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.”

Warner Bros. Discovery's blockbuster announcement Thursday that it would accept Paramount Skydance's takeover bid shouldn't be thought of simply as seeking to unify two major Hollywood players, two big streaming platforms and two leading TV news divisions under one roof.

It is certainly that. The nearly $111 billion Paramount-Warner marriage would unite their studios — and their back catalogue of shows and movies. It would add such franchises as D.C. Comics, Harry Potter and Game of Thrones to Paramount's Top Gun, Mission Impossible and Star Trek powerhouse. Paramount+ and HBO Max. CBS and CNN.

But there's more to it.

Paramount Skydance Chairman and CEO David Ellison is relying largely on the financial backing of his father, Larry Ellison — the co-founder of software giant Oracle, the lead investor in TikTok US, and one of the richest people on the planet.

The Ellisons have staged what appears to be a lightning-swift ascent through social and legacy media relying heavily on their connection to the Oval Office.

Should the Ellisons receive a green light from regulators to proceed with the deal, the minnow will have swallowed the whale. Warner currently has more than five times the market value of Paramount.

That's on top of acquiring Paramount itself and a major stake in TikTok US — all in less than a year. And that's in addition to Oracle, which runs much of the digital backbone of the nation's commerce and government.

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, right, sits next to media mogul Rupert Murdoch as they listen to President Donald Trump speak in the Oval Office.

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"It's tech giants becoming media giants," argues Jon Klein, a former top executive at CNN and CBS News.

But history shows such mega-mergers often end in tears. The movie business is expensive. Cable television is highly profitable but in steep decline as viewers cut the cord. The combined company will be saddled with debt. So why would the Ellisons spend their billions this way?

David Ellison has sought to be a force in Hollywood for years. He helped to produce movies with Tom Cruise at his family's company Skydance Media. But for his father, Larry Ellison, it's about more than just making his son's very expensive dreams come true.

"Beyond any dollars that they can derive — it's the data about consumer habits, down to the specific identity," Klein says.

He says the push into artificial intelligence by Oracle creates a thirst for more insight into how people view news and entertainment and what products they buy online. The streaming channels and social media giant both offer greater and more granular information.

"That's the prism that you've got to look at this Paramount/WBD deal through," says Klein, co-founder of HANG Media, a Gen Z social video engagement platform. "Oracle... wants to be one of the major players in AI. That's what Oracle wants to get out of media."

The deal still hinges on acceptance from antitrust regulators in Washington and Europe, who can seek to block the transaction. California's attorney general made clear Thursday night he would also give the acquisition tough scrutiny.

"If a merger substantially reduces competition in any market, it's illegal. Courts sort of take that literally," says University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner, who held a senior antitrust position in the U.S. Justice Department under former President Joe Biden.

"But in practice, the Justice Department has discretion on whether to challenge these mergers," Posner tells NPR. "And the courts have discretion on whether to block them."

Friendly ties to Trump

President Donald Trump's Justice Department is a wild card. Last year, the department's then antitrust chief, Gail Slater, took an aggressive stance against Google in court. Last month, the Justice Department sued to block Hewlett Packard Enterprise's $14 billion acquisition of a wireless tech competitor. Slater resigned under duress this month, however.

The Federal Communications Commission is unlikely to intervene, as no broadcast licenses would change hands in the Paramount takeover of Warner. But its chair, Brendan Carr, may well advise the Justice Department and he has lauded David Ellison's moves at CBS.

Even before sweetening its offer this week, Paramount proclaimed its "confidence in the speed and certainty of regulatory approval for its transaction."

Publicly, it argues that such consolidation is needed to take on streaming giants, very much including Netflix but also Amazon Prime, Apple, Disney and YouTube.

Behind the scenes — and sometimes in not-so-hidden ways — the Ellisons have become cozy with President Trump. Larry Ellison is a backer and adviser.

On Tuesday night, David Ellison attended Trump's State of the Union address as a guest of the president's ally, Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican. Graham tweeted out a photo of the two men making Trump's signature "thumbs-up" gesture ahead of the speech.

