The Brief

John Lauretig remembers the filthy bathrooms, the overflowing trash cans and the community of people who rallied to clean up Joshua Tree National Park the last time the U.S. government shut down.

For more than a month from December 2018 through January 2019, thousands of National Park Service employees were furloughed nationwide — but the Trump administration kept many national parks open.

Unsupervised, visitors drove through wilderness and historic sites, camped where they weren’t supposed to, and vandalized plants and buildings at parks across California. The trash — and the feces — piled up. In the days after the shutdown ended, park staff found at least 1,665 clumps of toilet paper littering Death Valley alone, where an estimated half-ton of human waste had been left outside the restrooms.

“It was insane to leave the gates open and tell the staff not to show up in the park — for our public lands, and all of our special places in this country, to be unprotected,” said Lauretig, a retired law enforcement park ranger and president of the Friends of Joshua Tree nonprofit.

Now, facing the prospect of another imminent shutdown, conservation groups and retired park service employees including Lauretig are calling to keep the gates locked at national parks and historic landmarks.

They’re among many Californians bracing for the shutdown, which is expected to begin Wednesday unless Democrats and Republicans can make a deal by 11:59 p.m. Tuesday.

As of now, the parties appear far apart, although President Donald Trump and congressional leaders are expected to meet today. Democratic leaders in Congress are demanding that Republicans reverse Medicaid cuts made in Trump’s signature tax and spending bill earlier this year and extend Biden-era subsidies used by a majority of Affordable Care Act enrollees.

In response, the Trump administration has floated firing federal workers en masse if the shutdown occurs.

“Democrats are hoping to use the one bit of leverage that they have left in Washington at this time to make it clear what they stand for,” said Thad Kousser, a political science professor at UC San Diego. “And the question is: Can they hold out against the political and policy pain that Donald Trump is hoping to impose by threatening more layoffs of government employees?”

The federal government shut down three times during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Each one presents a hardship for government employees, who are either furloughed or obliged to work without pay.

About 150,000 federal employees work in California, not counting the military service members who also will go without pay during a shutdown.

In the past when facing possible federal shutdowns, the state had a contingency plan to try to avoid disruptions in certain services. In late 2023, it planned to pay one month’s worth of federal food assistance early to advance aid to families in the event of a shutdown.

But this year there’s no such commitment yet from the Department of Finance, as Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration weighs the possibility of a lengthy shutdown.

“There isn’t an open-ended long-term line of credit where the state’s general fund can be assumed to make up for any federal fund shortfall,” finance spokesperson H.D. Palmer said.

Here’s a look at what Californians can expect to happen if a shutdown occurs this week.

Social Security and health care

Most Californians shouldn’t worry about a federal shutdown impacting their Social Security benefits or their health care access in the near term.

About 6.5 million Californians receive benefits through the Social Security Administration and those checks are expected to continue going out during a shutdown.

But, customer service could suffer depending on how many employees are told to stay home, according to the National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare.

That includes “benefit verifications, earnings record corrections and updates, overpayments processing, and replacing Medicare cards. The level of disruption will depend on how many (Social Security Administration) employees the Trump administration deems ‘essential’ and ‘non-essential’ during the shutdown,” Max Richtman, the organization’s president, said in a written statement.

Medicaid and Medicare, which pay for health care for low-income individuals, people with disabilities and seniors, are mandatory programs that are exempt from the annual appropriations process.

Jan Emerson-Shea, spokesperson for the California Hospital Association, said “essential services” like insurance payments to hospitals and doctors will continue.

Some discretionary programs, however, like food stamps and benefits for women, infants and children may be impacted by a shutdown.

One group that could be disproportionately affected by even a brief federal shutdown are native and indigenous populations. Many of the 723,000 American Indians living in California get health care at clinics that are funded through federal grants. The clinics are often small and may have very little reserves to weather a funding pause, said Nanette Star, policy director for the California Consortium for Urban Indian Health.

“Even a short shutdown can mean staff furloughs, service cuts, patient service delays,” Star said.

Airports and travel

You’ll be able to fly and take rides during a government shutdown, but you might experience more delays.

That’s because air traffic controllers and Transportation Security Administration agents are among the government employees who would be expected to show up for work without getting paid. The longer a shutdown drags out, the more likely it is that the system will strain and workers will call in sick.

The U.S. Travel Association, which advocates for the industry, released a statement last week that included a survey showing many people would cancel or postpone travel during a shutdown, which it argued would ripple through the economy.

“A shutdown is a wholly preventable blow to America’s travel economy—costing $1 billion every week—and affecting millions of travelers and businesses while placing unnecessary strain on an already overextended federal travel workforce,” said Geoff Freeman, the organization’s president.

