The Brief

The Trump administration has drafted a memo to Congress outlining its intent to end nearly all federal funding for public media, which includes NPR and PBS, according to a White House official who spoke to NPR.

The memo, which the administration plans to send to Congress when it reconvenes from recess on April 28, will open a 45-day window in which the House and Senate can either approve the rescission or allow the money to be restored.

The official, who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity, confirmed the existence of the draft.

In a statement on Monday that did not refer to the memo, the White House said: "For years, American taxpayers have been on the hook for subsidizing National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as 'news.'" The statement includes examples of what the White House said is "trash that passes as 'news'" and "intolerance of non-leftist viewpoints."

NPR produces the award-winning news programs Morning Edition and All Things Considered, while PBS is best known for its nightly PBS News Hour and high-quality children's programming, such as Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood.

Earlier this month, on social media platforms, President Donald Trump blasted the two primary public broadcasting networks, posting in all caps: "REPUBLICANS MUST DEFUND AND TOTALLY DISASSOCIATE THEMSELVES FROM NPR & PBS, THE RADICAL LEFT 'MONSTERS' THAT SO BADLY HURT OUR COUNTRY!"

Trump is expected to propose rescinding $1.1 billion — two years of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB, a congressionally chartered independent nonprofit organization that in turn partially funds NPR and PBS.

In making the move, the president appears to be drawing impetus from a House Oversight subcommittee hearing in late March. The panel called the NPR and PBS chiefs to testify, alleging the networks' news coverage is biased against conservatives.

In a statement, NPR said: "Eliminating funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would have a devastating impact on American communities across the nation that rely on public radio for trusted local and national news, culture, lifesaving emergency alerts and public safety information."

"We serve the public interest. It's not just in our name — it's our mission. Across the country, locally owned public media stations represent a proud American tradition of public-private partnership for our shared common good," it said.

Paula Kerger, PBS CEO and president, said the Trump administration's effort to rescind funding for public media would "disrupt the essential service PBS and local member stations provide to the American people."

"There's nothing more American than PBS, and our work is only possible because of the bipartisan support we have always received from Congress," she said. "This public-private partnership allows us to help prepare millions of children for success in school and in life and also supports enriching and inspiring programs of the highest quality."

Accusations of political bias

At the hearing, the public broadcasting heads spoke of their mission to provide free, non-partisan news and programming to all Americans.

Some Republican lawmakers, however, vented about what they saw as biased reporting. "You can hate us all on your own dime," said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the chair of the subcommittee that held the hearing. House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., complained about NPR's coverage of how he structured his investments with a shell company.

Republicans assailed NPR chief Katherine Maher for political messages she'd posted to social media long before she became the network's CEO and president in March 2024. Their questioning also focused largely on stories published before her arrival at NPR.

They queried PBS CEO and President Paula Kerger about a video involving a performer in drag singing a variation on a children's song for a young audience. (Kerger testified that the video was posted on the website of PBS's New York City member station and never aired on television.)

Both PBS and NPR provide locally grounded content and reach more than 99% of the population, at no cost to viewers and listeners. In many states and communities, the stations serve as a key component of emergency and disaster response systems.

Congress allocated $535 million for the CPB for the current fiscal year — an amount affirmed in a recent stop-gap bill passed by the Republican-controlled U.S. House and Senate. The CPB's budgets are approved by Congress on a two-year cycle in large part to insulate it from political pressures; Congress has appropriated funds through Sept 30, 2027.

Where public broadcasting's money comes from

NPR receives about 1% of its funding directly from the federal government, and a bit more indirectly; its 246 member institutions, operating more than 1,300 stations, receive on average 8% to 10% of their funds from CPB. In turn, they pay NPR to air its national shows. By contrast, PBS and its stations receive about 15% of their revenues from CPB.

The bulk of CPB funding goes to local stations — mostly to subsidize television, which is more expensive than radio.

Stripping away such financial support would wipe out smaller stations, the public broadcasting chiefs testified, especially in rural regions and other areas ill-served by corporate-owned media. It would also weaken the broader public media system. Alaska Public Media's chief executive testified that the funding was vital to his state network and to ensuring his reporters' stories found a broader audience.

"Without PBS, without NPR, you wouldn't hear stories — news stories, public affairs stories, community stories — from Alaska," Alaska Public Media CEO and President Ed Ulman said. "You wouldn't see them on the PBS NewsHour. This is vital. It's vital for Alaskans to know that they're connected to their nation, and that what we do in Alaska matters to our nation."