The president cares deeply about TV news. He has publicly said he wants new owners for CNN — which he has blasted repeatedly as "fake news" — and has proven willing to interfere in corporate matters in his return to the White House.

Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos departs the White House on Wednesday. Sarandos was there to discuss Netflix's bid for Warner Bros. just hours before Warner announced its preference for Paramount.

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Netflix chief Ted Sarandos met Thursday with administration officials at the White House — though notably not with Trump, according to an aide — in a last-gasp effort to salvage his company's competing bid. By the end of the night, Netflix had given up the fight.

The shadow cast over the process by the president has inspired sharp criticism of the path that Paramount and the Ellisons took to land the Warner deal.

"A handful of Trump-aligned billionaires are trying to seize control of what you watch and charge you whatever price they want," Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said in a statement. "With the cloud of corruption looming over Trump's Department of Justice, it'll be up to the American people to speak up and state attorneys general to enforce the law."

"It is not just the seemingly open corruption of this entire process that leaves me shaken," writes Jeffrey Blehar in the conservative National Review. "I am shaken by how little people will care."

Said Seth Stern, head of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, "Ellison will readily throw the First Amendment, CNN's reporters and HBO's filmmakers under the bus if they stand in the way of expanding his corporate empire and fattening his pockets."

CNN's future hangs in the balance

The Ellisons' acquisition of Paramount followed a similar path.

Last summer, the previous owners of Paramount announced the end of late night host Stephen Colbert's CBS show as they sought federal approval to sell the company to David Ellison.

While they cited economics, Colbert's was the top-rated late night show on network television — and he has been a lacerating satirist of the president. Colbert called the cancellation a "big fat bribe."

Ellison subsequently made additional pledges to the FCC's Carr to win support. Among them: he promised the cessation of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives throughout Paramount and the addition of an ombudsman to field complaints of ideological bias. He named the former head of a conservative think tank to that role.

Carr blessed the sale. He has since praised the shifts made at CBS News.

The question of what happens to CNN hovers prominently over the Warner sale. The network has undergone rounds of cuts under a series of owners seeking to reduce debt; Paramount would be its fourth corporate parent in under a decade.

Other elements are in play as well.

CBS's new editor in chief is Bari Weiss, founder of the center-right opinion and news site The Free Press. Ellison bought the site and added it to Paramount's portfolio.

Bari Weiss, CBS News' editor in chief, interviews conservative activist Erika Kirk in a CBS town hall event in December.

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Weiss has contended CBS and much of the rest of the media has been too reflexively hostile to conservatives and the president, and she's sought to revamp the newsroom.

CNN's Anderson Cooper, who has also served as a correspondent for CBS's 60 Minutes for two decades, recently announced that he would leave the show, citing the desire to spend time with his small children. Associates, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose internal network matters, say he was concerned about the approach that Weiss has taken at CBS.

She is considered likely to have a role over CNN as well, should the deal go through.

CNN CEO Mark Thompson urged colleagues to focus on their news coverage. "Despite all the speculation you've read during this process, I'd suggest that you don't jump to conclusions about the future until we know more," he wrote in a memo Thursday.

Perceived value beyond the bottom line

The deal David Ellison struck for Warner is valued at nearly $111 billion. The new company would carry substantial debts and have Saudi and Emirate backing. The profits are currently relatively modest.

Yet Klein contends larger motives are in play. Just look at Google, he says, which owns what many consider the dominant media company, YouTube.

"They want to know what you watch, and where you come from, and what you buy when you watch, and where you go after you buy, and what you post in the comments and what you like and love and all that," Klein says.

"And if you can combine that with your streaming content and your studio decisions and your marketing for all the content product you're creating," he adds, "you're in a very very powerful position."

Copyright 2026 NPR

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

The Serving Spoon has been an Inglewood cornerstone for four decades, dishing up grilled corn bread and fried turkey chops. 

Now, though, the whole country is in on the secret. 

