The Brief

California lawmakers on Thursday passed a 2024-25 budget that rejected Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposal to cut in-home supportive services for low-income older, blind, and disabled immigrants lacking legal residency. However, the Democratic governor has not said whether he’ll use his line-item veto authority to help close the state’s $45 billion deficit.

The legislature, controlled by Democrats, passed a $211 billion general fund spending plan for the fiscal year starting July 1 by drawing more from the state’s rainy-day fund and reducing corporate tax deductions to prevent cuts to health and social services.

“Our legislative budget plan achieves those goals with targeted, carefully calibrated investments in safety-net programs that protect our most vulnerable,” said Assembly member Jesse Gabriel, chair of the Assembly’s budget committee, following voting in Sacramento.

Newsom and lawmakers are expected to continue talks.

“What was approved today represents a two-house agreement between the Senate and the Assembly – not an agreement with the governor,” said state Department of Finance spokesperson H.D. Palmer. “We’ve made good progress, but there’s still more work to do.”

Newsom had proposed eliminating the new in-home benefit for qualified immigrants to save nearly $95 million in the next fiscal year, with no plans to bring it back. Lawmakers not only rejected Newsom’s cut to the in-home services program; they also refused the governor’s proposal to slash $300 million a year from public health agencies. However, they accepted delaying food assistance to low-income older immigrants without legal residency.

The In-Home Supportive Services program helps low-income older, blind, and disabled individuals receive care in their homes, which helps keep them out of more costly nursing and residential facilities. The program works by paying $16 to $21 an hour to caregivers, many of them family members.

Advocates applauded lawmakers for rejecting the cut. They had urged the governor to adopt the legislature’s budget, arguing the state could end up paying more in the long run as Medi-Cal recipients tap nursing services. The state has estimated the annual per-person cost of nursing homes is $124,189, compared with the roughly $28,000 average cost for people without legal residency in the in-home services program.

“These individuals would need to essentially go into costly hospital or nursing care,” said Ronald Coleman Baeza, managing policy director at the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network. “It’s not only cruel for undocumented immigrants, but it doesn’t make sense as a fiscal decision either.”

The governor has said he’s trying to maintain fiscal discipline while preserving Medi-Cal benefits for immigrants. California was the first state to expand Medicaid eligibility to all qualified immigrants regardless of legal status, phasing it in over several years: children in 2016, adults ages 19-26 in 2020, people 50 and older in 2022, and all remaining adults this year.

“It’s a core of I think who we are as a state, and we should be as a nation,” Newsom said in May.

As part of the Medi-Cal expansion, the state authorized nearly 3,000 older, blind, and disabled immigrants without legal residency to access paramedical services and daily care, including meal preparation, bathing, feeding, and transportation to medical appointments. Advocates estimate 17,000 immigrants qualify.

“Fixing California’s deficit means making tough choices, so the Assembly came to these negotiations focused on preserving programs that matter most to Californians,” said Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, a Central Coast Democrat, in an earlier statement.

Lawmakers did agree to Newsom’s proposal to delay around $165 a month in food assistance to low-income immigrants without legal residency ages 55 and older. Lawmakers had approved the benefit two years ago, but the governor proposed delaying it by two fiscal years to 2027.

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The Los Angeles Unified School District, among other districts, has called on the state to help mitigate financial challenges for projects. And despite some help, they’re still anticipating deficits beginning in the 2027-28 academic year.

For its June general, unrestricted budget, LAUSD is projecting a deficit of $1.351 billion for the 2027-28 academic year, according to a presentation Tuesday at the board’s Committee of the Whole meeting. That’s taking the updated cost-of-living adjustment from the governor’s May revision into account. But with possible additional May revision revenue, that deficit could drop to $514 million.

For the 2028-29 academic year, LAUSD is projecting a deficit of $3.581 billion compared with $2.534 billion after accounting for additional revenue from the May revision.

“I want to kind of take us back to a couple of weeks ago when some of us were in Sacramento marshaling some advocacy to various elected officials, the governor’s office themselves,” said acting LAUSD Superintendent Andrés Chait on Tuesday. “I want to mark that I do think that some of the movement that we saw in the May revise can be attributed to the advocacy that folks that are sitting here and that we partnered with vis-a-vis labor really did move the needle, as it were.”

