The Brief

L.A.’s homelessness agency revised the locations of over 400 sheltered people in its 2025 homeless count — moving them out of the city of L.A. — in the days before the public release of the findings this week. The moves were made without informing elected officials who had seen the earlier numbers.

On July 7, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority told local elected officials and their aides that overall homelessness had declined by 2.5% within the city of L.A. This week, the agency publicly touted a slightly larger 3.4% reduction in the city.

The changes — which revised the city’s count down by 437 people — were not disclosed to elected officials when LAHSA provided the updated numbers Monday morning ahead of their public release that afternoon.

Following questions from LAist, LAHSA said it acknowledged and explained the changes to city elected officials on Tuesday, the day after the count’s public release. Representatives of several L.A. City Council offices told LAist they are asking LAHSA for more information about the revisions.

LAHSA gathered the data used in the estimate in February, as part of a tally mandated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD.

LAHSA officials said the last-minute revisions were made because the agency discovered that several hundred interim housing units had been incorrectly tagged as being in the city of L.A. by LAHSA’s new housing inventory system, agency spokesperson Ahmad Chapman told LAist. He pointed to HUD’s rules requiring that so-called scattered site beds be tagged as all being in the city where most of the beds in a given project are located.

The issue was fixed after LAHSA briefed council members and staffers on July 7 and before the data was released publicly this week, the agency said. But the homelessness agency did not inform the city’s elected officials until after LAist asked about the revisions.

L.A. Councilmember Monica Rodriguez told LAist that LAHSA should have been more transparent about the changes and that information was withheld by the agency. She said the revisions were made after LAHSA had delayed the briefing for elected officials multiple times.

LAHSA representatives declined to respond to that accusation.

“I don’t think that the outcomes reflect a moment of celebration because it’s unclear to me how real these numbers really are,” Rodriguez added.

"Any changes made to the numbers, the public is entitled to know because these are their taxpayer dollars that are being used for this work.”

A spokesperson for Mayor Karen Bass told LAist the mayor was first provided the updated numbers on Thursday, July 10, a few days after LAHSA's initial briefing to public officials. That’s when the mayor received an updated draft slide deck indicating the updated numbers, the spokesperson said.

The changes made by LAHSA, which happened after when city officials were briefed on the results of a yearly homelessness count, have led elected officials to raise questions about the report's accuracy.

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What changed?

These revisions did not alter the total population estimates across L.A. County, but the overall homeless population estimate for the city of L.A. was revised down to 43,699, from 44,136.

That downward revision consisted of a 475-person reduction to the city’s sheltered count and a 38-person increase in the city’s unsheltered estimate.

While past year’s shelter counts publicly list the service provider names for each shelter site, LAHSA declined LAist’s requests to identify which shelter locations they revised. The agency said the issue was with multi-site or “scattered site” programs with housing units across multiple jurisdictions.

In response to LAist’s question about which shelter spots had their locations revised, LAHSA officials said: “The most important thing is that LAHSA identified the misassignment in the draft data and corrected it before the results were finalized and announced.”

Regarding the revision increasing the city’s unsheltered estimate by 38 people, the presentation to officials and their staffs on July 7 provided a city unsheltered number that was from an earlier set of draft data that was supposed to be updated before the briefing, LAHSA officials told LAist.

LAHSA communication

When LAHSA presented its findings to officials July 7, the agency told them the information was subject to change but that any “possible changes would not be expected to change the overall narrative of the Homeless Count," Chapman said in LAHSA’s written response to LAist’s questions.

After that meeting, LAHSA said it discovered that the way it was tagging cities for multi-site or scattered housing programs did not follow HUD’s geographic coding specifications.

LAHSA said it then adjusted the official addresses accordingly and submitted the information to USC School of Social Work to recalculate the results.

(The agency did not answer how it discovered the issue. HUD’s geographic coding specifications for scattered sites did not change from 2024 to 2025, according to the federal agency’s records.)

USC’s Ben Henwood, an expert on housing and homelessness, told LAist that LAHSA informed him last week that some shelter data had been misclassified and required updating. He said that kind of change is not uncommon.

