The Brief

In the spring of 2022, a woman named Shelby Bunch began appearing at government hearings in Riverside County, demanding that officials there address what she believed was an epidemic of fraud in local elections.

Bunch often introduced herself as a representative of New California, a secessionist movement that seeks to break away from what it describes as the tyranny of a Democratic-controlled state.

She accused Riverside officials of colluding in criminal activity and warned that they would soon “be answering to law enforcement.” She once closed her comments by telling the Riverside County Board of Supervisors to “have a crappy day.”

The supervisors didn’t seem to take Bunch seriously, but she found a powerful ally in Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco.

Based on her various claims, including that the county’s electronic voting machines had been remotely manipulated, the sheriff put one of his senior investigators in charge of a criminal probe into the registrar of voters.

The investigator, Christopher Poznanski, quickly came to the conclusion that there was no evidence of a crime. On July 20, 2022, he sent Bunch an email letting her know he was closing the case.

“I understand this may not be the desired outcome,” he wrote. “But know that I did not take this case lightly and considered all of the information.”

Bunch was furious. She demanded that Poznanski investigate the “corrupt machines.”

But Poznanski was unmoved. “I respect your passion for this cause, but I will conduct no further investigation into the matter,” he wrote.

Bunch continued to write Bianco directly, urging him to reopen the case. Then, in early September, she got some help.

Shelby Bunch comments on election oversight at the Riverside County Board of Supervisors hearing on Oct. 4, 2022.

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Screenshot via the Riverside County Board of Supervisors

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A figure in the “constitutional sheriff” movement, which asserts that elected sheriffs are more powerful than anyone — including the president and the courts — sent Bianco an email.

“I just heard this past week that a group of your constituents requested that you investigate election fraud in Riverside County and that your investigator was unable to find anything and you closed your investigation,” Steve Tuminello wrote to Bianco. “I know that as a Constitutional Sheriff you realize how extremely important Election Integrity is, and that you would welcome any assistance in these investigations.”

Bianco, whose career has been guided by the movement, wrote back to say he had launched another, more ambitious investigation.

Emails obtained by CalMatters trace the development of a years-long case that ultimately led to Bianco’s unprecedented seizure of 650,000 ballots in March. They reveal that his sprawling investigation was based on the thinnest of evidence and raise alarms over how the November elections could be disrupted by the unproven claims of fringe groups and ideologically aligned officials.

That scenario is particularly troubling in Riverside County, which is home to one of a few dozen congressional districts in the country that could determine control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the midterm elections.

Bianco’s emails with Bunch also show that he doubted some of her group’s allegations.

In one exchange in 2023, Bunch suggested the county supervisors were complicit in election fraud and might have ties to drug cartels.

“This is absolutely ridiculous,” Bianco responded. “Just because ‘someone’ convinced themselves of something doesn't mean its reality.”

Bianco told Bunch her group was “acting stupid.”

“I actually cant believe I took the time to respond,” he wrote.

Still, he pushed the investigation forward.

In a 2024 podcast interview, Bunch said the sheriff had been hamstrung by the courts. She told her host that Bianco had “tried to get a search warrant on the machines … but the judge, he just laughed. He said, ‘I’m not giving you anything.’”

Her coalition, she said, needed a judge who was ideologically aligned with Bianco.

“If we can get just one judge,” she said, “the whole dam will break.”

“Who’s gonna be the one judge that steps up?”

In 2026, she would get her answer.

‘Don’t have to ask permission from anybody’

The “constitutional sheriff” movement is rooted in the beliefs of a Southern California-based white supremacist who was active in the 1970s and 1980s and argued that sheriffs were the country’s only legitimate law enforcement officials. Its members cite the 10th Amendment, which says that powers not specifically delegated to the federal government fall to the states. The amendment, however, makes no mention of sheriffs.

The main organization behind the movement, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, is led by a former sheriff named Richard Mack.

Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff, speaks during a rally for gun-rights advocates in Olympia, Washington, in 2014.