The breakfast and lunch spot on Centinela Avenue was announced Wednesday by the James Beard Foundation as one of six winners of the America’s Classics Award, an honor the foundation says goes to “timeless” local institutions. The foundation is also responsible for the James Beard Award, one of the nation’s top culinary honors. 

The Serving Spoon joins a pantheon of other L.A.-area eateries to win the classics award including Guelaguetza, Langer’s Deli and Philippe the Original. 

Jessica Bane, part of the third generation to run the family-owned restaurant, said the honor is still sinking in, but that it validates decades of work. “It’s being done out of love,” Bane said.

The Serving Spoon has been an Inglewood cornerstone for four decades, dishing up grilled corn bread and fried turkey chops.

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The award announcement hailed The Serving Spoon as an “anchor” of L.A.’s Black community, run by staff who genuinely care for their customers.“The restaurant is cherished for its joyful hospitality and as a place where all can gather and feel at home,” the announcement read. 

The Serving Spoon didn’t exactly need Beard recognition — the diner is often packed and already has  pedigree as Snoop Dogg and Raphael Saadiq’s breakfast spot of choice in the 2000 Lucy Pearl song “You” — but Bane said the award takes the diner’s reputation national.“The recognition is beyond appreciated,” Bane said. 

The Serving Spoon was founded in 1983 by Bane’s grandfather, Harold E. Sparks. He passed the restaurant down to Bane and her brother, Justin Johnson, through their parents. 

The menu looks much the same as it did four decades ago, Bane said, though some of the dishes have been renamed for regulars. 

During the Thursday lunch rush a day after the announcement, The Serving Spoon’s vinyl booths were packed, as usual. Bane oversaw the dining room while Johnson marshaled plates of fried catfish through the kitchen. 

Tina and Kevin Jenkins waited for a table outside. The L.A. natives each have been coming to The Serving Spoon since childhood. They live in Lancaster now, but make sure to come back to the diner whenever they’re in town. 

“It’s the atmosphere, our people, our music,” Tina Jenkins said.

Despite taxes on imports at levels not seen in a century, Long Beach’s seaport had a good year in 2025. And a decent January.

Port officials said Wednesday they started the new year by leading the nation in trade, responsible for moving more than 847,000 shipping containers in January — 51% of the total cargo at the San Pedro Bay Complex, which it shares with neighboring Port of Los Angeles.

In a call with reporters, Port CEO Noel Hacegaba said that despite a “fair share of doom and gloom” at the time, the seaport finished 2025 as its busiest year on record.

This comes days after President Donald Trump signed new, across-the-board tariffs on U.S. trading partners, and later added he would raise the tariffs to 15%. It’s a direct response to a recent Supreme Court decision that found his tariffs announced last April were unconstitutional.

The new tariffs would operate under a law that restricts them to 150 days, unless approved by Congress.

Asked to measure how much this will affect the seaport, traders, logistics companies and consumers, Hacegaba reiterated a word he has evoked heavily in the past 10 months: uncertainty.

“Our strong cargo volumes do not suggest we are not being affected by tariffs,” Hacegaba said, adding the Port saw a 13% decline in imports driven by major reductions in iron, steel, synthetic fibers, salt, sulfur and cement.

Economists are somewhat more confident, saying it would take nothing short of a national economic crisis to reverse the seaport’s fortunes. “Even if the market is affected, our standing at the Port of Long Beach, even compared to other ports, is strong,” said Laura Gonzalez, an economics professor at Cal State Long Beach.

But experts caution that the ruling will heap the most damage on businesses, especially smaller enterprises, as well as the average consumer who already bore the tariff’s costs last year.

Noel Hacegaba, CEO of the Port of Long Beach, held his first State of the Port in Long Beach on Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026.

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Tariffs added $1,700 in costs to the average U.S. household, as importers raised prices to offset higher import taxes — especially on clothes, shoes and electronics from China and other Southeast Asian nations.

Consumers, Gonzalez said, should budget over the next six months “for essentials.”

Priyaranjan Jha, an economics professor at UC Irvine, said historically trade policies since 2018 have shown that for every dollar of duty imposed, consumer prices rose by about 90 cents.