A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 43% of U.S. adults surveyed favored continued federal support for NPR and PBS, with 24% saying it should be cut. However, by political affiliation, the results were more stark, with 44% of Republicans favoring an end to federal funding of the public broadcasters, while 69% of Democrats said it should continue.

Trump administration launches attacks on media outlets

Over its five and a half decades of existence, public broadcasting has mostly enjoyed bipartisan support, allowing it to survive periodic conservative pushes to strip the system of taxpayer dollars.

But recently, Brendan Carr, Trump's pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, launched an investigation of NPR and PBS, saying it appears that their corporate underwriting spots violate laws banning commercial advertisements.

The networks say the agency and Congress have encouraged them repeatedly to develop a greater share of private financial support. They have worked assiduously for years with the FCC to ensure that their spots fall within FCC guidelines. Other news organizations supported by the U.S. government have also moved into the crosshairs in the early months of the Trump administration.

In New York, a judge has placed a temporary restraining order on presidential adviser Kari Lake's attempt to shut down the federally owned Voice of America. In Washington, D.C., another judge ruled the government had to keep sending funds that Congress already had committed to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Those lawsuits — and others — argue that Trump has far exceeded the expansive powers of the presidency, usurping Congressional prerogatives, trampling on due process and eroding free speech rights.

Even so, the White House has succeeded in previously unimaginable ways; representatives of Trump's budget-slashing DOGE initiative, aided by Washington, D.C., police officers, forced their way into the U.S. Institute of Peace so that the administration could take it over. The institute, while funded by Congress, is an independent nonprofit like CPB.

Fired institute employees are now suing the Trump administration. U.S. Justice Department attorney Brian Hudak has said in court that plans already are underway to lease the U.S. Institute of Peace headquarters to the U.S. Labor Department. The judge overseeing the case has, to date, declined to issue a temporary restraining order to stop the transfer of assets to the government, although she said the administration has adopted a "bull in a china shop" approach.

Lake, who is also overseeing the effort to dismantle other federally funded international broadcasters, echoed Trump's remarks on NPR and PBS. "Defund ALL Fake News and Turn them Off," she tweeted, pointing to the hearing in late March as more grist.

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Correspondents David Folkenflik and Scott Neuman. It was edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editors Gerry Holmes and Vickie Walton-James. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

Copyright 2025 NPR

With an El Niño winter threatening heavy rain, the State Auditor warns that California’s aging dams “continue to pose a risk to public safety,” especially in the Bay Area, San Diego, and Los Angeles areas.

Lawmakers gave the state the power to penalize dam owners that violate safety requirements in 2017, after the Oroville spillway failure forced the evacuation of nearly 200,000 people. Water managers have yet to use that power, the audit found.

Even if state water managers had wielded their enforcement powers, dam owners likely couldn’t have afforded the fixes.

An audit released Monday found 57 dams in poor or unsatisfactory condition as of May, up from previous counts. That number is likely to keep rising, as state water officials reevaluate aging dams.

The 40 riskiest dams — rated high or extremely high hazard — are located throughout the state, but cluster near densely populated coastal cities.

Should these dams fail, the auditor reported, “they could collectively endanger as many as 1.5 million people and cause more than $265 billion in economic damage.”

Almost a decade ago, lawmakers strengthened the California Department of Water Resources’ authority to impose penalties such as reservoir restrictions, property liens, and fines when dam owners violate state safety laws and other requirements.

State engineers have referred owners of 44 dams for enforcement as of April. But, the auditor wrote, the water resources department “has never taken punitive enforcement actions against dam owners that fail to remedy their violations.”

Aging dams, limited funds

The problem is that dams are getting older. Many were built when safety standards were softer. State laws never required dam owners to set aside funds to keep them safe, so when concrete crumbles, sediment accumulates and spillways threaten to erode under floodwaters, most dam owners lack the money for repairs.

The state’s water resources department oversees the safety of more than 1,220 dams, most of them in satisfactory condition. Responsibility for maintaining the dams falls to the local governments, utilities, water agencies, and the private landowners and companies that own them. Some of the dams rated in poor condition are owned by state agencies.

Disasters are extremely rare. But when they do occur, like in Oroville, or the 1928 collapse of nearly-new St. Francis dam northwest of Los Angeles — they can be catastrophic.

