The Brief

Lawmakers and advocates say Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration is making inflated estimates about the cost of legislation, with some suggesting his subordinates have been trying to kill the bills without making the governor politically accountable for the outcome.

“While people are dying on the streets from a lack of access to behavioral health care treatment, state agencies continue to fabricate exorbitant cost estimates,” Sen. Dave Cortese, a Democrat from Campbell, told CalMatters after one of his mental health proposals died recently in the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco who authored another mental health bill that died recently, said in a public hearing last month that the administration’s cost estimate of his bill was “extreme and outrageous.”

The pointed accusations from Democratic lawmakers and health care advocates who tend to be friendly with the Democratic governor are extraordinary because such criticism is rarely made in public. The examples also stand out because they challenge the administration’s response on one of the governor’s top priorities, mental health.

The administration did not accept an interview request with CalMatters and would not provide more detail – to CalMatters or to lawmakers – to explain the cost estimates. By email, however, a spokesperson insisted the costs were accurate and rejected the idea that they were intentionally inflated.

“It’s outrageous and inaccurate for anyone to suggest these numbers are fabricated or artificially inflated,” Rodger Butler, a spokesperson for Newsom’s Health and Human Services Agency, said in an email. “Legislative fiscal analyses from state government departments are informed by real-world, on-the-ground experience implementing legislative mandates.”

Whatever the motivations, four health care bills with controversial cost estimates died quietly earlier this month in the Senate and Assembly Appropriations committees even after each had advanced without a single “no” vote from a Democratic legislator.

The Appropriations Committees are focused on the cost of legislation, especially in a year when the state is struggling with a budget deficit. The four bills were moved to the committees’ “suspense files” along with 263 other controversial or costly bills. Each committee then killed the bills in their respective suspense file with a single vote.

Mike Gatto, a former Democratic lawmaker from Los Angeles who chaired the Assembly Appropriations Committee, said inflated cost estimates from a governor’s administration are nothing new.

When an executive-branch agency provides “a significantly exaggerated cost” on a piece of legislation “it’s generally a big flashing light that the administration dislikes the bill and that the governor would likely veto it,” he said.

It can be advantageous for the governor when legislators quietly kill those bills, he said.

“Having the appropriations committee there to kill it and to take the arrows (of criticism), that is a tremendous benefit politically for any governor,” Gatto said.

Gatto has a hand-written note framed on his wall that former Gov. Jerry Brown gave him expressing Brown’s appreciation for keeping bills from reaching the governor’s desk.

In a corner of the note are two words: “Keep holding.”

But Thad Kousser, a former legislative staffer who’s now a professor of political science at UC San Diego, said the integrity of the legislative process is jeopardized if cost estimates are not accurate.

“You’ve got to have reasonable and realistic estimates that are not part of a political strategy in order for everyone to make informed decisions,” he said.

This year alone, according to the Digital Democracy database, lawmakers considered 2,522 bills, many of them with large potential costs to taxpayers.

Democrat calls costs ‘extreme and outrageous’

Sen. Wiener’s legislation, Senate Bill 294, would have required an automatic review of cases in which commercial health plans denied children and young people mental health treatment.

Wiener, the chair of the Senate’s mental health caucus, said in the public hearing last month that the measure “does nothing more than require health plans to provide the coverage that they’re required to provide and stop denying covered behavioral health care treatment to children.”

So he said it was “outrageous” when the Department of Managed Health Care estimated that the bill would cost $87.6 million per year by 2028 and would require 340 new employees. That’s a 55% increase over the 610 positions in the department’s budget for the 2022-23 fiscal year. A separate state office, the Department of Insurance, also said the bill would require it to hire an additional five positions by 2026 for $1.2 million. There is no description in the cost estimate about how the departments arrived at the estimate or what jobs the new positions would perform.

The estimate also was a surprise to supporters of Wiener’s bill. In June, they sent a three-page memo to the chair of the Assembly Appropriations Committee, Democrat Buffy Wicks from Oakland, saying that a similar bill that failed last year had a significantly lower cost estimate. They also noted that the pending bill was more narrow in scope.