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Since 2020, Mack has held a series of events alongside prominent election conspiracy theorists, encouraging sheriffs to investigate voter fraud in their own counties. Sheriffs, he said, “don’t have to ask permission from anybody.” As a result, many conspiracy-minded local groups have flocked to their county sheriffs for support when other officials have rejected their theories of election fraud.

Even though claims of widespread voter fraud have been debunked, these sheriffs have used their discretionary power to open investigations, many of them based on allegations that echo President Donald Trump's false claims about the 2020 election.

Bianco, who could not be reached for comment for this story, describes himself as a constitutional sheriff and agrees with the movement’s core tenets.

He has maintained power in Riverside even as the county’s shifting demographics have altered its historically conservative political landscape. Today there are more registered Democrats in Riverside than there are Republicans. But that shift to the left has coincided with a religiously fueled radicalization on the right.

One of the key figures of that movement is Tim Thompson, the pastor of a powerful Riverside church and Bianco’s political ally. Thompson has led an effort to stack local school boards with members who have rolled back transgender student rights and rejected textbooks that mention Harvey Milk, one of the nation’s first openly gay elected officials. He recently celebrated a parishioner who was pardoned by Trump after being convicted for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Thompson has also taken an interest in the local judiciary. In 2022, he supported a former prosecutor named Jay Kiel, who was running to fill a seat on Riverside’s Superior Court.

When Kiel joined Thompson on his popular podcast, he promised to “bring a little balance back to the bench” to counteract the state’s liberal Legislature. Kiel also praised Bianco and said Riverside needed “judges that are willing to stand up and say, this is the law, and I’m going to follow it.”

He won the election.

A new group emerges

By late 2024, a new group had taken control of the effort to prove voter fraud in Riverside County. The Riverside Election Integrity Team included many of the same people who had been working closely with Bunch, but they had very different tactics.

The group’s leader, Greg Langworthy, had testified alongside Bunch for years. While he was part of the same Christian conservative circles, he rejected her antagonistic approach. Langworthy is soft-spoken and polite. At board hearings, he wears button-down shirts and the occasional pocket protector. If Bunch was the movement’s firebrand, Langworthy is its genial middle school math teacher. He focused his group’s efforts on ballot counting, conducting audits of past elections to prove to local officials that the county’s voting system is rife with error.

Greg Langworthy gives public testimony on election oversight during a Riverside County Board of Supervisors meeting on April 2, 2024.

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Screenshot via the Riverside County Board of Supervisors

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Langworthy’s group asked the county registrar for records from the November 2025 election for California’s redistricting measure, Proposition 50, which passed with overwhelming support across the state and by a wide margin in Riverside. The measure redrew California’s congressional maps and gave Democrats a chance to pick up several House seats in the midterms.

Langworthy said he reviewed the data and found that the registrar’s office had counted 45,896 more ballots than it had received. His group demanded meetings with individual supervisors and asked the district attorney and the sheriff to look into the matter.

The alleged discrepancy wasn’t enough to change the election results in Riverside, and Langworthy said he was not interested in overturning the measure. “Prop. 50 just happened to be the next election,” he said.

On Feb. 10, the Riverside supervisors held a special hearing on the issue. Langworthy’s group had met with several officials but wanted to present its findings to the full board.

Hoping to lay the matter to rest, the board asked the Riverside registrar, Art Tinoco, to show the group that it had misread the data his office had provided. Tinoco said Langworthy and others had relied on raw data that did not include provisional and other ballots. The actual discrepancy between ballots cast and ballots counted, he said, was 103 — a figure independently confirmed by the Riverside Record.

Tinoco spoke for more than an hour, but members of the Riverside Election Integrity Team were not convinced. One by one they approached the podium with prepared statements, laying out their audit.

The supervisors struggled to hide their frustration. But Langworthy didn’t need the board; he had Bianco. Just one day before that hearing, an investigator from the sheriff’s office had appeared in court asking for a warrant to take hundreds of thousands of ballots from Tinoco’s office.

The judge handling the matter was Jay Kiel.

