Topline:
SB79, which allows for denser housing around transit hubs across the state, now heads to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Why it matters: The bill, among the most controversial housing proposals in recent memory, overcame opposition from local governments, organized labor unions and many legislative Democrats.
Read on ... to find out more about the proposal — and whether Newsom is expected to sign it into law.
California lawmakers just laid the groundwork for a highly targeted building boom.
Senate Bill 79, authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat, would “upzone” neighborhoods immediately surrounding train, light rail and subway stations in many of the state’s most populous metro areas. That means apartment developers will be able to construct residential buildings — some as tall as 75 feet — regardless of what local zoning maps, elected officials or density-averse neighbors say.
In a legislative year teeming with controversial housing bills designed to kick-start more construction in California, SB 79 has been among the most controversial. Because it would override the planning decisions of local governments, the bill had to overcome opposition from a host of city governments and their defenders in the Legislature, while fracturing the Capitol’s reigning Democratic Party over questions of affordability, labor standards and who ultimately has the final say over what gets built where.
The bill now heads to Gov. Gavin Newsom who supporters expect will sign it.
Wiener’s bill is meant to address two crises at once: The state’s long-term housing shortage and the financial precarity of its public transit agencies. By allowing taller and denser development, the legislation is meant to pave the way for more apartment developments in areas closest to jobs and services. By centering that development around public transit stations, it’s meant to steer more people away from cars and toward buses and trains.
“Decades of overly restrictive policies have driven housing costs to astronomical levels, forcing millions of people away from jobs and transit and into long commutes from the suburbs,” Wiener said in a statement after Friday’s vote. “Today’s vote is a dramatic step forward to undo these decades of harm, reduce our most severe costs and slash traffic congestion and air pollution in our state.”
SB 79 also would give transit agencies the ability to develop their own land, giving them another potential revenue source — a financial model common across East Asian metros.
Making it easier to build on and around public transit stops has been a career-spanning effort for Wiener, who first introduced a version of the idea in 2018. That measure died in its first committee hearing. Wiener tried again in 2019 and 2020 but never was able to push the idea out of the Senate.
That’s all helped to bestow the proposal with a kind of mythic status in California’s legislative housing wars. Its success at last slaps a symbolic bow on a year marked by the state Legislature’s unprecedented appetite for pro-development bills. Earlier this year, lawmakers made national news in exempting most urban apartment projects from the state’s premier environmental review law.
California YIMBY, one of the sponsors of the bill and a vocal force in the Capitol for pro-construction legislation, was quick to take a victory lap after the final vote in the Senate this afternoon.
“Today, California YIMBY achieved one of its founding goals — legalizing apartments and condos near train stations,” the organization’s CEO Brian Hanlon said in a written statement. “We won many victories over the past eight years, but the dream of passing a robust, transit-oriented development program has long eluded us, until now.”
For opponents of state-imposed density measures, the vote marks an equally weighty defeat.
Susan Kirsch, founder of Catalysts for Local Control, a nonprofit that advocates for the preservation of municipal authority over housing policy, predicted the legislation would have a “devastating impact” on California’s low-rise neighborhoods, describing “extreme seven-story buildings next to single-family homes with nothing that the community can do about it.”
The secret to Wiener’s success this year after so many past failures might have been his willingness to whittle the bill down.
Over the course of the year, the proposal underwent 13 rounds of amendments — more than any other policy bill. Many of those changes were made to convince powerful interest groups to drop their opposition. That often meant reducing the bill’s scope.
The legislation would only apply to counties with at least 15 passenger rail stations. According to its sponsors, just eight counties fit the bill: Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Santa Clara, Alameda, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Mateo.
That’s a concession that likely softened opposition from rural and suburban legislators.
Rather than applying to every major bus line in the state, as the 2018 iteration did, SB 79 only targets homes within a half-mile of train stations, subway stops and “high-frequency” light-rail and commuter rail stops. Buildings within the nearest quarter-mile of Amtrak stations, Bay Area Rapid Transit stops and Los Angeles subway stations can top out at roughly seven stories. But parcels farther out or surrounding less-trafficked light-rail stations would be capped at more modest heights.
The legislation also comes with asterisks about the kinds of projects that can make use of its provisions. Developers, in select cases, must hire unionized construction workers — a provision that convinced the powerful State Building and Construction Trades Council to drop its opposition.