Lishaun Francis, director of behavioral health for the advocacy group Children Now, told CalMatters the Department of Managed Health Care, which is intended to protect consumers, inflated the cost of Wiener’s bill, presumably to try to kill it.

“This is not an analysis in good faith,” she said. “The unfortunate thing here is that DMHC has fallen into a trap where they are trying to be here for consumers while also inflating costs to make sure bills don’t get to the governor when there is a tight budget year.”

Before the bill died, it passed the Senate and an Assembly committee without any Democrats voting against it, according to the Digital Democracy database.

Are there ‘multiple layers of fiscal review?’

The Department of Managed Health Care, which issued the cost estimates, is part of the state’s Health and Human Services Agency. Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly, a Newsom appointee, oversees the agency.

CalMatters requested an interview with Ghaly or another top official to talk about the cost estimates, but the administration would not talk beyond providing the emailed statement from Butler at the Health and Human Services Agency.

“It’s important to note there are multiple layers of fiscal review throughout the process,” he said, citing the policy and appropriations committees in the Legislature and the governor’s Department of Finance.

But Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer told CalMatters “we rely principally on (agencies and departments) to provide us with the personnel and fiscal estimates.”

Policy committees, meanwhile, don’t evaluate the costs of bills.

“To say that policy committees vetted the finances of a bill is almost uniformly incorrect,” said Gatto, the former Assembly Appropriations chair. “Policy committees don’t do that.”

That independent fiscal review is supposed to happen at the Assembly and Senate Appropriations Committees, whose staffers are widely regarded as some of the smartest people in the Capitol. Their job is to independently vet the administration estimate and provide their own cost estimates for bills, Kousser and Gatto said.

“These people are professionals,” Kousser said. “They’re trying to get it right.”

Yet when it came to these four disputed bills, the analysis written by the staffs of the Appropriations Committees described the administration cost estimates and nothing more. Each of the four analysis included language similar to SB 999, which said only: “The Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC) reports the total costs of this bill as follows:”

Luis Quinonez, chief of staff for Sen. Anna Caballero of Merced, who chairs the Senate’s Appropriations Committee, declined to discuss specific bills, other than to say the committee’s consultants perform their own analyses.

Representatives for Assemblymember Wicks, who chairs the Assembly Appropriations Committee, did not return messages.

Another Democrat calls costs ‘exorbitant’ 

Regarding his mental health bill, Sen. Cortese said in an email he has “serious concerns about how the health care agencies are coming up with these cost projections.” Senate Bill 999 would have required health insurers to make sure they have mental health and addiction experts review claims for treatment, something advocates say already is required under state law.

This was the second time Cortese introduced the bill. A previous version made it through the Legislature in 2022 before Newsom vetoed it, saying the issue could be addressed by new regulations that would be issued soon.

After he felt draft regulations last year were inadequate, Cortese introduced a pared down version of the 2022 bill. But advocates were surprised to see the department’s cost estimate increase significantly to $18 million over five years and about $4 million annually after 2028 to pay for 13 permanent positions. The estimate does not explain how the department determined the number of positions needed or what jobs they would perform.

Advocacy groups supporting the bill noted that, in recent years’ budget allocations, the Department of Managed Health Care already received millions of dollars to cover some of the costs of implementing the proposed rules so it didn’t make sense that the costs would be so high.

“It’s sad to see some of these good faith efforts by advocates to try to bring accountability to the system kind of fall under the weight of a cost estimate that we don’t have a lot of insight into from the department,” said Lauren Finke, policy director for The Kennedy Forum, one of the bill’s sponsors.

Santa Cruz Democratic Assemblymember Gail Pellerin similarly couldn’t understand why there was such a high cost associated with her Assembly Bill 3260, which would have required health insurers to expedite reviews of mental health claims that doctors deem urgent.

The Department of Managed Health Care estimated the bill would cost nearly $140 million in the first five years and $32 million annually after 2029 to pay 144 new positions – a 23% increase in staff size, Pellerin said in an interview. The estimate, which also includes an additional $238,000 annually for the Department of Insurance, does not provide any further description about the need for the positions.

Sal Rosselli, president emeritus of the National Union of Healthcare Workers, which supported the bill, said in an email that his organization reached out to agency officials to ask for an explanation of the cost analysis, “but they declined to engage with us.”