Wildfires and disasters

A federal shutdown won’t ground firefighters, but could slow the money that pays for future disaster prep.

Nick Schuler, a spokesperson for Cal Fire, said the agency does not expect a shutdown to affect its “ability to respond to and aggressively attack fires” and will continue to operate as normal. In past shutdowns, he said, U.S. Forest Service firefighters have still been available for emergency response and pointed to California’s “robust Master Mutual Aid System,” which ensures resources respond regardless of jurisdiction.

Delta Fire, Sept. 5, 2018.

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U.S. Forest Service

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Still, he cautioned that what keeps engines running today might not pay for the prevention work of tomorrow: “Any disruption to grant funding that supports fire prevention and wildfire resiliency could have negative impacts,” he said.

Newsom’s office said the Federal Emergency Management Agency would keep “core life-saving operations” going during a shutdown but that payments to states would stall and recovery efforts would be put on hold. That means Californians could see first responders in action but face delays in reimbursement or recovery projects.

Other science agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey could face interruptions that affect California’s disaster readiness, the governor’s spokesperson said.

National parks

National parks supporters are worried that the Trump administration again would send home workers but leave open the gates.

That’s “a recipe for even more disaster,” said Kate Groetzinger, communications manager at the Center for Western Priorities, an environmental advocacy group. “It will be worse this time than it was last time around, simply because the parks are already struggling.”

She was referring to federal staffing cuts the Trump administration carried out earlier this year. The National Parks Conservation Association estimates that the National Park Service has lost 24% of its permanent staff since Trump’s second term began, and left thousands of seasonal positions unfilled.

If a shutdown does occur, the association projects daily losses of $1 million in fee revenue for the parks, and $77 million for the gateway communities that surround them.

Morale among National Park workers is bad already — and a shutdown would make it worse, said Bernadette Johnson, a former superintendent of Manzanar National Historic Site, where during World War II the U.S. Government incarcerated thousands of Japanese Americans.

“The attack has just been so furious. And I think that federal employees are being demonized, as these lazy bureaucrats that we are not … It breaks my heart to watch,” Johnson said. “The people left behind are holding all of that work now, because the work didn't go away.”

A spokesperson for the The National Park Service said the agency is reviewing and updating plans for a lapse in funding.

However a shutdown may play out, Lauretig over at Joshua Tree said he’s ready.

“I still have a loft (full) of toilet paper, trash bags, bleach, cleaning materials, gloves waiting for the next event — which, you know, could be imminent.”

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

MyLA311, the system designed to help residents access city services for graffiti removal or streetlight outages, got a makeover last year, but since then some Angelenos and Los Angeles city staff have reported it has been plagued by problems.

The city has received “numerous complaints” about the updated website and app, including issues with GPS and logging work, according to officials.

MyLA311 is set up so residents can report non-emergency issues and track requests for tree inspections, homeless encampment services and illegal dumping, to name a few. There are 86 options in neighborhoods, according to Mayor Karen Bass’ office, which helped launch the new system.

Staffers within the city’s Department of Public Works have said they’ve been frustrated by the rollout, according to city officials. They say it now takes longer to add their responses to service requests, and the city can’t record completed work that doesn’t have a service request connected to it.

City Council members Imelda Padilla and Monica Rodriguez led a motion aimed at addressing the issues, saying they’ve caused concerns about the system’s overall functionality and accountability.

“Reports and individuals are telling us that because of this broken 311 app, folks are once again going back to using Excel sheets, phone calls, paper and pen in order to engage in service delivery, and I think that that's a problem,” Padilla said during Wednesday’s council meeting.

The motion instructs Public Works to make a formal report of any problems with the system, including how they may be affecting service timelines and completion rates, and asks the city’s IT agency to come up with potential solutions.

It was approved in a 12-0 vote Wednesday. Councilmembers Bob Blumenfield, Eunisses Hernandez and Adrin Nazarian were absent.

How we got here

Bass announced the launch of the new MyLA311 last year, saying the previous website and app were outdated and had lasted years past their lifecycle.

In a 2023 directive, she’d called for the system to be modernized with the goal of providing better customer service and communication about the status of residents’ requests.

“This new and improved way to request and receive city services is another example of how we are breaking away from the old way of doing things to make our neighborhoods cleaner and safer,” Bass said in a March 2025 statement.

But some people say the new system is falling short.

According to the North Hollywood Northeast Neighborhood Council, the new app has “actually made it harder for Angelenos to request services.”