San Diego’s Lake Hodges Dam under repair in fall of 2022. The dam is expected to be replaced in the next decade. The dam, built as a multiple arch design, was completed in 1918, and purchased by the City of San Diego in 1925.

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Photo courtesy of John Gastaldo

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The auditor applauded the water resources department’s inspection program but blasted its failure to enforce against dam owners who fail to meet state planning, safety or other requirements, “thereby allowing serious deficiencies to persist.”

One of the cases involved a dam with a 47-foot-wide hole in its spillway that has gone unrepaired for more than 30 years, which the audit said could cause flooding affecting nearly 300 people and more than $88 million in damage.

The audit doesn’t name the dam. State water managers said more specifics could pose security concerns, though the department makes each dam’s hazard potential and condition public in an annual report.

State water managers finalized the enforcement regulations in 2022. But they told the auditor they haven’t been able to adequately staff an enforcement branch and aren’t confident they could afford to defend their actions in a hearing.

Even with staff and money, the auditor concludes, if a dam owner remained noncompliant, the state “cannot act before the dam poses emergency-level danger. This leaves a gap in state law that puts public safety at risk.”

Drop in the bucket

Gov. Gavin Newsom touted dam repairs in his drought-era water supply strategy four years ago, as a way to shore up water supplies. Two years later, in 2024, Newsom and lawmakers slashed funding for a dam repair grant program.

Since then, a 2024 ballot proposition delivered a $464 million infusion for the program. A Federal Emergency Management Agency grant also awarded California $629,198 this September, according to Jason Ince, a spokesperson for the Department of Water Resources

But the audit cited estimates that repairing the state’s less-than-satisfactory dams could cost around $28 billion, making the funding a drop in the bucket.

The report urged state lawmakers to set deadlines and require dam owners with high and extremely high hazard dams — meaning ones that could kill people if they fail — to submit maintenance and repair plans to state agencies.

It also called for lawmakers to expand state water managers’ enforcement authority, and for the agency to use the full force of its powers.

“To ensure that the safety of the public is addressed before a dam’s condition results in an emergency,” the audit said, “the Legislature should amend state law to allow Water Resources to order the condemnation and decommissioning of a dam when Water Resources’ other means of enforcement are unsuccessful.”

Laura Hollender, deputy director of flood management and safety with the Department of Water Resources said that the department worked closely with the State Auditor but disagrees with some of the report’s findings and recommendations.

Still, she said in a statement, they are carefully reviewing the recommendations and preparing for whatever El Niño brings. “Protecting public safety is DWR’s highest priority, and we recognize the critical role that dam safety and levee maintenance play in reducing flood risk for California communities.”

As the wet season approaches, the auditor also highlighted that dam safety planning statewide is incomplete.

The Governor’s Office of Emergency Service has not yet approved emergency plans for 245 dams describing what their owners would do to protect people and property should the dam fail. Officials told the auditor’s office that dam owners haven’t completed required revisions, and state law doesn’t require deadlines. 

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

This is about the time of year when the country engages in the Great American Biennial Polling Freakout.

A few weeks before an election, lots of people start to really engage. They read headlines showing this candidate or that candidate leading a race. People wonder who's going to win and whether the polls are right or wrong. And it all often leads to a blend of anticipation mixed with confusion and anxiety.

Stop and breathe. All that needs to be known from the polls at this point is that over the last several months, the compass needle has moved more in Democrats' direction. That's it. They are the favorites to win the House and are within striking distance of winning the Senate, something that was seen as a long shot when this election cycle began.

That's based not just on the polls but on conversations with campaigns and on-the-ground reporting. But here are some tips and things to remember as the deluge of polls comes your way:

1. Polls are not meant to be predictive.

They are snapshots in time of when those surveys were conducted.

2. They're also not as precise and specific as people want them to be.

They're more like fuzzy targets. Remember: Polls have margins of error. So when someone has a 2-point lead, that's not a lead at all. If a poll has a 3 percentage-point margin of error, this means that candidate could have a 5-point lead or be losing by a point.

3. Look for transparency.

There has been a proliferation of not-so-great polls this cycle, some driven by AI, others without long track records and even a pollster exposed to be fake. Good pollsters show their work with detailed methodology pages. If you can't find a methodology, that's a red flag.

4. The quality of state-level polling is not very good.

With the decline of local journalism, there has been a decline in well-conducted, rigorous and frequent state polls. There is less money for those local outlets to pay for polling, which can be very expensive. So take those state poll averages with a grain of salt.