The investigator’s sworn statement, intended to justify the warrant, focused almost entirely on Langworthy’s audit and Bunch’s claims. In three years of investigating the matter, the sheriff’s office had failed to produce any of its own evidence to support a case.

Kiel signed off on the warrant and sealed it, preventing the public from seeing the justification for Bianco’s seizure of the ballots.

Over the next few weeks, Bianco's office removed 1,500 boxes of election materials from the registrar’s office. If stacked, they would rise as high as the Empire State Building.

It was the first time in the nation’s history that a sheriff took possession of previously cast ballots.

‘You intend to ignore my directives’

The California attorney general, Rob Bonta, appears to have been caught off guard.

A day after Bianco seized the first batch of ballots, Bonta sent him a letter asking him to “pause” his investigation. Bonta wrote that he was “concerned” that Bianco had taken the boxes without probable cause that a crime had occurred.

Bianco ignored him.

A few days later Bonta sent another letter. “I learned that you intend to ignore my directives and plan to start counting the seized ballots tomorrow,” Bonta wrote. “Let me be clear: this is unacceptable.”

Bianco called a press conference to tell reporters he would continue counting ballots and that the attorney general did not have the authority to stop him. What had been a behind-the-scenes battle immediately became national news.

“I will carry out my constitutional duty to pursue justice,” Bianco said. He called the attorney general “an embarrassment to law enforcement.”

According to the California Constitution, the attorney general has “direct supervision over every district attorney and sheriff ... in all matters pertaining to the duties of their respective offices.” There is no California case law directly addressing this provision.

Bianco believes he is the final authority on everything that happens in his county. In flouting Bonta’s orders, he has sparked a high-stakes legal showdown testing the constitutional separation of powers. The case is currently in front of the state Supreme Court.

Attorney General Rob Bonta speaks at a press conference at the California Department of Justice in Sacramento on Feb. 4, 2025.

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Fred Greaves

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Bonta didn’t file a lawsuit to try to stop Bianco until almost a month after he first learned about the ballot seizure, and only after the story exploded in the national press. At that point, according to sworn statements by investigators, Bianco’s office had already begun counting the ballots, opening about 22 boxes.

During that same period, Bonta filed at least a dozen lawsuits on other issues, many of them against the Trump administration.

A spokesperson for Bonta said the attorney general was trying to “work cooperatively with the sheriff’s office in order to better understand the basis for its investigation,” and that Bonta believed Bianco was complying with his directives.

The state’s initially tepid response, and its inability, thus far, to get Bianco to return the ballots raise concerns about how officials here will be able to protect future elections.

Bianco has already said he wouldn’t hesitate to seize ballots again, even in the June primary for California governor, when his own name will be on the ballot.

And there’s another critical election that Bianco could throw into flux: In the November midterms, the Riverside registrar will be responsible for counting a significant percentage of the ballots in California’s 48th Congressional District. Last year’s redistricting effort made the district competitive for Democrats. Of the 435 House seats nationwide, it’s one of fewer than three dozen that analysts consider too close to call. These races will ultimately determine which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives.

If Bianco takes ballots cast in the race for the California 48th, the ensuing chaos could transcend Riverside County.

A broader network

In the months before Bianco’s ballot seizure, the FBI seized reams of paper ballots cast in Fulton County, Georgia, based on debunked claims from citizen election-deniers, and sought electronic voter data from Maricopa County, Arizona, despite multiple investigations that have turned up no evidence of fraud. The Justice Department has demanded voter information in dozens of states, leaving many attorneys general to fight those demands in court. In speeches and on social media, Trump has escalated his voter fraud claims. He has said Republicans should “nationalize the voting.”

Some of the administration officials pushing these efforts are associated with the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank that has consistently supported unverified election conspiracy theories. The founding director of the institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, John Eastman, was disbarred in California last week for being one of the legal masterminds behind the attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

Several years ago, the Claremont Institute set its sights on sheriffs and began hosting week-long education sessions to provide them with a roadmap for promoting Trump’s brand of conservatism in their counties. Bianco attended the training, and the institute later gave him its “Sheriff of the Year” award — a bust of John Wayne — at a fundraiser in Huntington Beach.