The Sylmar Neighborhood Council agreed the system needs improvements, writing in a community impact statement that MyLA311 fails to serve L.A. taxpayers effectively if it’s difficult to use or inaccurate.

In public comments, some residents cited “major issues” with the system, including GPS and location accuracy, invalid addresses and missing or incomplete service categories. One commenter wrote that addresses were being routed to other areas, some of them outside the city.

“As a result, they frequently lead to confusion in the field, delays in response and, in some cases, requests going unaddressed due to the difficulty in locating the reported issue or misdirection caused by inaccurate data,” the commenter said.

What’s ahead

The City Council approved several instructions aimed at improving MyLA311, including the following:

• Public Works is expected to report back on its issues with the system.
• The city’s Information Technology Agency is expected to report on system performance, including operational issues, and provide solutions as needed.
• Public Works and IT are expected to provide quarterly reports on service request data, including backlogs, average response times and requests received and closed.

The Supreme Court's conservative majority seemed ready Wednesday to allow the Trump administration to potentially proceed with mass deportations of more than a million foreign nationals, including those from Haiti and Syria, who live and work legally in the United States.

Until now these individuals have been accorded temporary legal status because their safety is imperiled by war or natural disasters in their home countries.

Congress enacted the Temporary Protected Status program in 1990, and every president since then — Republican and Democrat — has embraced TPS. President Donald Trump, however, is trying to end it.

On Wednesday his solicitor general, D. John Sauer, told the justices that the statute clearly bars any court review of the administration's decisions. And he dismissed the idea that a separate law established to provide procedural fairness does not allow the courts to review the Homeland Security agency's decision-making either. Pressed by the court's three liberal justices, Sauer insisted that the courts cannot review anything.

"None of those procedural steps required by the statue are reviewable. That's your position?" asked Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

"Correct," responded Sauer.

"What you're basically saying is that Congress wrote a statute for no purpose," Sotomayor said.

Justice Elena Kagan noted that under the statute the secretary of Homeland Security is supposed to consult with the U.S. State Department about what the conditions are in those countries that people have been forced to flee. What if she didn't do that at all, Kagan asked. Or what if she asked, but the response from the State Department came back: "Wasn't that baseball game last night great!"

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked what would happen if the secretary used a Ouija board to make decisions?

To all these hypotheticals, Solicitor General Sauer stood firm. That prompted this from Sotomayor: "Now, we have a president saying at one point that Haiti is a 'filthy, dirty, and disgusting s--thole country.' I'm quoting him. He declared illegal immigrants, which he associated with TPS, as poisoning the blood of America. I don't see how that one statement is not a prime example … showing that a discriminatory purpose may have played a part in this decision."

Sauer pushed back, noting that Kristi Noem, the then-DHS secretary, had not mentioned race at all. That prompted this response from Justice Jackson, the only Black woman on the court, "So the position of the United States is that we have an actual racial epithet that we aren't allowed to look at all the context."

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the mother of two adopted Haitian children, interjected at that point to clarify the administration's position. Are you conceding that individuals with TPS status could bring a challenge based on race discrimination? she asked.

Sauer appeared to concede the point.

Representing the Haitians, lawyer Geoffrey Pipoly described the administration's review as "a sham."

"The true reason for the termination [of TPS status] is the president's racial animus toward non-white immigrants and bare dislike of Haitians in particular," Pipoly said. "The secretary herself described people from Haiti" and from other non-white countries as "killers, leeches, saying, 'We don't want them, not one,'" while "simultaneously enacting another humanitarian form of relief for white and only white South Africans."

That was too much for Justice Samuel Alito who asked Pipoly, "Do you think that if you put Syrians, Turks, Greeks and other people who live around the Mediterranean in a line-up, do you think you could say those people are … non-white?"

An uncomfortable Pipoly resisted categorizing each group until Alito got to his own roots.

"How about southern Italians?" Alito inquired, prompting laughter in the courtroom.

Responded Pipoly: "Certainly 120 years ago when we had our last wave of European immigration, southern Italians were not considered white. … Our concept of these things evolves over time."

At the end of Wednesday's court session, one thing was clear: President Trump may be furious at some of the conservative justices he appointed for invalidating his tariffs, but for the most part, he is getting his way. Especially in light of the court's 6-to-3 decision, announced Wednesday, which effectively guts what remains of the landmark Voting Rights Act, once celebrated as a signature achievement of American Democracy.

Copyright 2026 NPR

The last dog from the Eaton Fire taken in by Pasadena Humane has now been adopted.