5. Go beyond the top lines.

Horse-race polling isn't the best use of polls. Polls are best when measuring attitudes over time to help inform us of how Americans are feeling and thinking about key issues. There is so much more underneath those top-line numbers, from job approval ratings and who is most motivated to vote, to which party is more trusted to handle the issues people care about most — and so much more.

The fact is that many of these races are expected to be close. Millions of votes are not yet cast, and anyone professing to know exactly what's going to happen is lying.

When you're looking at who's up and who's down, just remember that horse-race polling is like sprinkles on top of a bowl of ice cream. Lots of people like sprinkles, but if all you eat is the sprinkles, you just wind up with a mouth full of wax without ever getting to the good stuff.
Copyright 2026 NPR

We’re getting pretty close to the midterm election, so get ready to fill out your ballot. If you’re a mail-in voter, you should be receiving your ballot soon if it hasn’t come already (mine showed up last week). As usual, there are many complicated props to read through, but we’ve got you covered with our L.A. and O.C. voter guides. After all that hard work, you’ll need to get out and do something fun.

Elsewhere on LAist, you can get a preview of Saturday’s Taste of Soul festival in South L.A.; check out an inside view of an event we’ve featured here before, the Sh*tty Movie Club; and Dave Grohl talks to us about the Soundstage of Hope fundraiser.

Music

Here's a selection of Licorice Pizza's music picks this week:

Wednesday 

• Lucky Daye at Grammy Museum
• Hip-hop legend Big Daddy Kane begins his two-night run at the Blue Note 

Thursday

• Role Model plays the first of two nights at the Greek
• Dinosaur Jr. at the Bellwether

Friday

• Juanes at the Forum
• Boy Harsher at the Palladium

Saturday 

• Peaches dances the pain away at the Fonda
• Wale is at the Blue Note (he’ll be there Sunday too)

Sunday

• Turnstile with Boy Harsher at the Observatory
• Tony-winner Shoshana Bean at El Rey

Monday 

• Folk singer Laura Veirs plays the Peppermint Club
• London’s Chinchilla plays Pacific Electric

Tuesday 

• UK chanteuse Jessie Ware plays the Greek
• Basement, DIIV and many more at the Shrine Expo Hall

Events

Beverly Hills Witch Walk

Saturday, Oct. 17, 9:30 a.m. 
503 N. Palm Drive, Beverly Hills
COST: FREE; MORE INFO 

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Courtesy Love Beverly Hills

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Bring your pointy hat and broomstick, then join your coven for a witchy walk through the spooky (but also… sun-spackled) streets of Beverly Hills. Hosted by women’s walking group Los Angelistas, the walk features historical landmarks like the Spadena House and wraps with 30% off treats at Sweet Angeles Bakery.

An Evening on Journalism & Public Safety in Los Angeles

Monday, Oct. 19, 6 p.m. 
L.A. Press Club 
2535 W Temple St., Downtown L.A.
COST: FREE; MORE INFO

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Courtesy Los Angeles Reporting Collective

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Los Angeles Reporting Collective (LARC) and the Association of Gun Violence Reporters (AGVR) host a discussion about journalism and public safety at the L.A. Press Club. Join reporters from The Trace, The Guardian, LA Local and Southern California News Group for the talk, preceded by a screening of the short documentary about surveillance, Flock Walk.

No Fest 

Saturday, Oct. 17, 12 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Beyond Baroque 
681 Venice Blvd., Venice 
COST: FROM $21.99; MORE INFO

Save poetry in L.A.! No Fest features an open mic, poetry readings, art, music and local vendors, all in support of Beyond Baroque, the historic Venice space that has supported poetry in Los Angeles since its founding in 1968. The event will also be streamed on YouTube.

Cynthia Erivo: 'Let Me Sing to You' 

Thursday, Oct. 15, 7:30 p.m.
Hollywood Bowl
2301 Highland Ave., Hollywood
COST: FROM $33.39; MORE INFO 

Cynthia Erivo returns to the Hollywood Bowl.

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LAURENT HOU/Hans Lucas

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AFP via Getty Images

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When Wicked star Cynthia Erivo last took the stage at the Hollywood Bowl, she was playing Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar, and she received a minutes-long standing ovation in the middle of the second act after “Gethsemane.” It was — I am not exaggerating — one of the most astonishing performances I’ve ever seen at the Bowl or anywhere else. Relive the magic with her solo show, featuring favorites from Wicked and much more.