Other sheriffs who were trained at the institute have since dedicated the resources of their offices to investigate baseless allegations of election fraud, but all of those efforts have failed.

In 2022, when it seemed as though Bianco’s investigation into Bunch’s claims had also reached a dead end, Mack’s constitutional sheriff’s organization offered the services of “an expert in cyber crimes” who could “provide Sheriffs with immutable evidence of election fraud” to help them push their investigations forward.

That expert was Gregg Phillips. Before Trump tapped him to lead emergency services at FEMA, he had a history of profiting from unfounded allegations of voter fraud, asking donors to fund his pursuit of concrete evidence and pocketing much of the money.

Recently, Phillips was back in the news with a different claim: He said he had been “teleported” against his will to a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.

Jeanne Kuang contributed reporting for this story.

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

Los Angeles is known for its bustling city landscape and even the beaches, but don’t miss out on what our coast has to offer. Here are a few ways to enjoy what’s beyond the sand.

Whale watching

Set sail to see whales, dolphins and more on a whale watching cruise. Harbor Breeze Cruises is just off the coast of Long Beach and the Los Angeles Harbor. Tours run throughout the day and start at $30 or $45 per person. Another option, Newport Whales, is further south in Orange County. Prices for those tours range from $38 to $84.50 per person. Good news, whale watching season never ends, so there’s always something to see.

People wanting to get out on the ocean can give sportsfishing a try

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Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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Los Angeles Times

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Sports fishing 

For a little more action, give sports fishing a try. Marina del Rey Sportsfishing offers 4.5-hour and 7-hour fishing trips every day. You can rent a tackle kit, which includes a rod and reel. Valid fishing licenses are required for people ages 15 and up. You can get one at most local sports stores.

Learning to surf at one of L.A.'s beaches is a great way to enjoy the ocean.

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Getty Images North America

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Surfing lessons

If you’ve been meaning to take up a new hobby or sport, why not give surfing a chance? L.A. has no shortage of surf spots, meaning it also has no shortage of surf schools. Down at Santa Monica Surf Tours, $185 per adult or $165 per child gets you a 5.5-hour lesson that includes gear and lunch. Malibu Makos has “Surf Saturdays” where for $99 a person, you can get a 4-hour surf instruction with gear included.

As you drive up the high peaks of Catalina Island’s rural communities, endless views of the Pacific Ocean can be seen.

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Zaydee Sanchez

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LAist

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Catalina Island 

From snorkeling to submarine tours, Catalina Island has excursions for everyone to enjoy. One-way tickets from Long Beach or San Pedro to Avalon cost about $45. Once you land, there’s no shortage of daytime adventures, including kayaking and fly fishing. You can find more information on activities here.

The Point Vicente Lighthouse trail in Rancho Palos Verdes is a breezy 1.6 miles and a great stop for ocean views.

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Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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Los Angeles Times

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Beach Hikes 

Beach hikes might not count as an ocean exploration, but they can give you some of the best views of the Pacific. Here are a few (of many) coastal hikes for every skill level:

• Point Mugu Scenic and Overlook Trails Loop in Malibu - 2.6 miles
• Solstice Canyon Trail in Malibu - 2.9 miles
• Los Leones Trail in the Pacific Palisades - 4.2 miles

This story was originally published by CalMatters.

Democrat Xavier Becerra will advance to the November general election in the race for California governor, capping a sudden and dramatic ascent for a career politician who is running on his experience and his willingness to take on President Donald Trump.

Becerra, the former state attorney general, has secured nearly 27% of the vote in the June 2 primary, with about two-thirds of votes counted as of Friday afternoon. If elected in November, he would be the first Latino to serve as California governor in more than a century.

It’s still unclear who his opponent will be: Returns so far show Republican Steve Hilton most likely to advance with more than 26% of votes counted, though the trailing Democrat Tom Steyer has not conceded and could make up ground in the nearly three million votes that remain to be counted.