Artemis the German shepherd was originally taken to the Pasadena animal shelter for emergency boarding. His family, which lost its home in the January fire, ultimately decided to put him up for adoption.

"The silver lining to all of that is — with all this tragedy — this incredible story of hope where we were able to help foster these animals we’re returning home," said Sarie Hooker,  communications manager at Pasadena Humane.

During his stay at Pasadena Humane, the cream-color pup won over many hearts.

"He's just such a striking boy. He's got this really fun, loving personality. He's very regal," Hooker said.

Hooker said Artemis was adopted by a family through the shelter's foster-to-adopt program.

"He just did amazingly. And the next thing we knew, he was adopted," Hooker said. "So it's a happy story."

Artemis says hello to a new family.

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Courtesy Pasadena Humane

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The Eaton Fire destroyed nearly 9,500 structures, including about 6,000 homes. Two days after the fire broke out, Pasadena Humane reported receiving more than 350 pets from displaced residents.

By the second week of the fire, the shelter had taken in some 600 pets, Hooker said.

" In totality, we were able to help with thousands of animals specifically for emergency boarding," Hooker said, including every kind of pet you can think of, as well as wild animals.

" We were seeing skunks, squirrels, hawks, owls, peacocks, raccoons, possums," she said.

Artemis isn't just the last dog to find a home — or return home — from the Eaton Fire.

He is the last animal.

" Artemis was our final, final animal — like dog, cat, critter. Anything else under the sun.  He was the last boy. So we're very happy," she said.

National and local organizers are calling on communities to abstain from work, school and shopping Friday in recognition of May Day.

The “economic blackout” is modeled after January protests in Minnesota following the surge of immigration enforcement and shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens.

“Our vision includes an economy that works for everyone with a living wage, strong labor protections and programs that keep families housed, fed, educated and healthy,” said Francisco Moreno, executive director of the Council of Mexican Federations in North America, in a Tuesday press conference.

The organization is one of more than 100 involved in planning a Los Angeles May Day rally with the theme, “solo el pueblo shuts it down:  no school, no work, no shopping.”

This year’s largest planned gathering starts at MacArthur Park, a longtime hub for day laborers and street vendors. Last July, immigration agents in armored vehicles descended on the park. The ongoing immigration raids and city policies have contributed to the challenges street vendors face.

“Starting there really sends a message that we're here,” said Kristal Romero, press secretary for the  Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. “We're standing with this community, and if you take on one of us, you take on all of us.”

May Day’s history in LA

May Day, sometimes called International Workers' Day, started after an 1886 strike tied to the fight for an eight-hour work day. The protest turned violent after police attacked workers. In the 1990s, L.A. organizers started to connect the labor movement with advocacy for immigrant rights.

This year’s event also marks the 20th anniversary of 2006’s massive rallies in support of immigration reform.

Romero said the Federation has offered training on de-escalation, conflict resolution and non-violent protests and that hundreds of people will act as “peacekeepers” during Friday’s rally and march.

“ A lot of times, folks can get caught in echo chambers and it may really feel hopeless,” Romero said. “The big point of these events is to inspire hope to show people we're all here, we're all fighting for the same thing.”

Los Angeles County

MacArthur Park

Time: 10 a.m.
Location: March begins at the corner of South Park View Street and Wilshire Boulevard and heads toward downtown L.A.
Organizers: Los Angeles May Day Coalition

L.A. City Hall

Time: Noon
Location: City Hall, 200 N. Spring St., downtown L.A.
Organizers: Union del Barrio and the Community Self-Defense Coalition

Boyle Heights

Time: 3 p.m.
Location: Mariachi Plaza, 1831 First St.
Organizers: Centro CSO

Long Beach

Time: 10 a.m.
Location: March starts at The Marketplace, 6501 Pacific Coast Highway, and ends at Mother’s Beach.
Organizers: Long Beach Indivisible, more details here.

San Fernando Valley

Time: 10 a.m.
Location: Northeast corner of Topanga Canyon and Victory Boulevard, Woodland Hills
Organizers: Indivisible Woodland Hills, SF Valley Brigade, others

Santa Clarita

Time: 10 a.m.
Location: 24292 Valencia Blvd.
Organizers: Indivisible CA27

Orange County 

Orange

Time: 3 p.m. rally
Location: City Hall, 300 E. Chapman Ave.

Time: 5 p.m.
Location: Orange Plaza Circle, Chapman Avenue and Glassell Street
Organizers: OC Indivisible Coalition

Santa Ana

Time: 3:30 p.m.
Location: Sasscer Park, 600 W. Santa Ana Blvd., Santa Ana
Organizers: OC May Day Coalition