Street Food Cinema: Boo-ze, Bites and Frights

Friday and Saturday, Oct. 16-17; 23-24.
Heritage Square Museum
3800 Homer St., Montecito Heights
COST: FROM $53; MORE INFO

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Courtesy Street Food Cinema

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Spooky season is upon us, and the next two weekends you can get your fill of scary movies and bites to go with them at Street Food Cinema's fourth annual immersive Halloween experience, Boo-ze, Bites and Frights at the historic village of Heritage Square Museum. They'll be screening horror classics old and new, including Nightmare on Elm Street, Sinners and Blade.

Come From Away

Through Sunday, Nov. 8 
A Noise Within 
3352 E Foothill Blvd., Pasadena
COST: FROM $52.75; MORE INFO

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Craig Schwartz

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A Noise Within

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Come From Away is one of the best musicals of the 2010s, with a heartfelt score and a story that has stood the test of time through runs on Broadway and in the West End, plus a successful filmed version on Apple TV. The show follows the story of the town of Gander, which played host to passengers stranded when flights were shut down mid-path following the attacks on Sept. 11.

Narsiso Martinez

Through Saturday, Nov. 7
Charlie James Gallery 
969 Chung King Road, Chinatown
COST: FREE; MORE INFO

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Narsiso Martinez

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Charlie James Gallery

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I first saw Narsiso Martinez’s work when he won the Frieze LA Impact Prize in 2023. Since then, his stirring portraits of migrant workers emblazoned on CSA boxes and Whole Foods bags have been showing up everywhere, from the Hammer to the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Don’t miss this solo show at Charlie James, where Martinez explores the stories of farmworkers and California kitchens across a variety of mixed media.

The Peterson Show

Through Monday, Oct. 26
Echo Theatre Company 
Atwater Village Theater
3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater Village
COST: $46.90; MORE INFO 

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Cooper Bates

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Lucy Pollack Public Relations

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I heard about The Peterson Show from one of my favorite L.A. newsletters, Tasbeeh Herwees’s No Bad Days, which spoke to writer Janine Nabors about her new play. It takes inspiration from '80s sitcoms and is loosely based on the Bill Cosby scandal, reuniting five former child stars when the legacy of their TV dad goes bust. It’s only on through Oct. 26, so don’t miss it.

Insurance is a social contract. When you sign up with State Farm or Allstate for home insurance, you confirm your membership in a community — your money will go to fix someone else’s burned or flooded home, and their money will in turn support yours. We let insurance companies sell policies on a private market, and we elect or appoint government officials to oversee that market to protect the interests of homeowners.

That’s how it’s supposed to work, but that’s not how it worked for Lynn McIntyre.

When McIntyre’s mother died in 2022, she willed McIntyre her longtime house in the “Alphabets,” a charming neighborhood not far from the coast in western Los Angeles. McIntyre and her daughter had only lived there for a year when her insurance company, Liberty Mutual, withdrew her fire coverage. She couldn’t find another private company to cover the home’s fire risk, so she enrolled in the California FAIR Plan, a state-backed “insurer of last resort,” paying another $5,000 a year in addition to her regular home insurance from Liberty.

After the Palisades Fire raged through the Alphabets in early 2025, McIntyre’s small bungalow was still standing. But it was full of smoke and ash that had crept in through vents and windows, and her belongings were stained beyond recognition by smoke. When she filed a claim with the FAIR Plan, the plan adjusters told her she was out of luck. They would pay for a temporary apartment, but nothing else.

Lynn McIntyre stands in front of her damaged home in the Alphabet Streets. McIntyre’s home suffered extensive smoke damage during the Palisades Fire, but the California FAIR Plan offered her almost no rebuilding assistance.

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Jake Bittle

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Grist

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McIntyre, who had worked for years as a real estate broker, spent months battling with 10 different adjusters and dozens of FAIR Plan representatives. It didn’t work. The employees batted her away at every turn, hiring third-party adjusters failed to get her anywhere, and her attorney professed himself confounded by FAIR’s obstinance. Even as most of her neighbors cleared their debris and started building new fire-resilient homes, many of them much larger than their old properties, her old bungalow sat stained with smoke.

It was only in late August, more than 18 months after the wildfire, that she was about to start repairing her home — not with insurance money, but with a nearly $200,000 loan from the federal government that she will someday have to pay back. To make matters worse, FAIR has been trying to cut off her apartment expenses, telling her that power and water have come back online in her area and that she needs to move back home — never mind that her house still has boarded-up windows and a scorched exterior. Meanwhile, Liberty Mutual informed her this summer that they would be canceling her non-fire coverage.