Projects also must set aside a modest share of homes for lower-income residents (at least 7%) and replace any rent-controlled units that are destroyed during construction. Lower-income neighborhoods also have more time to plan for the rezoning with the new rules not taking effect until at least 2032. That compromise led a number of tenant rights, “housing justice” advocacy groups and other affordability advocates to stand down earlier this week.
Case in point: Sen. Aisha Wahab, a Fremont Democrat who, as chair of the Senate’s Housing committee, nearly killed the bill earlier this year, was the second to speak in favor of it Friday.
In a fig leaf to ticked-off local governments, the bill also allows cities that already are planning for transit-oriented apartment buildings at a significant scale, such as San Francisco and Sacramento, to stick with those plans rather than abide by the full scope of the new law.
“If you look at the bill and you read the bill, I actually view it as a thoughtful, relatively narrow-in-scope bill,” Oakland Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, a frequent political ally of Wiener’s on housing matters, said on the Assembly floor Thursday.
Many of her fellow legislators, Democratic and Republican alike, disagreed.
The Senate ultimately passed the bill by the narrowest possible margin, with Wiener only claiming his final vote from Bakersfield GOP Sen. Shannon Grove after a few tense minutes. The Assembly vote was equally close, with just 43 of the chamber’s 80 members supporting it.
“This blunt, one-size-fits-all bill will not work for a district like mine,” said Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur, a Los Angeles Democrat who represents portions of Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Hollywood. “For many Californians, living in a single-family neighborhood fulfills a lifelong dream — the American Dream.”
Placing apartment blocks in those neighborhoods “has the potential to fundamentally reshape my district without the benefit of careful land-use planning," he said.
Zbur was partially channeling opposition from his counterparts in local government. Last month, a narrow majority on the Los Angeles City Council voted to oppose SB 79, which members characterized as a Sacramento power grab and a giveaway to real estate developers. The city is one of dozens of municipalities that came out against the measure.
Supporters counter that deferring to local governments on land-use decisions has resulted in a chronic undersupply of new housing, as local elected officials historically have catered to the interests of change-averse homeowners.
Marc Vukcevich, a policy director for the LA-based transit and pedestrian advocacy group Streets For All, a co-sponsor of the bill, said he didn’t think the city of Los Angeles’ opposition to the measure carried much weight.
“The Legislature knows that LA is a deeply unserious actor when it comes to housing,” he said.
For all the concessions Wiener made along the way, backers of the bill still are calling the proposal historic.
“It’s by far the biggest housing bill the California Legislature has passed,” said Matthew Lewis, a spokesperson for California YIMBY. “There’s more to do, but it’s a major, major step. And honestly, I feel like as people start to see what is actually going to happen, the politics will start to change too.
“The fear is Hong Kong. I think the reality is going to be something closer to Copenhagen — not everyone is going to build the maximum demand.”
Whether homeowners in Palo Alto, mid-city San Diego and the San Fernando Valley ultimately come to appreciate the new apartment developments in their communities will depend on whether any get built in the first place.
Past upzoning efforts in California have proven to be more ambitious on paper than in practice. In 2021, state lawmakers passed Senate Bill 9, a measure that both supporters and opponents said would end single-family zoning in California by allowing homeowners to build up to four units on their property. Four years in, the law has resulted in precious few units. Housing advocates point to costly requirements and loopholes that made the law difficult for property owners to actually use.
Simon Büchler, an economist at the Miami University in Ohio who has studied the results of different upzoning policies, said developers are generally keen to build around public transportation stations, making SB 79 a promising approach.
“The success of upzoning depends crucially on where it happens,” he said in an email. “Ideally, you want to upzone in high-demand areas with strong transit connections, since those are the places where added density will translate into meaningful increases in supply.”
In any case, the changes will be gradual.
“Supply increases take time [often many years] to materialize, even in the right places, so these policies are far from an overnight solution,” he said.
Cobbling together enough single-family homes in a desirable transit-adjacent neighborhood is easier said than done, said Mott Smith, a developer and board member of the California Infill Builders Association. Land values are steep. Finding enough sufficiently large land all in one place requires a fair bit of luck. Both make it hard to profitably build a six-story apartment building.
“We will probably see in the next five years 20 to 30 SB 79 projects around the state, that’s my wild guess,” he said. “Both the opponents and the proponents of the bill are probably overstating how much this is going to change the built environment in California.”
That could be especially true in the current economic climate. Tariffs on building goods, immigration crackdowns targeting construction workers and high interest rates show no sign of abating, factors that make it hard to build — close to a train station or not.