California uses a top-two primary system; the two candidates with the most votes advance to the November ballot regardless of party.

The November race could differ dramatically depending on the opponent. If it’s Hilton, Becerra would be heavily favored to win: Democrats in California outnumber Republicans nearly two-to-one, and Hilton is endorsed by Trump, whom Californians disapprove of in high numbers.

If it’s Steyer, California can expect an all-out slugfest between opposing wings of the Democratic Party, supercharged by the hundreds of millions of dollars Steyer has spent from his personal fortune on the primary alone.

While the hedge fund manager-turned-Democratic donor and climate activist has run a progressive campaign and garnered the support of Bernie Sanders surrogates, Becerra is favored by more of the Democratic establishment.

Becerra, who had lingered in the single-digits in polling, surged in popularity following the political implosion of former frontrunner Eric Swalwell, with establishment Democrats favoring the former Health and Human Services secretary and former state attorney general over former Rep. Katie Porter and the outsider Steyer.

It was a surprising and swift ascent for the mild-mannered career politician who was previously part of a crop of lower-polling Democratic candidates that party chair Rusty Hicks was publicly pressuring to drop out of the race.

“Guess what? The underdog stayed in the fight,” Becerra said at an election night rally Tuesday in Los Angeles, calling his near-victory “the everyday miracle of living in a state that regularly makes the improbable seem inevitable.”

The decision comes at a particularly consequential time for California. Residents face a crushing cost of living, nation-topping gas prices made worse by the war in Iran, wildfire risks that have driven insurance companies out of state, an unstable state budget, impending federal cuts to the state’s expansive health system and an economy dampened by immigration enforcement.

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

Nearly three months ago, the Los Angeles City Council voted to fund homelessness prevention programs to the tune of $177 million. Despite approval by Mayor Karen Bass, the funding still has not been cleared by City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto.

Now, city leaders want answers about the delay.

A motion introduced earlier this week by Councilmember Ysabel Jurado said the “contracts remain unexecuted without explanation.” The motion goes on to say the setback has caused “$17 million ... in emergency rental assistance to sit unused” and has put “services for those at risk of homelessness in jeopardy.”

If passed by the council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee and later approved by the full council, Jurado’s motion would call on Feldstein Soto to report back to the council within 30 days about the reasons for the delay.

Representatives with the City Attorney’s Office did not respond to LAist’s repeated requests for comment.

Tenant aid providers said they’ve entered their third month without funding from the city. They said without an executed contract, legal aid organizations may soon have to lay off staff and stop taking eviction cases.

“The people who are providing the services are all in nonprofit organizations that don't have a great deal of extra funding to cover this contract that isn't being paid,” said Barbara Schultz, housing director at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.

How we got here

Feldstein Soto has held up the tenant aid funding since April 2025, when she refused to sign a previously approved five-year funding deal with the Legal Aid Foundation. At the time, she argued the contract should have gone through a competitive bidding process.

City officials responded by putting out a request for proposals. They ultimately selected the Legal Aid Foundation, along with several other tenant rights groups, to receive funding set aside for rent relief, tenant education, enforcement of the city’s tenant anti-harassment ordinance and programs that provide free attorneys to tenants facing eviction.

Much of the funding for these homelessness prevention programs comes from the city’s Measure ULA, also known as the L.A. “Mansion Tax.” That tax is now facing potential elimination from a statewide November ballot measure from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.

The city attorney’s tenant rights track record 

Feldstein Soto has frequently clashed with tenant rights advocates.

She previously attempted to remove the word “right” from the city’s “Right To Counsel” ordinance, which supplies free eviction defense attorneys to qualified tenants.

Feldstein Soto also has faced criticism for not prosecuting more landlords accused of rent gouging in the wake of the 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires.

She also was accused of failing to defend the rights of tenants at the high-rise apartment complex Barrington Plaza, who went to court to successfully fight wrongful evictions from landlord company Douglas Emmett, which donated to a campaign opposing Feldstein Soto’s opponent in the 2022 election.