Even if tariffs are reduced or reversed, and pressure is relieved on importers, consumers shouldn’t expect lower sticker prices right away, he said. “Firms do not always reduce prices as quickly as they raise them, especially if contracts or inventories are involved.”

Richer San, a former banker and business owner in Long Beach, said he’s in regular talks with shops across the city’s historic Cambodia Town that have been crushed by the increased prices of imported ingredients.

“Most of these are family-owned businesses operating on very small profit margins,” he said, adding there is little to no margin to “absorb higher costs.”

Many companies managed to avoid price increases last year in part by stockpiling inventory in the first half of the year to be sold through Christmas and the start of the year. As stock dwindles, many businesses might be less willing to eat the cost of a new set of tariffs.

Marc Sullivan, president of Long Beach-based Global Trade and Customs, said his logistics company saw a brief boom last year in ordered goods, mostly medical equipment and pharmaceuticals.

But by June, orders dropped 35%, a trend that continues today. It’s forced him to freeze any new hiring in the past year and at least through the next six months as he waits for federal officials to settle on tariffs that will determine the cost of shipped goods.

“For the companies that I work with that are importing into the state here, it’s just ‘hold on and let’s see what happens,’” he said.

“I’d like to hire a salesperson to go out and chase new business, … but it’s just a bleak outlook,” he added.

In the interim, he’s received a steady flow of calls (that started “within minutes” of the ruling) from importers looking to claim refunds or recoup their tariff expenses. The U.S. Treasury had collected more than $140 billion from tariffs enacted under emergency powers, and the Supreme Court left the decision of how to appropriate the refund proceedings to lower courts.

His response: They might be stuck waiting for a while. “Customs doesn’t pay anything back quickly,” he said. “It could be a year before you ever see anything back to you.”

Sullivan said he knows of companies that spent upwards of $20,000 per shipment for months.

“They’re going to want that money to be able to reinvest it,” Sullivan said.

But some experts say that consumers, as well as small businesses, deserve a share of refunds.

“The importer may receive a refund even though consumers bore much of the cost,” Jha said. “Courts generally refund the statutory payer, not downstream buyers, but that opens the possibility of follow-on litigation. Small businesses that directly imported goods and paid tariffs should qualify for refunds.”

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A long turtle lineage: Dubbed “Porkchop” by aquarium staff due to her hefty appetite, the young female green sea turtle represents one of seven sea turtle species worldwide (six of which occur in U.S. waters). These animals have called our oceans home since at least the time of the dinosaurs — about 110 million years ago, according to NOAA. All species of sea turtles found in the U.S. are listed as either endangered or threatened and are protected by the Endangered Species Act.

Porkchop’s healing journey: Aquarium vets had to amputate Porkchop’s right front flipper after tangled fishing lines severely cut off her blood flow. She also had a fishing hook removed from her throat. First rescued after being spotted in the San Gabriel River by volunteers with the aquarium’s sea turtle monitoring program last March, her healing journey took nearly a year. She now swims and eats as well as her four-flippered kin and after a final physical exam, blood sample and X-ray, vets determined she was ready to return to her wild roots. She also now has a microchip, so if she ends up stranded again, scientists will know it’s her.

An ambassador for conservation: Porkchop became the aquarium’s first public-facing ambassador for its expanded green sea turtle rescue efforts. A new holding tank, viewable by the public, doubles the aquarium’s capacity to rescue green sea turtles and provides firsthand education about their conservation efforts. The aquarium is currently caring for another larger and older female green sea turtle — she weighs more than 200 pounds — rescued from the San Gabriel River in January. She’ll be in the public viewing tank in the coming months when she’s recovered a bit more.

How to help local green sea turtles: Green sea turtle populations are actually doing quite well in the San Gabriel River, but trash, debris and pollution remains a big threat. If you fish the San Gabriel River, never litter fishing lines or hooks. If you see a stranded sea turtle in the San Gabriel River or elsewhere, call the West Coast Marine Mammal and Sea Turtle Stranding Network’s hotline at (562) 506-4315. You can also donate to the aquarium’s rescue program.