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A new video based on clips from King of Jazz has won this year's Public Domain Film Remix Contest.
How it works: The annual competition invites filmmakers from around the world to reimagine often long-forgotten literary classics, films, cartoons, music, and visual art that are now in the public domain.
About the winner: Titled Rhapsody, Reimagined, the roughly two-minute video captures the King of Jazz's surreal quality: Cookie-cutter rows of musicians, showgirls, office workers and random furniture cascade across the screen as influential bandleader Paul Whiteman's winking face looks on.
One of the most unusual of the creative treasures to enter the public domain this month is King of Jazz. The plotless, experimental 1930 musical film shot in early Technicolor centers on influential bandleader Paul Whiteman, nicknamed "The King of Jazz."
In one memorable scene, the portly, mustachioed Whiteman opens a small bag and winks at the camera as miniature musicians file out one after another like a colony of ants and take their places on an ornate, table-top bandstand.
A new video based on clips from King of Jazz has won this year's Public Domain Film Remix Contest — an annual competition that invites filmmakers from around the world to reimagine often long-forgotten literary classics, films, cartoons, music, and visual art that are now in the public domain. This means creators can use these materials freely, without copyright restrictions. In 2026, works created in 1930 entered the public domain.
Titled Rhapsody, Reimagined, the roughly two-minute video captures the King of Jazz's surreal quality: Cookie-cutter rows of musicians, showgirls, office workers and random furniture cascade across the screen as Whiteman's winking face looks on.
"I wanted to transform the figures and bodies into more dream-like shapes through collage and looping and repetition," said Seattle-based filmmaker Andrea Hale, who created the piece in collaboration with composer Greg Hardgrave. For video artists, Hale said discovering what's new in the public domain each January is a thrill. "We're always looking for things to draw from," Hale said. "Opening that up to a bigger spread of materials is amazing. That's the dream."
The Internet Archive, the San Francisco-based nonprofit library behind the contest, digitizes and provides public access to a massive repository of content, including many materials used by contest participants. "These materials have often just been in film canisters for decades," said digital librarian Brewster Kahle, who founded the Internet Archive in 1996.
This year's submissions range from a reworking of the 1930 film The Blue Angel starring Betty Boop — another public domain entrant this year — instead of Marlene Dietrich, to an AI-generated take on the 1930 Nancy Drew book The Mystery at Lilac Inn.
Kahle said the Internet Archive received nearly 280 entries this time around, the highest number since the competition launched six years ago. "Things are not just musty, old archival documentation of the past," Kahle said. "People are bringing them to life in new and different ways, without fear of being sued."
Lawsuits have become a growing concern for artists and copyright holders, especially with the rise of generative AI. Recent years have seen a surge in online video takedowns and copyright infringement disputes.
Media companies are trying to address the problem through deals with tech firms, such as Disney and OpenAI's plan, announced late last year, to introduce a service allowing users to create short videos based on copyrighted characters, including Cinderella and Darth Vader.
"On the one hand, these licensing agreements seem quite a clean solution to thorny legal questions," said Jennifer Jenkins, director of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School. "But what's exciting about the public domain is that material, after a long, robust 95-year copyright term, is just simply free for anyone — without a team of lawyers, without a licensing agreement, without having to work for Disney or OpenAI — to just put online," Jenkins said.
Jenkins also pointed out an interesting twist for people who create new works using materials from the public domain. "You actually get a copyright in your remix," she said. "Just like Disney has copyrights in all of its remakes of wonderful public domain works like Snow White or Cinderella." (The Brothers Grimm popularized these two characters in their 19th century collection Grimm's Fairy Tales. But their roots are much deeper, going back to European folklore collections of the 1600s and beyond.)
However, this only applies to works created by humans — U.S. copyright law currently doesn't recognize works authored by AI. And Jenkins further cautioned that creators only get a copyright in their new creative contributions to the remix, and not the underlying material.
This year's Public Domain Film Remix Contest winner Andrea Hale said she's using a Creative Commons license for Rhapsody, Reimagined. This means the filmmaker retains the copyright to her work but grants permissions that allow other people to freely use, share, and build upon it. "I'm keeping with the spirit of the public domain," Hale said.
Copyright 2026 NPR
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Every January 25 — on Sunday this year — is Burns Night, a global celebration of the life and legacy of the Scottish poet and lyricist Robert Burns.
Why it matters: His name might not be familiar, but every New Year’s Eve — or Hogmanay, as it is called in Burns's native home Scotland — millions of people sing Auld Lang Syne, a poem he wrote in 1788.