“The annual count is an intensive process conducted in a compressed period of time, so it is not unusual for us to have to rerun our estimates during this process as we work closely with LAHSA,” Henwood said.

In arriving at the final estimate for the region’s overall homeless population, USC combines estimates of the unsheltered count conducted by volunteers from February and the count of people living inside shelters and other interim housing sites on the same nights. The sheltered portion of the count does not rely on volunteers, but is reported to LAHSA by the shelter providers and is considered an exact count of people.

A spokesperson for L.A. Mayor Karen Bass did not respond to questions about the changes.

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On Monday, when the agency publicly announced slightly lower homeless population numbers in the city of L.A. than they had a week prior, LAist asked LAHSA for an explanation of any changes to the main numbers since the briefing of officials.

“There were no significant differences in the data that was shared,” LAHSA’s deputy chief external relations officer Paul Rubenstein responded, as Bass stood nearby.

“The topline numbers were the same.”

Further reporting from LAist found that LAHSA’s top bullet point of numbers had been revised from a 2.5% drop in the city count to a 3.4% drop.

Chapman later told LAist that Rubenstein had been referring to the overall countywide point-in-time results and associated percent decrease, which stayed the same.

On Tuesday, LAHSA first informed public officials of the revisions via email, with the following message:

“You might see slight differences in the Council District, Supervisorial District, and SPA sheltered counts compared to last week’s draft. The data collected did not change, but we corrected some interim housing locations. This happened because our new inventory system initially misassigned some locations for multi/scattered-site programs, which required updates due to HUD’s rules for reporting these types of sites. We identified and accounted for this issue prior to the public release on July 14 by ensuring all programs were accurately assigned, using last year’s address for consistency when appropriate. We’ll refine this mapping for next year’s Housing Inventory Count to comply with HUD’s requirements while also addressing our need for precise local mapping of locations.”

LAHSA says its annual homeless count was conducted in accordance with HUD regulations and the official data released at Monday’s news conference met HUD’s standard.

HUD did not respond to LAist’s request for comment.

Count concerns

Several City Council members and their aides told LAist that slight revisions to the count sometimes happen after their offices are briefed but that LAHSA typically informs them of these changes.

Meanwhile, Councilmember John Lee is raising concerns about the sheltered counts provided in his district. Lee said he’s worked to bring 371 shelter beds online in his San Fernando Valley district and believes they are typically occupied. However, he says data shared with his office last week indicated just 78 of those beds were being used, while the rest sat empty.

“Based on district-specific PIT count data we have received from LAHSA, we have questions regarding the sheltered count: how 'sheltered' is defined and how the data is collected and verified,” said Roger Quintanilla, Lee’s communications director. “Our office continues to seek clarity from LAHSA in order to better understand how they arrived at these figures.”

Asked by LAist about Lee’s concerns, LAHSA officials did not provide an explanation but said they would follow up with Lee.

The agency said it will be releasing more information from the 2025 homeless count this week. That is expected to include breakdowns of the raw homeless count by council district, as well as demographic information about the region’s unhoused population.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday accused President Donald Trump of placing him on a political “hit list” and directing federal investigators to go on a “fishing expedition” for a crime it could use to indict him.

The Democratic governor declared that the president was targeting him not for his “mean tweets,” but because Newsom is considering a run for president in 2028.

“In recent days, federal agents have knocked on the doors of family friends and former employees,” Newsom said in the video. “Not because they found a crime, but because they simply are trying to find one.”

Newsom stated that he was “proud” to join Trump’s so-called “enemies list” that has also included former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the former vice presidential candidate.

The governor claimed that federal agents were demanding records and “abusing the grand jury process” by “digging through years and years of random documents.” Neither the governor nor first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom have received subpoenas yet, Newsom’s office said, but he “looks forward” to receiving them.

His office said federal agents have contacted friends, former employees, business associates, donors, and organizations connected to the Newsoms but did not specify further.

