as the canary in the coal mine," says Natalie Jayroe, the CEO of the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona. "We are showing the rest of the country a really scary scenario."

Alongside Arizona, some of the steepest declines took place in Louisiana, Florida and Oklahoma. The CBPP also reviewed data from 19 states that provided numbers of children on SNAP and found that in those states alone, over 1 million kids have lost food benefits since last July.

What's driving the decline 

In a July statement, the Agriculture Department told NPR that participation for food benefits tends to fluctuate and the drop isn't representative of any one policy. Back in late April, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins also spoke about the decline, adding that it's possibly a good sign.

"A lot of it is people taking the program that shouldn't have been, and then a lot of it is just a better economy," she said on Fox Business.

Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at CBPP, is skeptical of this assessment. She points out that over the past year, unemployment has largely stayed flat while food prices continue to go up.

" What that's telling us is that this is not happening because fewer people need help affording groceries. It's the result of these policy changes," she says.

According to Bergh, part of the issue is that many state agencies are struggling with staffing pressures and paperwork backlogs, especially amid efforts to prevent errors on food aid applications and avoid new federal penalties.

"People are calling and calling, and they can't get through to anyone," she says. "Or they're being asked for more and more and more documentation of every aspect of their lives, and maybe they don't have a way to document everything."

That's in line with a survey conducted by the Urban Institute and the American Public Human Services Association (APHSA). Out of 39 states that responded to the survey, 15 states said they were prioritizing payment accuracy over benefit timeliness.

More drastic changes to come

One of the most consequential changes from last year's tax law is the upcoming cost burden on states.

Before, the federal government split the bill 50-50 with states to cover administrative expenses, such as paying and training staff at state agencies. But starting in October, the federal government will only pay 25% of those costs while states will have to shoulder the remaining 75% of operational expenses.

Furthermore, in October 2027, the federal government will no longer cover the full cost of food benefits. States will also need to chip in if their error rate — a measure of overpayments and underpayments — is at or above 6%. Almost half of states may each owe $100 million or more because of penalties tied to their error rate, according to the think tank CBPP.

The Agriculture Department has argued that improper payments totaled $10 billion last year. It's important to note that an error rate largely reflects unintentional mistakes by state agencies or food stamp recipients, according to CBPP's Bergh.

"It largely reflects unintentional mistakes by state eligibility workers and participating families," she says. " So someone made a typo or a state worker misapplied a policy or a family didn't understand what information they needed to report and when."

SNAP experts say it takes time to lower those rates, which is why some local officials are urging the federal government to delay the new penalties.

Through all of these changes, the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality estimates that on average, states will need to spend two to three times more on SNAP to keep the food assistance program running — which could result in higher taxes or other state budget cuts.

In the same survey conducted by the Urban Institute and the APHSA, 29% of states said they may consider further narrowing eligibility for food assistance, while 11% said they may need to withdraw or pause the program altogether if the new costs become too burdensome.

" There's really an existential crisis in the future of SNAP," says Lexie Kuznick, the director of policy and government relations for APHSA.

Changes to SNAP have ripple effects — not only on low-income Americans, but also across food banks and grocery stores, according to Kuznick. The National Grocers Association estimates that the drop in shoppers receiving food aid will reduce grocery store sales by nearly $88 billion nationwide through 2034.

"Groceries are a significant cost in the lives of low-income families, and it truly is a lifeline for them to be able to meet their family's needs," Kuznick says. "We also know how critical the benefits are for entire communities."
Copyright 2026 NPR

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

A pioneering California law meant to sharply limit use of the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol has been blocked by a federal judge who said it probably violates the First Amendment.

In a preliminary injunction issued earlier this month, U.S. District Judge William Hayes halted enforcement of SB 343 after food, packaging and retail groups sued, finding that key provisions were “unconstitutionally vague” and likely infringed protected commercial speech. Enforcement of the law, passed in 2021, was expected to start this fall.

The decision is a blow to environmental advocates, who had hoped to remove the familiar symbol from a huge array of plastic products, in line with a statewide study showing that only a fraction are widely collected and actually recycled. SB 343 said only goods and packaging accepted by recycling programs serving at least 60% of Californians and then actually sorted for recycling — not collected and thrown away — could bear the chasing arrows.