Why now: Several events are happening in Los Angeles, too. We're here to tell you about them. Whiskys? Bagpipes? Poetry, anyone?
The name of Robert Burns might not be familiar, but every New Year’s Eve — or Hogmanay, as it is called in his native home Scotland — millions of people sing Auld Lang Syne, a poem that he wrote in 1788.
Every Jan. 25 — on Sunday this year — is Burns Night, a global celebration of the life and legacy of the Scottish poet and lyricist.
Several events are happening in Los Angeles, too, which I can attest are rather zany affairs — if only because of the sheer number of tartan kilts in sight, the haunting, piercing but tuneful drone of bagpipes, which can only bring to mind a windswept mountain top, and a generous dash of whiskys (plural). More on that later.
Some 30,000 square miles in size and home to around 5.5 million people today, Scotland was officially united with England in 1707 when their two parliaments became one and created Great Britain.
However, as you may have seen in movies like Braveheart, Rob Roy, and even Trainspotting, a streak of fierce independence has run through Scotland for centuries, so don’t make the mistake of assuming that, just because the countries are joined geographically, that English and Scottish people are more or less the same.
Besides historical rebels, beautiful countryside and world-class golf courses, Scotland has always punched well above its weight: penicillin, television, the telephone, artificial refrigeration, and the raincoat — “the mac” — were all invented by Scots. Naturalist John Muir, the Father of the National Parks,” was born in Dunbar, and Nessie is perhaps the most legendary of all cryptids.
But it’s Robert Burns — often known as Rabbie — whose name and work has lasted centuries as Scotland’s National Poet.
In 1796, Burns died at just 37 — on the same day his son Maxwell was born — and he had worked almost exclusively on traditional Scottish songs during the latter stages of his life, which ensured that several hundred folk songs, like Auld Lang Syne, were not lost to history.
Burns Night is a tradition that was begun by some of his friends in 1801. Scottish people and any other admirers and friends of Scotland will gather together for poetry readings, music, dancing, and of course a meal of haggis. For those who don’t know what it is, it’s rather an odd-looking meal, and rather an acquired taste.
A bagpiper will lead the haggis, the traditional centerpiece, into the dining room, where a poem written by Burns called Address to a Haggis is read aloud before the haggis is dramatically cut into pieces for everyone to share.
The poem in question describes the delicacy as having “buttocks like a distant hill,” among other writerly flourishes. Read for yourself here.
When I was a child, I was told that haggises were small, furry creatures that lived in the Scottish Highlands and were too clever to be caught, hence you rarely saw them on the dinner plate. Buttock size was not mentioned.
That’s not true of course, and this might be why: haggis is made from minced sheep’s heart, liver and lungs mixed with oatmeal, suet, onions and spices then traditionally boiled inside the sheep’s stomach. It’s savory and earthy, somewhat rich and a little gamey. Maybe not something you eat slice after slice, perhaps.
Over dinner and helpings of haggis, raucous toasts are celebrated with “drams” or small glasses of whisky — surely Scotland’s most famous export — and there are recitations of some of Burns’s other poems, like A Red, Red Rose, Ae Fond Kiss, or Tam o’Shanter.
The latter was the name of a drunken farmer who taunts the devil and is chased by witches in a poem written by Burns in 1791. He wears a tam o’shanter, a flat woolen cap with a pom-pom in the center.
Angelenos might recognize that as the name of the restaurant and pub in Los Feliz.
I went to my first Burns Night in L.A. last year, and I must say, that despite being an Englishman I was heartily welcomed, and I did enjoy my taste of the famous dish — though the bagpipes, also an acquired taste for this “sassenach” are yet to be something on my regular playlist.
Festooned with Scottish flags, souvenirs and regalia, “the Tam” is one of the venues that will be hosting its 41st Burns Nights on Jan. 27 and 28, with two seatings each night.
Also, the St. Andrew’s Society — named in honor of the Scottish patron saint - will host their sold-out Burns Night on January 24 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. It’s their 96th event, and singing for his supper as the winner of their annual Robert Burns Award is Dundee-born actor Brian Cox, who played the ruthless Logan Roy in HBO’s Succession (and was in Braveheart).
Alternatively, the St. Andrews University Alumni network here in L.A. is also celebrating a day early, on Jan. 24, 6 - 9 p.m. at MacLeod’s Brewery in Van Nuys.