The accusations first came in a fiery video statement released Monday, but provided no concrete evidence that the president had orchestrated such a probe and did not identify any of the associated groups or people he said the Justice Department was looking into.

“You can subpoena my records. You can investigate me. You can harass me. Put my name on any and every enemies list that you have,” Newsom said. “But leave my wife and family out of your personal vendetta!”

The White House referred questions about Newsom’s comments to the Department of Justice. A Department of Justice spokesperson did not immediately respond.

This is a developing story that will be updated.

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

A year ago, California officials had to report under a new state law how they used automated systems to make important decisions about people’s lives.

They said they never did — a startling answer for a number of reasons, sources told CalMatters at the time, including that there were several prominent examples to the contrary.

Now, the state has issued a more expansive answer: It is currently using six automated systems to make consequential decisions about the lives of Californians.

The systems are used to do things like:

• Predict whether incarcerated people will re-offend 
• Evaluate whether unemployment claims are fraudulent
• Remotely administer exams for California State University students 
• Detect when college students use generative AI to write assignments.

That's according to a report released Friday by the state's technology department. The report is required under a 2023 law mandating that that state agencies annually disclose their use of “high-risk automated decision systems,” which the law defines as systems “used to assist or replace human discretionary decisions that have a legal or similarly significant effect, including decisions that materially impact access to, or approval for, housing or accommodations, education, employment, credit, health care, and criminal justice.”

The law was pushed by civil rights, privacy, and civil liberties groups concerned about harms from AI-like systems. Numerous such systems have been shown to produce results biased against marginalized groups, including those used for high-stakes testing, predicting recidivism, and detecting AI-generated texts.

CalMatters flagged last year’s report as surprising, noting that the state corrections department had reported using software to predict post-release behavior and that the employment department used a fraud detection system that paused benefits for 600,000 Californians between Christmas and New Years in 2020, according to a Legislative Analyst’s Office report.

Though the report names six high-risk systems in use today, state agencies have used some for several years now. Those include COMPAS, which has been used by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to assign recidivism scores to inmates for at least a decade.

The technology department said in the report that it found more systems for its report this year because it evaluated responses from state agencies more thoroughly, including by meeting with agencies and questioning them about their systems.

In addition to the six high-risk systems, the department’s report disclosed an additional six systems initially flagged as high risk but later determined not to be. One was AI used for legislative bill analysis by the California Department of Finance.

The report also notes two high-risk systems that are not currently in use: the Department of Cannabis Control is developing artificial intelligence to analyze whether marijuana packaging violates a law against appealing to children and California State University discontinued use of a language model for reviewing job applications.

Results of the second annual survey come after cities like San Jose and San Francisco released their first AI inventories in recent months. They also come at a time when California-based AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are going public and seeking government contracts. Americans are split on whether they trust AI and surveys last year by TechEquity and Carnegie California found that the majority of Californians want safety over innovation. A Gallup poll to evaluate the opinions of Americans found similar results.

Senate Bill 1248, a bill that would have prohibited state employees from using automated decision systems as the sole basis for decisionmaking, was killed last month in the state’s rapid-fire appropriations process.

What’s missing

While the newly-released report shares more information than last year’s, several questions remain about the state’s use of artificial intelligence and other automated systems.

The report does not include generative AI pilot projects underway with support from the governor’s office to do things like help businesses file taxes, support state employees who work on homelessness, and an AI assistant named Poppy that uses language models like Anthropic’s Claude to do things like draft documents, research policy, or build custom AI tools, according to a state website. The website says that 67 state departments provided input during the pilot phase and statewide rollout of Poppy begins next month.

A California State University contract with OpenAI to provide a version of ChatGPT is also not mentioned, though surveys of AI use in educational settings have found that the technology can do more harm than good.

The 2023 law mandating the annual high-risk systems report excludes reporting by a number of state agencies, including the judicial branch and the University of California college system. Reporting by CalMatters last month found that a majority of the roughly 60 courts that operate statewide have adopted generative AI use policies. Courts in Los Angeles and Riverside counties have begun testing an AI tool to act as a clerk, drafting orders and producing research memos.