Eleven other states, plus Washington, D.C. have already adopted similar laws, he said, with no evidence that those laws resulted in a major increase in workload.

Pellerin said she and her staff also couldn’t get an answer from the department about how it came up with what she called “inflated” numbers.

“Is this taxpayer-funded state department doing the job it is required to do?” she asked.

For Pellerin, the issue is personal. She knows first-hand how an urgent mental health crisis can spiral out of control. Her husband died by suicide in 2018.

“My family, we’ve experienced this kind of situation,” she told CalMatters.

Are agencies not showing their work?

Advocates for Health Access California also were frustrated by the cost estimates associated with Assembly Bill 236 by Pasadena Democratic Assemblymember Chris Holden. The bill would have given state regulators the authority to fine health insurers if their publicly available lists of in-network doctors and specialists aren’t accurate.

In testimony supporting the bill’s promises to crack down on so-called “ghost networks,” a therapist described having a patient end up in the emergency room from a suicide attempt after she called through a list of 50 mental health providers and couldn’t find one who’d see her.

The bill would have added teeth to a law that insurers and doctors are already supposed to be following and that state regulators are supposed to be monitoring.

The Department of Managed Health Care estimated its cost to be $3.5 million annually after 2029 for 14 new positions. In its one-sentence description, the Department of Health Care Services said its cost for the bill would be "approximately" $24 million. In an email, the department told CalMatters the bill would lead to “increased costs in the Medi-Cal managed care and behavioral health delivery systems and staffing requirements.”

“This $24 million is just mind-blowing,” said Rachel Linn Gish, a spokesperson for Health Access. “We do not understand how they came up with this number.”

Michael Genest spent four years as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s director of the Department of Finance. At CalMatters’ request, he reviewed the cost estimates of the four bills.

He said he could expect high costs for Wiener’s and Pellerin’s bills, but he said it wasn’t possible for him to independently evaluate the figures without more detail.

But he said the other two estimates definitely seemed out of line based on the information the administration and the committees provided.

He said it wouldn’t surprise him if the agencies were inflating the projected costs of the bills to try to get more money to backfill their budgets – or if top officials in Newsom’s administration had told departments to oppose bills that weren’t the governor’s priorities.

Either way, he said the agencies should do a better job of explaining their cost projections.

“It’s poor practice,” he said. “It’s not a good thing that they’re not showing the detail.”

Genest worked in the Capitol when Willie Brown was Assembly speaker and when John Burton was president of the Senate. He said those leaders, known for their aggressive leadership styles, would never let the governor’s administration get away with blowing off lawmakers’ concerns. Back then, he said, lawmakers would have threatened to cut the departments’ budgets if they felt they were getting the runaround.

“If a member was disrespected to that extent by a member of the bureaucracy,” he said, “there would be consequences.”

The Supreme Court is allowing California to use its new congressional map for this year's midterm election, clearing the way for the state's gerrymandered districts as Democrats and Republicans continue their fight for control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The state's voters approved the redistricting plan last year as a Democratic counterresponse to Texas' new GOP-friendly map, which President Donald Trump pushed for to help Republicans hold on to their narrow majority in the House.

And in a brief, unsigned order released Wednesday, the high court denied an emergency request by the California's Republican Party to block the redistricting plan. The state's GOP argued that the map violated the U.S. Constitution because its creation was mainly driven by race, not partisan politics. A lower federal court rejected that claim.

The ruling on California's redistricting plan comes two months after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Texas map that kicked off a nationwide gerrymandering fight by boosting the GOP's chances of winning five additional House seats.

"With an eye on the upcoming 2026 midterm elections, several States have in recent months redrawn their congressional districts in ways that are predicted to favor the State's dominant political party," said the court's December order in the Texas case. "Texas adopted the first new map, then California responded with its own map for the stated purpose of counteracting what Texas had done."

The "impetus" for adopting both states' maps was "partisan advantage pure and simple," wrote Justice Samuel Alito in a concurring opinion, which fellow conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch joined.

The Supreme Court has previously ruled that partisan gerrymandering is not reviewable by federal courts.