The district’s budget also takes into account agreements reached last month with three unions that will cost $1.2 billion annually.

“We’re not in a place necessarily where we’d like to be. I continue to be concerned about the almost $4 billion that is being withheld in terms of Prop 98,” Chait said. “Those are dollars that are for today’s kids, and therefore should be allocated today, so that they can go out and serve our schools as needed. So, there is still a significant amount of advocacy to come.”

To Spencer Pratt and his supporters, becoming mayor of Los Angeles first means winning the internet.

Pratt has amplified outlandish artificial intelligence videos, including one depicting lightsaber duels between him and the city's current mayor, Karen Bass, and another where he's portrayed as Batman descending on a burning Los Angeles to save the day; his campaign has tapped an army of freelance "clippers" to edit short social media snippets of him bashing the city's leaders; and he talks about nonexistent "super meth" plaguing the city's streets and pushed false narratives about California lawmakers' response to the Palisades Fire.

A screenshot of a artificial intelligence video created by a supporter of Spencer Pratt.

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Charlie Curran via Twitter

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It's perhaps no surprise that the 42-year-old former villain of the reality television show "The Hills" knows how to work the attention economy, but he's doing so by borrowing the combative and mocking style of politics popular in fringe online forums and celebrated by allies of President Trump.

"He's probably the most Trumpian candidate we've ever seen in terms of house style," said Steve Bannon, Trump's former top adviser. "Trump's superpower was bringing in people into politics who hate politics, and that's what he's doing online right now."

Pratt's internet antics are up against long odds.

On June 2, Angelenos will go to the polls for the city's "jungle primary," a nonpartisan contest where Pratt, a Republican, will face off against Democratic incumbent Bass and progressive council member Nithya Raman.

If any candidate surpasses 50% of the vote, that person becomes mayor. If nobody does, the top two vote getters compete in a November runoff. Polls show Pratt and Raman neck and neck, with Bass commanding a comfortable lead.

Yet Pratt is harnessing the web to shake things up.

He has leapt into the usually more mundane world of municipal politics with brash and extreme rhetoric, taking to TikTok, with direct-to-camera videos condemning Bass' response to the devastating Pacific Palisades wildfires that claimed his family's home. He describes Bass as "the mayor who let the town burn down."

Pratt has also blamed city leaders with enabling the deterioration of city residents' quality of life, or, as he puts it on TikTok, "a city battered by fires, homelessness and crime," a framing that would sound familiar to anyone watching right-wing influencers and streamers.

Pratt says, without evidence, that "socialists in LA city government are stealing your money." He denigrates the city's homeless as fentanyl-addled "zombies." And he has promised to clear out encampments by mass-arresting people living on the streets.

He's accused Bass and Raman of "running a grift with the Homeless Industrial Complex," a vague and unsubstantiated claim aimed at whipping up his fans online, according to Dan Cassino, a professor of government at Fairleigh Dickinson University who studies masculinity and politics.

"These are the sorts of things that play very well in red-pilled forums where there's this idea that everyone is in control of their lives and 'we need to embrace hard truths out there that they won't teach you in school,'" he said.

Pratt's endorsement from podcaster Joe Rogan, Cassino said, is proof of Pratt's credibility in the manosphere, the bro-friendly world of male influencers who wage war against polite society.

"Focusing on this audience is a way to target young men," Cassino said. "Just as Trump did in 2024, and now we see Spencer Pratt doing the same thing."

Former LA councilmember: 'Winning the internet' doesn't equal an election win

Former Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Bonin has been watching Pratt's campaign morph from unserious long-shot to top three contender.

Pratt had a megaphone of millions of social media followers before he ran for public office. That has helped supercharge the spread of the AI slop videos his fans have made. So has Elon Musk's repeated re-sharing and replies to Pratt's content on X, the platform the tech mogul owns, to his 240 million followers.

When Pratt wants his incendiary campaign messages and AI content to spread even farther, conservative influencers like Laura Loomer, Ben Shapiro and Benny Johnson are at the ready, commenting and reposting to juice Pratt's reach.