CalMatters is compiling an inventory of automated decisionmaking systems in use by state and local agencies throughout California in order to provide transparency into how governments are using decisionmaking systems and AI. Know about an AI system in use by a state or local agency? Email khari@calmatters.org.

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

An estimated 1.3 million Joshua trees burned as the 2020 Dome Fire swept through 43,000 acres of the Cima Dome in the Mojave Desert. Scientists feared the damage extended far beyond the trees, reaching into the underground networks of fungi that help sustain desert ecosystems.

Instead, fungi are thriving underground.

That finding — published in a peer-reviewed study in the journal Fire Ecology — is important because the fungi extend the reach of Joshua trees’ root systems, helping them survive harsh desert conditions. Without the fungi, the desert plants would struggle even more than they already are to recover from the fire.

“Even though things die, there are always plants and microbes that will take advantage of the fire and will really bloom after them,” said Sydney Glassman, a fungal ecologist at UC Riverside and the lead author of the study. “So it’s not all doom and gloom."

Two weeks after the Dome Fire was contained in August 2020, Glassman and a team of researchers collected samples from burned and unburned areas around the Cima Dome volcanic structure east of Baker. The area is home to one of the densest Joshua tree forests in the world. The team collected soil samples near Eastern Joshua trees to assess the fire’s effect on fungal communities. The samples were frozen, processed for DNA extraction, and later sequenced to identify which organisms were present.

Over the next three years, researchers returned to the sites five times, focusing on measuring the amount of the symbiotic fungi and bacteria that live within Joshua tree roots.

They found a fungal system that remained largely intact.

“In this case, other plants survived — like cacti, or different kinds of desert forbs, or other yuccas — so they were maintaining the soil microbial community,” Glassman said.

Sydney Glassman of UC Riverside collects samples of fungi in the Mojave National Preserve.

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These fungi help plants absorb water and nutrients from the soil, while also protecting against pathogens and environmental stressors such as drought.

Experts think that the fungal networks remained resilient partly due to the sparseness of the Mojave, where Joshua trees are spread far apart.

“There’s not really a lot of ground cover in between them, so the fire moves really fast,” Glassman said, meaning the heat did little damage to the soil.

But efforts to restore Joshua trees have seen little success so far. Seedlings face a multitude of threats, including pack rats and increasing temperatures, Glassman said.

“The seedling has to get growing and survive first,” Glassman said. “And then once it’s growing, then it definitely requires these fungi, and those can help them tolerate drought and survive.”

This image shows what's known as an arbuscule, a fungal structure, from an Eastern Joshua tree's root.

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By 2100, Joshua trees are projected to lose up to 80% of their habitat if greenhouse gas emissions continue increasing. Amid concerns about climate change, experts said that the new study provided insight into how Joshua trees may fare in a hotter world.

Brendan Cummings, conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said Joshua trees face increasing fire and drought risk as human-caused climate change accelerates.

“If we do everything necessary to save the Joshua tree, we will also be saving the broader desert ecosystem,” said Cummings, who has worked on Joshua tree conservation.

Glassman said her research will continue. She hopes to understand the traits of bacteria and fungi that survive fires, and how they're doing it.

Ohio State University evolutionary ecologist Alison Bennett said future research could investigate whether soil fungi play a role in improving the germination and growth of Joshua tree seedlings. However, Bennett noted that challenges in procuring Joshua tree seedlings and waiting for them to reach maturity over decades could make such research difficult.

“There are other aspects of restoration and looking at soil microbiology that need to be built more, and I feel like this paper lays a good foundation for a lot of that future work,” said Andrew Kaiser, an environmental scientist at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife who was not involved in the study.

California lawmakers are expected to adopt a $356 billion state budget today that would largely avoid or delay billions of dollars in social service cuts Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed last month.

Then, the (real) budget negotiations can begin.

Today’s vote is only a formality, because lawmakers are constitutionally required to pass a balanced budget by June 15 each year to continue collecting their pay. They have until the end of the month to strike a deal with Newsom before the new fiscal year starts July 1.