While the Trump administration supported the Texas redistricting by Republicans, it opposed California's, describing it as "tainted by an unconstitutional racial gerrymander." The administration asserted the case was different from Texas' due to the timing of the states' candidate filing periods and the fact that the California Republican Party and the federal government provided alternative maps that met California's "stated partisan goals."

Where the California map fits into the larger redistricting fight

Democrats are counting on California's map to help their party push back against Republican gerrymandering in Texas and other states. With rulings upholding both the Texas and California maps, the end result is that the two states may essentially cancel out each other's partisan gains.

Legal fights are still playing out over other new congressional maps, as Republican-led Florida and Democratic-led Maryland take steps to join the list of states that have redistricted before the midterms.

In New York, Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis and GOP members of the state's elections board are appealing a state judge's order for a new redistricting plan that would redraw Malliotakis' district, which the judge found illegally dilutes Black and Latino voters' collective power. A redraw of the New York City-based district could tip it into the Democrats' column.

In Utah, two House Republicans have filed a federal lawsuit that claims a new state court-selected congressional map, which could help Democrats win an additional House seat, violates the U.S. Constitution.

And in Virginia, a judge has ruled that a proposed constitutional amendment on congressional redistricting violates state law because the process Democratic state lawmakers used to advance it was improper. Virginia Democrats are appealing the decision.

Redistricting also remains an issue for the Supreme Court this term.

It has yet to rule on a challenge to Louisiana's voting map, but the October oral arguments suggested that the court's conservative majority is likely to continue undercutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Such a ruling could lead to new rounds of congressional gerrymandering — and the largest-ever decline in representation by Black members of Congress.

Edited by Benjamin Swasey
Copyright 2026 NPR

The killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Macklin Good in Minneapolis have renewed a long-running debate among Democrats over how best to address immigration enforcement, and whether advocating for "abolishing ICE" fits into a winning political playbook.

It is a debate that has taken on new urgency among Democrats against a backdrop of bipartisan backlash to the Trump administration's deportation efforts, led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Critics on both the left and the right say the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens by federal officers last month show the administration has gone too far.

For Democrats, the events in Minneapolis have created an opening ahead of this year's midterm election to shift the conversation on immigration — a notable change after struggling to message on the issue in the 2024 election.

But internal divides over what to do about ICE could complicate the effort. Calls to "abolish ICE" have been particularly amplified by progressive candidates, especially among younger Democrats running for Congress and those challenging Democratic incumbents. On Capitol Hill, far fewer Democrats have re-upped support for abolishing the agency, despite many rallying around the issue during President Donald Trump's first term.

Instead, many elected Democrats have called for reforms at ICE, wary of appearing out of step with voters who want strong enforcement of immigration laws but who disagree with the administration's tactics.

"There is no question that the dynamic from '24 has flipped, [during] which immigration was a sure strength for Trump and a profound weakness for Democrats," said Jonathan Cowan, president and co-founder of the centrist think tank Third Way. But, he cautioned, if the party wants to be successful in November, they should keep the focus on the administration's missteps.

"The divide in the Democratic Party is not over rage, disgust and anger," Cowan said. "The divide is what are you going to do about it? How do you channel that rage in a way that actually changes policy? Both short and long run."

He warns the "abolish ICE" slogan may not be universally embraced among voters across the country. Democrats hoping to flip districts or win over swing voters, Cowan said, should lean into different language, such as calling for a "reform" or "overhaul" of ICE.

He likens the debate to when many Democrats coalesced around the "defund the police" movement in 2020, a decision that Cowan argues created an opening for Trump to paint Democrats as soft on crime.

"People embraced an emotionally satisfying slogan that in the long run proved to be politically toxic and a barrier to getting serious police reform in the country," Cowan said. "We are in grave danger of the same problem happening for those who are embracing abolish ICE."

A protester carries a sign that reads "Defund The Police" during a July 3, 2020 march in Richmond, Va. Many Democrats have been wary of calls to "abolish ICE," and point to how calls to "defund the police" hurt the party with voters in 2020 and 2024.

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That may already be happening. In response to calls to abolish the agency, many Republicans have attempted to link the movement with "defund the police." White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt echoed that in a post on X last week, asking, "Why do Democrats keep attacking the law enforcement agencies that hunt down criminals and protect innocent American citizens?"