"Winning the internet is not the same thing as winning the election, but it can help," said Bonin, who now directs the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State Los Angeles.

Spencer Pratt often turns to TikTok to promote his candidacy for mayor of Los Angeles.

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TikTok

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He points to how the kinetic digital campaign of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani inundated Instagram Reels and TikTok with videos showing how natural and conversant he was with the format.

More close to home, Los Angeles Controller Kenneth Mejia won his 2022 election using his two corgis on billboards and in social media videos as a way of appealing to those terminally online.

The difference with Pratt, Bonin said, is that he's using the leverage of the well-oiled right-wing online media machine.

"Unlike left-leaning candidates, right-leaning candidates come into an internet ecosystem that is well-practiced in promoting itself through its various networks," he said.

Also giving a signal boost, Bonin said, was the launch of California Post, a West Coast edition of conservative New York Post owned by Rupert Murdoch, around the same time Pratt launched his campaign. The outlet has "been reinforcing the supposed dystopian crisis Los Angeles has been living through, and that is a big part of Pratt's narrative," Bonin said.

Pratt and his campaign did not return requests for an interview. Bass did not offer any comment.

Raman, through a spokesman, dismissed Pratt's online tactics, saying the AI slop videos show how out of touch he is with something that's an existential concern to the city's entertainment industry.

"Hollywood jobs are being devastated by AI, meanwhile Spencer Pratt is using his platform to promote AI-generated content amplifying the very technology replacing the workers he claims to care about," Raman said in a statement. "Our videos are made by working film and television professionals who believe Los Angeles can be better."

The MAGA tightrope walk

There are two ways to respond to this: Try to meet Pratt on his level, or don't participate at all.

Cassino, the government professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, said Raman and Bass are taking "the Rose Garden strategy" by not trying to match the intensity and absurdity of Pratt's online campaign, which he said is probably politically wise.

"He's more chronically online than they are. He has fans who generate this stuff for him in a way that they don't, so any attempt for them to do this will make them look inauthentic," he said.

It is difficult to gauge how much of Pratt's content and rage-baiting is coming across the social media feeds of Los Angeles voters, but, at least on X, he's been praised as the candidate who is the most "anti-woke" and "based," internet slang for being unapologetically one's self and unafraid of offending others.

His favorite pejorative for Bass is "Karen Basura," which is Spanish for trash. And he calls the mayor's supporters "Bassholes" — cruel, bully-like language that Cassino said is catering to young men online.

"If people are voting for Spencer Pratt because they think it's funny versus because they seriously want him to be mayor, the vote still counts," Cassino said.

However it is resonating or not with voters, Pratt is not slowing his inflammatory language and pugnacious tone.

It's a posture being lapped up by the online MAGA sphere. It also represents the new template for right-wing political candidates, both national and local, Bannon added.

"Pratt knows it's not politics, it's drama," said Bannon, who was a Hollywood financier before he got into politics. "He's got a warrior mentality."

If Bannon found any criticism of Pratt's campaign, it would be Pratt's shameless promotion of AI slop.

A fierce critic of Silicon Valley, Bannon said the videos are entertaining, but they risk turning off voters who can see them as trivializing the race, not to mention how the internet is already glutted with AI junk and fakes.

"On the AI slop, he's one inch away from jumping the shark," Bannon said. "It can be effective, but it's starting to get tiresome, and it could backfire if you promote it too much."

Internet notoriety, though, cannot dislodge one fact about Los Angeles: Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans three to one, presenting Pratt with a serious challenge if he advances to the November runoff.

Trump on Wednesday signaled support for Pratt. The mayoral hopeful did not immediately blast this out to his social media followers.

And that's because, while Pratt is a registered Republican, he has tried to separate himself from the MAGA movement and has repeatedly highlighted how the mayor's race in Los Angeles is nonpartisan.

It's a tightrope walk that Bannon, one of the chief architects of the MAGA movement, is keenly attuned to as he offers conditional praise for Pratt.

"Tell him I would endorse him," Bannon said. "But I don't want to hurt his chances of winning in LA."
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