It’s the very first Burns Night celebration organized by Sammy Ginsberg, a self-described, home-grown “Valley Girl” who left L.A. in 2012 to study at St. Andrews, a venerable institution founded in 1413. It’s where Prince William met his wife-to-be, Kate Middleton.
Ginsberg fell hard and fast in love with Scotland, describing her first visit as “magical.”
As an aspiring writer and poet, Ginsberg was especially inspired by the reverence for literature that she found.
“Scotland is a rich place filled with imagination that truly loves writers and I think we can learn a lot from them,” Ginsberg said, adding that was one reason why she co-started the Los Feliz Writers Festival.
Alongside the neeps, tatties and haggis there will be haggis pizza — surely a new culinary innovation — as well as Scottish beer and music from bagpiper John McLelan Allan, who has appeared in many movies, TV shows and has worked with performers such as Korn, The Chieftains, and Michael Flatley.
Though Ginsberg developed a taste for fish and chips when she was in Scotland. “That was my stress food when I was in the library on a deadline crunch,” she said.
She admits that it took a few more attempts before she became a fan of haggis.
Nearly 680,000 people with a Scottish or Ulster-Scots background call Southern California home, according to the 2020 census, so “slàinte” to all of you, and try to get hold of a bottle of Irn-Bru — an electric orange-colored soda from Scotland — as it’s said to be the best cure for a hangover.
“It really gets you going again!” Ginsberg said.
Topline:
Steven McDonald was 12 when he and his slightly older brother Jeff started performing as Redd Kross, becoming a part of the burgeoning punk scene in ‘80s Los Angeles.
Why now: On Sunday, McDonald is headlining a benefit show in Pasadena for musicians who lost gear in the Eaton Fire.
Backstory: As Redd Kross, the then tween and his older brother Jeff were part of the L.A. punk rock scene that spawned groups like Black Flag and Adolescents.
Punk rose up in L.A.'s Hollywood in the 1970s with groups like X, the Germs and The Go-Go's. Just a handful of years later, disaffected kids from the ‘burbs picked up guitars and an attitude and took punk hardcore with bands such as Adolescents, Black Flag and Social Distortion.
Steven McDonald, then 12, had a front row seat to all that noise, angst and swagger as one of the core members, along with his slightly older brother Jeff, of the Hawthorne-based punk group, Redd Kross.
The younger McDonald had just picked up the bass — the instrument he plays in Redd Kross — and the guitar a year or so before. In no time, the brothers found themselves in the thick of a thriving scene.
“ It's a unique thing that I got to experience,” McDonald told LAist. “We got to play the punk clubs like in Chinatown at the Hong Kong Cafe, and then later on the Whisky a Go Go. It was a really magical moment around 1979, 1980 — when I was 12 or 11.”
Redd Kross, known briefly as the Tourists before, opened for an early incarnation of Black Flag. New York art punk gods, Sonic Youth, frequently performed with the group. Social Distortion, McDonald said, opened for them when he was around 13.
“It was just this super creative, supportive environment. Most of these people were older than me in their early 20s,” McDonald said, adding that many of them were art school kids open to groovy new things. “I'd get a lot of CalArts people and people that had kind of been around for the glitter scene in Los Angeles and it kind of was morphing into this new punk rock thing and had a very independent spirit.”
And no one thought the McDonald brothers were out of place.
“People thought like, ‘Oh, if you've got something to say, then don't get weighed down with, like, refining anything. Just go say it.’”
The brothers soaked in L.A. punk lore watching legends from The Runaways to The Go-Go’s perform on stage. And knocked on doors on their own until local clubs and venues let them play.
They were persistent, but McDonald said they couldn’t have done it without the support of their parents.
“ They're not musicians, they're not hippies on a commune,” he said.
In fact, their father is a welder who's still running the same small business with their mom.
“They just could recognize that their kids had some kind of intense interest and even if they didn't share it or understand it, they could recognize that,” he said.
That meant pick-ups and drop-offs — the usual stuff, in a way, for parents. “They would actually drive us to the Whisky a Go Go and they would sit in the parking lot at the gas station across the street,” he said.
As Redd Kross gained success with their pop punk sound, the band became elder statesmen looking over the next generation of bands that were coming up.
Last year, McDonald attended the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where grunge group Soundgarden was inducted.
“Those guys opened for my band in 1986,” McDonald said lovingly.
It was a moment that brought into relief the many decades that Redd Kross has been making music. And they’re still at it — working on a new album this year and going on tour abroad and locally.