Loudest calls come from progressives and new candidates

The debate is poised to be especially salient in Democratic primaries and in states that have faced increased enforcement, such as Minnesota, Illinois, California and New York. Democratic candidates have already faced off on the debate stage in Illinois with competing pitches to abolish and reform ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. In Minnesota, immigration enforcement has become a key issue in the race to succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Tina Smith.

Some of the loudest calls to abolish ICE have come from Gen Z and millennial candidates, many of whom have sought to frame their bids around a larger rejection of Democratic Party norms.

Darializa Avila Chevalier has embraced that message. The 32-year-old progressive organizer and Ph.D. student is running a primary challenge against Rep. Adriano Espaillat, 71, in New York's 13th congressional district, which includes upper Manhattan and part of the Bronx.

"From the very beginning, I've been adamant that I wanted the abolition of ICE to be central to what we're talking about," said Avila Chevalier.

"It's an institution that should have never existed to begin with," she added. "It's an institution that is younger than I am. And so I've lived in a world where ICE didn't exist, and we can all go back to a world where ICE doesn't exist and never exists again."

ICE agents look for someone at a home on Jan. 28 in Circle Pines, Minn. Protests continue around the Twin Cities area after the Trump administration sent thousands of immigration agents to the region to search for undocumented immigrants.

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Avila Chevalier says Democratic candidates need "to be bold" in their solutions to issues affecting voters right now, and that includes on immigration.

"If I could trust that the leadership we have was reflecting our values, was actually meeting this moment," she said, "I wouldn't be running."

Avila Chevalier is one of 10 candidates currently backed by Justice Democrats. The political group has supported a handful of progressives who have gone on to win seats in Congress, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who delivered an upset primary win in 2018 and ran on a platform that included abolishing ICE, a stance she's reaffirmed in recent weeks.

For nearly a decade, Justice Democrats has rallied around anti-establishment candidates of all ages who often draw contrast to the Democrats they're challenging by rejecting donations from corporate PACs or pro-Israel lobbying groups. But in the wake of the fatal shootings in Minnesota, candidates the group supports are also drawing a line in the sand on immigration — pledging to abolish ICE.

"Every single one of these communities has an ICE story of their own. And it's up to us to listen to those communities … and show people what an opposition party, if in power, would actually do," said Justice Democrats spokesperson Usamah Andrabi. "That's what our slate of candidates exists to be."

Andrabi disagrees with the idea that "abolish ICE" creates more party divides than flips voters.

Protesters stage a march calling for an end to taxpayer spending on ICE and demanding a moratorium on evictions on Jan. 31 in Minneapolis.

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"The slogan is not the problem. ICE is the problem," he said.

Recent polling indicates there is some support for the issue among voters, though not overwhelming. A plurality of Americans, 46%, strongly support or somewhat support abolishing ICE, according to a YouGov poll conducted after the shootings in Minneapolis. Americans under 30 were most likely to oppose Trump's immigration agenda, according to the poll, and nearly 7 in 10 voice some level of support for getting rid of the agency.

It's a generational sentiment that may add important context when looking at the influx of younger candidates voicing support for the issue.

"I think that they are furious. They see it all over their news feeds. They see it in their communities. They also, I think, are less beholden to this idea of tradition or the way things have been done," said Amanda Litman, the founder of Run for Something, an organization that recruits and supports young people running for local office.

"I think that sense of the crisis and of the urgency of this moment … is something that young leaders really bring with them into their positions of power," she added. "And it is both their super strength and often their weakness because they're a little more radical in some ways."

Divides on Democratic messaging

Immigration enforcement has become a central issue in funding negotiations on Capitol Hill, where Democrats are lobbying for changes to the tactics used by immigration officers. Democrats want to narrow the type of warrants immigration officers can use to enter homes, require them to wear body cameras and prohibit the use of face masks.

While Democrats in Congress are united in what they see as the bare minimum needed to reform immigration enforcement, there is less consensus on how far to take the rhetoric. Though Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., is pushing to "defund and abolish ICE," as are some House lawmakers, other Democrats have taken a different approach.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D–Mass., would not directly answer whether she supports calls to abolish ICE, telling NPR it needs to be "totally reorganized" and "torn down to the studs and rebuilt." She declined to say whether campaigning on abolishing ICE would benefit Democrats.