Feldstein Soto launched an audit of the Legal Aid Foundation last year. So far, no findings have been released.

Schultz said the organization has provided all the financial and administrative documentation requested by the L.A. Housing Department related to the contracts.

Why it matters for renters

The Legal Aid Foundation is the lead contractor for the city’s eviction defense funding, but the money is shared with other legal aid organizations as well.

Elena Popp, who leads the Eviction Defense Network, said her small team of lawyers can’t continue to take on tenant cases until funding is approved.

“We're contemplating layoffs effective June 15 unless we can raise the part of the money that is our budget from the city,” Popp said. “If we lay people off, then tenants won't be served.”

Anna Urena, a paralegal with the Eviction Defense Network, says her organization would normally do intake for about 300 tenants per month.

“We're not taking on new cases. We're not representing new people right now because we don't know what's going to happen,” she said. “We really cannot leave our tenants behind.”

What’s next?

Jurado’s motion has not yet been scheduled for a vote in the council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee.

Based on her third-place showing so far in the June primary election results, it appears Feldstein Soto will not be L.A.’s city attorney much longer. Popp said Feldstein Soto’s lame duck status doesn’t bode well for the contract getting signed soon.

“She now has no incentive to sign, and pressure on her will not get her to sign,” Popp said. “If that happens and the City Council doesn't take charge of this, maybe hire outside counsel to get the approval, then we won't see any money until the new city attorney comes in.”

Millions of people are about to pack stadiums across the U.S., Canada and Mexico for the World Cup, starting June 11.

Public health officials have been working to ensure the health and safety of the masses of fans they're expecting at the 104 matches across 16 cities through mid-July.

In the U.S., World Cup preparations are coming in a time of a diminished federal health presence and funding. It's upped the workload for host city health departments, as they're also strapped for federal funding.

Nevertheless, World Cup host city health officials say they're prepared for the many challenges that come with large-scale celebrations and gatherings.

"We've been focusing on expecting the expected" — issues related to weather, health and human behavior, says Dr. Marcus Plescia, district health director for Fulton County, Georgia, which includes Atlanta.

Planning for the event is ongoing, says Dr. Philip Huang, director of Dallas County Health and Human Services in Texas. "To be able to begin preparations a year out is a luxury for us, compared to a lot of the situations that we deal with," he says.

"We call Atlanta 'Hotlanta' for a reason"

For public health departments, the World Cup is a big deal –- but they're well prepared for the biggest challenges.

Summer heat, for instance. "We call Atlanta 'Hotlanta' for a reason," says Georgia's Dr. Plescia, "It's going to be hot and humid here -– so heat-related injuries are going to be an issue."

Atlanta is hosting eight World Cup matches and the team from Uzbekistan. At downtown Centennial Olympic Park, a month-long fan festival is expected to draw some 15,000 people a day. Cooling stations will offer air-conditioning and hydration.

Then there's feeding the crowds. "The biggest lift for us and for all health departments is that our environmental health workers have to inspect all of the food vendors — and there will be a whole lot of food vendors," Plescia says.

Inspectors will check every day to ensure the facilities are in working order and the food is safe to eat. "We want to make sure that people feel confident that they can go out to eat and have a good time –- and they don't have to worry about getting food poisoning," Plescia says.

When lots of people gather, germs tend to spread. "We're worried about sexually transmitted infections because there's going to be a lot of people here and it's going to be a festive atmosphere," Plescia says. "And then we're worried about things maybe we wouldn't have been worried about as much before, particularly measles." Measles is highly contagious among those who haven't been vaccinated, and there have been 30 U.S. outbreaks this year.

Dallas is hosting nine World Cup matches — the most of any city. The health department is stepping up disease surveillance in wastewater, expanding sites and covering more area, says Dr. Huang, the county health authority. Beyond looking for typical threats like influenza and COVID, they're also testing for "whatever might appear" through genomic sequencing, he says.