On Sunday, McDonald will headline a benefit show (LAist is a media sponsor) at the record shop, Healing Force of the Universe, in Pasadena to help musicians replace equipment and gear they lost in the Eaton Fire.
He’ll play an acoustic set of Redd Kross songs, including “Annie’s Gone,” which he previewed in a performance at the LAist studios.
The song is a reference to the character Annie in the 1980 film, Foxes. The role was played by Cherie Currie, the lead singer of one of McDonald’s favorite bands, The Runaways. He first saw them played at the Whisky in 1979.
“ I just really worshiped them and they inspired me because they were teenagers and they were bridging that gap between punk and hard rock. They were just out there doing it,” he said.
Performing solo is something of a first for him. At Sunday's show (tickets are still available), McDonald will include "Annie's Gone" in his acoustic set — a song normally sung by his lead singer brother Jeff.
"It's a rare opportunity to see Steve McDonald singing 'Annie's Gone.'"
Gear Donation Drive and Acoustic Show
When: Jan. 25, 2 p.m.
Where: Healing Force of the Universe, 1200 E. Walnut St., Pasadena
Tickets: $12 (pre-sale) / $15 (door) / or donate a working musical instrument
Topline:
The records of more than 3,000 patients at CHLA’s former Center for Transyouth Health and Development will now be protected from federal subpoenas until at least February 2029 under a settlement.
What the federal government was seeking: The DOJ wanted to pull a wide swath of information from CHLA’s records related to hormone therapy prescriptions, including the identities and social security numbers of the people it was prescribed to.
What CHLA patients’ lawyers are saying: “This is a massive victory for every family that refused to be intimidated into backing down,” said Khadijah Silver, Director of Gender Justice & Health Equity at Lawyers for Good Government. “The government's attempt to rifle through children's medical records was unconstitutional from the start.”
What’s in the settlement: Under the agreement, which was first reported by Reuters, the federal government has withdrawn its requests for personal information like social security numbers, records and “documents relating to the clinical indications, diagnoses or assessments that formed the basis for prescribing puberty blockers or hormone therapy.”
What the hospital and DOJ say about the win: LAist has reached out for comment to both entities and has not heard back.
The backstory: The subpoenas were issued on or about June 11, 2025, according to the settlement. They were made public in July, though many patient families remained in the dark about whether they were affected. CHLA announced it planned to close its clinic for trans youth June 12.
After the Department of Justice issued a wide-ranging subpoena to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles last June, the records of more than 3,000 patients now will be protected until at least February 2029 under a settlement reached between patient families and the federal government.
What the federal government was seeking
The DOJ wanted to pull a wide swath of information from CHLA’s records related to hormone therapy prescriptions, including the identities and social security numbers of the people it was prescribed to. Lawyers for CHLA patient families said the broad request also included details of patients’ sexual health data and records of their mental health and said the inquiry violated their constitutional rights.
What CHLA’s lawyers are saying
“This is a massive victory for every family that refused to be intimidated into backing down,” said Khadijah Silver, director of gender justice and health equity at Lawyers for Good Government. “The government's attempt to rifle through children's medical records was unconstitutional from the start.”
Silver also noted that DOJ confirmed it had not received any sensitive patient data under the parts of the subpoena that had been struck down.
What’s in the settlement
Under the agreement, which was first reported by Reuters, the federal government has withdrawn its requests for personal information like social security numbers, prescription records and “documents relating to the clinical indications, diagnoses or assessments that formed the basis for prescribing puberty blockers or hormone therapy.”
The government cannot make new requests of this type to CHLA until February 2029. The settlement also establishes a process for the DOJ to continue to pursue seeking some limited redacted medical records from CHLA.
What it means for parents and children
In the aftermath of the subpoenas, many advocates were worried that families would face federal prosecution for seeking gender-affirming care for their children.
However, according to the settlement, the DOJ said it “is not currently aware of information that would support the federal prosecution of parents or guardians who have sought and consented to receiving gender-related care for their children at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.”
What the hospital and DOJ say about the win
LAist has reached out for comment to both entities and has not heard back.
The backstory
The subpoenas were issued on or about June 11, 2025, according to the settlement. They were made public in July, though many patient families remained in the dark about whether they were affected. CHLA announced it planned to close its clinic for trans youth June 12.
Judges have ruled against similar requests and struck down subpoenas seeking records from other hospitals, like Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Boston Children’s Hospital.