It's a debate that's also playing out in competitive midterm matchups, including in the Senate Democratic primary in Maine, where the state's governor, Janet Mills, and first-time progressive candidate Graham Platner are running to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

Graham Platner is running against Gov. Janet Mills for the Democratic nomination for Senate in Maine. Platner has called for ICE to be "dismantled," characterizing it as "the moderate position."

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Mills has advocated for ICE reforms, calling for "measures" that would "prohibit ICE's lawless, dangerous conduct and their abuses of power." Platner has called for the agency to be "dismantled," characterizing it as "the moderate position" in a post on X.

Maine Gov. Janet Mills has not called for abolishing ICE, instead advocating for reforms at the agency.

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The degree to which candidates choose to embrace — or reject — calls to abolish ICE could prove particularly decisive in swing districts.

Though many voters want the current situation to change, calls to abolish ICE may mean different things to different people, argues Cowan of Third Way.

"You can take the literal word, slogan, abolish ICE, and it will get a certain level of support," he said. "But the moment you start asking people specifically what they actually support, the concept of abolishing interior immigration enforcement is not popular."

Though nearly half of Americans say they have some support for abolishing ICE, according to the latest YouGov poll, far fewer, less than a third, support abolishing the U.S. Border Patrol. When respondents were asked if they support Trump moving forward with a smaller enforcement effort, "aimed at criminals, not at hotel maids and gardeners," 55% strongly or somewhat approved.

The lack of Democratic consensus on the issue isn't stopping some progressive congressional hopefuls from standing by the policy they believe is right.

Mai Vang was in high school in 2003 when ICE was created. Now, more than two decades later, the 40-year-old Sacramento City councilmember is campaigning on abolishing the agency as she challenges 81-year-old Democrat Doris Matsui in California's 7th Congressional District.

"What we've seen is this agency has inflicted harm on our communities, and you can't reform it. There is not enough training or even body cameras that would justify what they are doing," she said in an interview.

When asked if she considered shying away from using the slogan, Vang pushed back.

"Not really because people are being killed and murdered by ICE," she said. "It's not a radical position to say we don't want an entity harming our families and loved ones. I don't think it's radical to want to dismantle an agency that is killing citizens."
Copyright 2026 NPR

Want more Olympics updates? Get our behind-the-scenes newsletter for what it's like to be at these Games.

It's the Winter Olympics, that special season every four years in which everyone you know is suddenly an expert on luge strategy and curling technique from the comfort of their couch.

There's plenty to dive into this year, at the unusually spread-out Milan Cortina Olympics.

Hundreds of athletes from around the world — including 232 from the U.S. — will descend on over two dozen venues across northern Italy to compete in 16 different sports. There are 116 medal events on the line throughout the 2 1/2 weeks. And this time, unlike the COVID-era 2022 Beijing Winter Games, spectators will be allowed to watch in person.

But you don't have to board a plane or sport hand warmers to get a good view, thanks to NBC's robust broadcasting rights and NPR's scrappy team of journalists on the ground. Here's how to follow the action — and peek behind the curtain — from home.

How to watch the opening ceremony

The Feb. 6 opening ceremony marks the official start of the Games (even though several sports, including curling and ice hockey, start competing two days earlier).

It will be held primarily at the historic San Siro Stadium in Milan, featuring performances by icons like Mariah Carey and Andrea Bocelli, as well as traditional elements like the Parade of Nations and the lighting of the Olympic cauldron.

But there will also be simultaneous ceremonies and athlete parades at some of the other venues — scattered hundreds of miles apart — and, for the first time in history, a second Olympic cauldron will be lit in the co-host city of Cortina d'Ampezzo.

NBC's live coverage of the opening ceremony (also streaming on Peacock) will begin at 2 p.m. ET on Friday, Feb. 6, with a prime-time broadcast planned for 8 p.m. ET the same day.

How to keep up once the Games begin

There are 16 days of competition between the opening and closing ceremonies, with contests and medal events scattered throughout, depending on the sport. Here's the full schedule (events are listed in local time in Italy, which is six hours ahead of Eastern time).