They're also broadening mosquito surveillance –- setting insect traps and testing for pathogens they can spread. "We always test for West Nile virus," Huang says, "But we're also increasing our testing for dengue, chikungunya and Zika because of all the [incoming] international travel."

Medical staff are also looking out for symptoms of Ebola or hantavirus, due to outbreaks.

Keeping track of which diseases are circulating means they'll be able to alert hospitals and the public quickly if they see a spike. "It's a lot of things we normally do but certainly more enhanced," Huang says.

They're also preparing health tips for the public in different languages: Wear a hat and sunscreen and hydrate when it's hot out. Bug spray and long sleeves help prevent mosquito bites. Stay home if you're sick. "It's the same messages [we always share], but it's really concentrated because we've got so many people coming during a hot period of time in Dallas," Huang says.

"Most of our staff are not taking vacations"

The World Cup finals are jointly hosted by New York and New Jersey on July 19.

Officials have been running practice simulations to prepare for outbreaks and mass casualty events. "We plan for the worst case scenario and go through it before it actually happens," says Dr. Alister Martin, New York City's health commissioner.

They've also set up "incident command" to "divert resources from normal stuff so that we can manage any potential emergencies," Martin says, adding that the operation will continue through much of the summer, for other big events planned in New York, including America's 250th anniversary, Pride month and the Puerto Rican Day parade.

In Los Angeles, which is hosting eight games, including the U.S. opening match versus Paraguay, risk-assessment teams will monitor the surroundings for chemical exposures and biological threats.

In L.A., diminished federal assistance means the health department is counting on existing staff to do the extra work. "Most of our staff are not taking vacations during the month of the World Cup because they'll need to work -– we'll be obviously accruing overtime costs," says Barbara Ferrer, the L.A. county health director.

And much of their regular work, like routine food inspections, gets put aside. "I know it would be easier if we weren't in a resource constrained environment," Ferrer says. "But I want to provide assurance that even in a resource constrained environment, we're well prepared."

Ferrer says they've successfully planned and managed other events of national significance, like the 2022 Super Bowl. "This work isn't new to us," she says, adding that staff are making great efforts "to make sure this is a joyous time in L.A. county and [that] we're all safe."

This year's experience will better prepare Los Angeles to host other events, she says — like the 2027 Super Bowl and the 2028 Summer Olympics.

Ferrer hopes these events will help authorities see that public health is key to public safety — and worth investing in.

Less of a federal presence

On the federal level, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which serves as the nation's public health agency, has a muted presence this year.

"Usually, the CDC is a visible lead when we have international events in the United States, particularly across the country, versus just in a single state," says Dr. Debra Houry, former chief medical officer for the CDC who resigned last year.

The current Trump administration has pushed thousands of workers out of the CDC workforce and tampered politically with some of its functions, such as setting vaccine policy and publishing scientific papers. The agency's scientists rarely speak directly with the public anymore; their messages are filtered through politically appointed leadership.

Other governmental groups that would typically be involved, such as the National Security Council's biosecurity group, the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, and the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, have been disbanded, left vacant or don't have permanent leaders, Houry says.

The diminished federal presence serves as the backdrop for the World Cup.

Emily Hilliard, press secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services which oversees the CDC and ASPR, wrote in an email response to NPR: "HHS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are actively coordinating with state, local, and global partners to ensure public health and safety during FIFA World Cup 2026 and enhance any measures, as needed."

Localities have found that the federal presence is late in coming, and not as coordinated as it may have been in the past, says Lori Freeman, CEO for the National Association of County and City Health Officials, which represents health departments.

Freeman says the CDC started holding coordination calls and issuing some guidance a few months ago –- long after host cities started their own preparations. She notes: "When it comes to merging public health, emergency response and preparedness, that is an area we worry constantly about because the federal government is the agency that must manage across state jurisdictions between and among states."

Some have stepped up to fill perceived gaps. For instance, Georgetown University has set up a Health Security Operations Center to track infectious diseases and send out daily reports, to inform places expecting an influx of travelers throughout the World Cup.
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