Hayes’ constitutional reasoning surprised supporters of SB 343 because similar arguments against environmental marketing regulations have historically struggled in court.

“The First Amendment protects free expression, not a corporation’s right to commit consumer fraud,” said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for the nonprofit Californians Against Waste. “We see this exact playbook every time the plastics industry is asked to stop misleading the public — they suddenly hide behind the Constitution.”

In his decision, Hayes applied a standard four-part test to determine whether SB 343 would unduly restrict companies’ speech rights. The law passed the first two tests handily, as it regulates “potentially misleading” speech and was intended to serve California’s legitimate interests in reducing consumer confusion and improving recycling rates.

The next tests are where the law ran into trouble. Hayes, siding with the industry trade groups, argued that the legislation would not advance those “legitimate interests.” Rather than encouraging companies to redesign their products and packaging to comply with California’s real-world recyclability criteria, the law would prompt them to remove the recycling symbol altogether, the judge said.

Products recycled at a rate below the 60% threshold that the law requires would no longer make it into recycling bins, which could in theory leave more of them bound for the landfill.

Hayes said a less stringent regulation could have better advanced California’s goals. For instance, the state could have passed a law requiring more descriptive qualifiers alongside the recycling symbol. He offered a hypothetical example of a label explaining that an item is “accepted by recyclers in the greater Los Angeles area but nowhere else in California.” Such a label would provide consumers with more and better information, he argued, but would not be allowed under SB 343.

Heidi Sanborn, executive director of the nonprofit National Stewardship Action Council, said the judge’s reasoning reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of the problems facing California recycling systems. People are throwing too much stuff into their blue bins, she said. In addition to not actually being recyclable, much of this refuse — including plastic bags and other plastic films — can gum up sorting machines, causing operational delays and creating safety risks.

“People are wish-cycling, they’re so desperate to recycle,” Sanborn told Grist. “We have to pull all this [contamination] out, which is very labor-intensive, and then everybody wants to know why their bills go up.”

Industry groups welcomed the injunction, saying it would prevent California from “censoring truthful information on packaging.”

Scott Hochberg, general counsel and litigation director for the nonprofit Earth Island Institute, said he’s seen free speech challenges to environmental rules many times before. Big polluters have frequently invoked the First Amendment to oppose regulations that require them to disclose information — like their greenhouse gas emissions — or tone down statements about their sustainability.

“What’s relatively new and concerning is when these arguments succeed and states are blocked from implementing common-sense initiatives to protect their residents,” he said.

A lawsuit Hochberg’s organization is pursuing against Coca-Cola illustrates the same debate. It alleges the company presents itself as a “sustainable and environmentally friendly company” despite its outsize contribution to plastic pollution. Coca-Cola argued that statements about its sustainability efforts — including plastics recycling — were protected political speech rather than commercial advertising. A federal judge rejected that argument in 2024.

The companies that sued California didn’t make that same distinction. Their suit is more like one filed in 1992 that sought to block a California law restricting the use of terms like “biodegradable,” “ozone-friendly,” and “recyclable.”

A judge upheld the law, ruling that it would not stifle free speech because corporations could still use a restricted word or phrase as long as they included qualifiers explaining how, where, or under what conditions it applied.

The injunction against SB 343 leaves California with few easy options. Hayes’ ruling suggests the state faces a difficult road if the case proceeds to trial. Lawmakers could amend the law to address some of the judge’s concerns, though that may be unlikely given the politics surrounding the issue. California could also appeal the injunction, but the lower court would still have to decide the case on its merits.

Earth Island Institute and Californians Against Waste announced on July 27 that they are joining California as defendants. Hochberg said he hoped to provide the court with more information “about how the recycling system actually works.” Losing the lawsuit will make it harder for other states to pursue similar labeling regulations, he said.

It could also jeopardize California’s nation-leading extended producer responsibility law, which shifts responsibility for collecting, recycling, and reducing plastic packaging from taxpayers and local governments to the companies that produce it. It relies on the same definition of recycling and is currently being challenged by a separate lawsuit.

Whatever happens next, Sanborn said she’s ready to work with industry to come up with other solutions — including legislation to clarify labeling rules at the national level.

“We can and should work together to solve this,” she said. “But you should not have the right to lie to people.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/accountability/is-the-recycling-symbol-free-speech-a-judge-just-ruled-it-could-be/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.