NBC says it will broadcast events live throughout the day, with a nightly prime-time highlights show at 8 p.m. ET, followed by a late-night version.

U.S.-based viewers can watch on NBC, Peacock and a host of other platforms, including the apps and websites of both NBC and NBC Sports. Seasoned Olympic viewers will recognize Peacock viewing experiences like "Gold Zone" (which whips around between key moments, eliminating the need to channel surf) and "Multiview," now available on mobile.

The Feb. 22 closing ceremony will be broadcast live starting at 2:30 p.m. ET, and again on prime time at 9 p.m. ET.

It will take place at a historic amphitheater in Verona, which will also host the opening ceremony of the Paralympics on March 6. Some 600 Para athletes will compete in 79 medal events across six sports — including Para Alpine skiing, sled hockey and wheelchair curling — before the closing ceremony in Cortina on March 15.

How to follow NPR's coverage

All the while, you can check out NPR's Olympics coverage to better understand the key people, context and moments that make up the Games.

NPR's five-person Olympics team will bring you news, recaps and color from the ground in Italy, online, on air and in your inbox. Plus, expect updates and the occasional deep dive from NPR's journalists watching from D.C. and around the world.

You can find all of NPR's Winter Olympics stories (past, present and upcoming) here on our website.

To listen to our broadcast coverage, tune to your local NPR station and stream our radio programming on npr.org or the NPR app.

Plus, subscribe to our newsletter, Rachel Goes to the Games, for a daily dose of what it's like to be there in person.

We'll also have a video podcast, Up First Winter Games, to further dissect the day's biggest Olympic stories and oddities. You can find it on NPR's YouTube page.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Californians could get instant rebates on electric vehicle purchases under Gov. Gavin Newsom's $200 million plan, which would require automakers to match state incentives dollar-for-dollar.

The plan, which the Legislature must still approve, lays out for the first time how the governor plans to steer a California-specific rebate program to bolster a slowing electric car market after the Trump administration cancelled federal incentives last year.

The California Air Resources Board would oversee the program, offering rebates at the point of sale to lower upfront costs for buyers instead of reimbursing them later. The draft does not specify rebate amounts, which the air board will determine during program design and discuss at a public workshop this spring, said Lindsay Buckley, a spokesperson for the agency.

The proposal exempts the program from the state’s usual rule-making requirements, allowing California to design and launch the rebates more quickly than typical for new programs.

Newsom first unveiled the incentive proposal as part of his January budget plan but released few initial details. State officials cast the subsidy as a response to President Donald Trump’s dismantling of incentives and blocking of California’s clean-vehicle mandate.

How the rebates would work

Outside experts and clean vehicle advocates said the details raise new questions about how the program would work in practice and who would benefit.

Ethan Elkind, a climate law expert at UC Berkeley, said structuring the incentives as grants allows the state to set the terms automakers must meet to access the money, giving California leverage over manufacturers.

But Mars Wu, a senior program manager with the Greenlining Institute, which advocates for investments in communities of color, said the draft plans fall short on equity, arguing the proposal does little to ensure the incentives reach the Californians who need them most.

“[The] proposal sets up a first-come, first-serve free-for-all scenario, which is not a prudent use of extremely limited public dollars in a deficit year,” she wrote in an email.

How far could the money go?

The proposal limits eligibility by vehicle price, not buyer income. New passenger cars qualify only if priced at or below $55,000, while vans, SUVs and pickup trucks are capped at $80,000. Used vehicles are limited to a sales price of $25,000. All vehicles must be registered to California residents.

The newly released details also add context about the size of the program. A CalMatters estimate of the governor’s initial proposal found that the $200 million would cover rebates for only about 20% of last year’s electric vehicle sales.

The proposed matching funds from auto manufacturers could allow the program to cover a larger share of buyers or provide larger point-of-sale rebates, depending on how the incentives are structured.

One clean car advocate said the details aren’t locked in yet — including how the rebates could be targeted. Wu said the state could move quickly without abandoning equity by deciding who qualifies in advance while still offering rebates at the dealership. “There is a way to balance equity and expediency,” Wu wrote.