In the next two weeks, legislators will have to settle their differences with Newsom on health care cuts, funding for schools and homelessness and more.

Here are five takeaways from the Legislature’s spending plan:

Punt and soften healthcare cuts

Faced with federal funding cuts under the tax and spending law President Donald Trump signed last year, Newsom proposed several measures to limit healthcare coverage for undocumented immigrants as well as refugees, asylees and human trafficking survivors.

Top legislative Democrats want to delay those cuts by a year while looking for alternatives to soften the impact.

Newsom also wants to raise the monthly Medi-Cal premium undocumented immigrants pay from $30 to $50. But lawmakers prefer waiting him out, proposing to leave the decision to the next governor.

“I don’t think it’s about Gavin Newsom,” said Sen. John Laird, a Santa Cruz Democrat who chairs the budget committee. “It’s really about trying to stretch as far as we can in the hope that we don’t have to make those cuts.”

The Legislature rebuked Newsom’s proposal to reinstate stringent Medi-Cal asset tests for seniors and adults with disabilities by July, instead pitching a less restrictive limit to take effect in fiscal year 2027-28. With bipartisan support, the lawmakers also rejected Newsom’s proposed cuts to the In-Home Supportive Services program.

They did, however, agree to Newsom’s plan to spend $300 million to subsidize private healthcare for low-income Californians.

Restoring some child care, TK-12 money

Democratic lawmakers want to add 22,000 state-funded child care slots over the next few years. They also rejected Newsom’s proposed reduction of 6,800 state-supported spaces due to declining federal and state funding.

The new slots would prioritize children ages 3 and under. Advocates who applauded the proposal say it would address a gap left unfilled by Newsom’s transitional kindergarten expansion to reach 4-year-olds.

Banking on a rosier revenue forecast, state lawmakers proposed $2.7 billion more in funding for TK-12 schools and community colleges than Newsom did in May.

Schools and educators were hoping for more. They wanted the Legislature to reject Newsom’s proposal to withhold $3.9 billion in constitutionally guaranteed school money — an accounting mechanism to prevent overpaying schools in case the projected revenue doesn’t materialize.

“We demand that the Legislature and the governor follow the law, stop with the gimmicks and the shell games, and fully fund our schools,” said David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association. “Our union is prepared to do whatever it takes to hold them accountable if they don’t. Our students deserve no less.”

More generous with counties

The Legislature’s spending plan would give counties more money to step up eligibility checks for Californians applying for food stamps and health care benefits, reviews that are now required under Trump’s spending bill.

It would also allocate $125 million to help counties reestablish indigent care — a program serving low-income Californians that largely went away under Obamacare.

State lawmakers also want to set aside $900 million for the state’s homelessness fund, whereas Newsom included just $500 million in his proposal.

More revenue, please

Newsom proposed three new tax measures and lawmakers are on board with them:

• Applying a sales tax on most company software, like Slack and Microsoft Suites
• Capping tax credits big corporations claim
• Extending a tax on Medi-Cal health providers, which the state has relied on to qualify for more federal funding.  

The proposals come at a time when California voters have rejected most local tax initiatives during the June primary. But Newsom’s proposals require no voter approval — just the support of two-thirds of each legislative chamber.

There’s still an appetite among lawmakers to make corporations pay up. Senate Democrats had proposed a monthly charge on big employers for having employees enrolled in Medi-Cal, but have now backed away from the plan, instead asking the next governor to pitch “fully viable options” next year.

Save more money for rainy days

There’s a consensus between the Legislature and the governor to raise the ceiling on the revenue the state can deposit into its rainy day fund. The question is how much. State leaders are constitutionally required to make deposits into the account each year, but the balance cannot exceed 10% of the state’s general fund tax revenue under current law.

Changing that amount would require voter approval. Lawmakers are considering placing a measure on the November ballot that would allow them to sock away more money for lean years. They have a tight deadline of June 25 to settle on what they want to put before voters.

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