“The next time a fire comes through, I'm just going to light it on fire, because I'm not going to go through this again,” McIntyre said wryly as we stood in her doorway, construction machines rattling at the other houses around us.

An aerial view of reconstruction efforts underway in Pacific Palisades after the Palisades Fire. Many residents of the community lost insurance coverage before the fire, forcing them to enroll in the California FAIR Plan.

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Qian Weizhong

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VCG via Getty Images via Grist

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Ensuring that Californians like McIntyre have access to affordable insurance falls to an elected official that many Californians have likely never heard of: the insurance commissioner. The commissioner, one of eight elected state officials in California, regulates the companies that provide fire, home, and auto coverage in the Golden State.

Over the last eight years, the incumbent insurance commissioner presided over what parties on all sides have called a “disaster,” a “crisis” and a “collapse” in the state’s home insurance market. Now, as the current commissioner terms out, two Democratic candidates — Ben Allen and Jane Kim — have emerged claiming they can fix it. These candidates embody a debate in the Democratic Party about the best way to adapt to climate change. Allen, an established legislator representing Pacific Palisades, wants to rebuild the market, and Kim, a left-wing organizer from San Francisco, wants to ditch the idea of a private market altogether.

Whoever wins in November will inherit an insurance system battered by a decade of devastating wildfires, insurers pulling out of the state, and other upheaval. Climate change and decades of poor forest management have turned California’s woodlands into tinderboxes, and the problem will only get worse as the planet continues to warm. The current crisis in the insurance market began with a series of unprecedented wildfires between 2015 and 2020. These fires scorched around 4 million acres and destroyed 35,000 homes, many in areas that had never been known to burn. Insurance companies like State Farm and Farmers had to pay out billions of dollars in claims, enough to negate the profits they had made from writing fire insurance policies over the previous two decades.

The companies believed they were charging Californians far too little, but the price of insurance isn’t elastic like the price of gasoline or paper towels. Insurers have to seek permission from the state insurance commissioner to raise their prices. California was strict about those price hikes, and it blocked insurers’ attempts to pass their post-fire bill onto the state’s homeowners. The insurance industry’s response was to ditch California. They dropped tens of thousands of customers across the state, and companies like State Farm announced they would withdraw from the state altogether and cease writing any new policies.

“There's something broken that so many of us are facing the same issues,” McIntyre said, “and they just think they can just ride roughshod right on over all of us.”

The lack of available insurance is starting to hurt the state’s economy: Around 1 in 7 California realtors said they had a home sale fall through in 2024 due to insurance issues, the state’s FAIR plan ran out of claims money last year, and average premiums could rise by 16% this year. The trend is now spreading out of the most flammable zones, and many homeowners even in low-risk areas are struggling to get insurance.

The outcome of the November election could determine the trajectory of insurance bills for millions of Californians and decide the fate of fire-prone areas around the state. The election will also serve as a bellwether for how voters in the United States want to approach the expensive and difficult process of adapting to a warming world, and whoever wins will have to turn that mandate into a policy that can offer short-term relief. This would be a daunting job under the best of times, and these are not the best of times.

A sign in front of a State Farm insurance office in Pinole, California. State Farm is one of several insurance companies that dropped policies in risky areas following California’s spate of large wildfires.

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Justin Sullivan

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Getty Images via Grist

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The roots of the insurance crisis

The current insurance crisis is new, but its origins are very old. Over the last century, California has built millions of homes in the “wildland-urban interface,” the flammable zone outside the state’s major cities. Developers rushed out into the mountains around Lake Tahoe and the desert hills east of San Diego and built without any thought for fire mitigation, throwing up homes with wooden sidings and flammable fences on crowded lots. These are the areas that are burning up in the state’s recent wildfires, and the areas that insurers are dropping en masse.

This history of unwise development has created a bizarre situation that the scholar Carolyn Kousky has dubbed “a tale of two markets.” Prices ticked up in places that weren’t risky, like wet San Francisco and low-lying Fresno, but the market went haywire in risky areas like Malibu and the High Sierras. Nearly half of all households in high-fire-risk areas lost their insurance between 2018 and 2024. The California FAIR Plan, which was intended as a fringe supplement, became the only option for thousands of homeowners. Since 2018, it has swallowed up a huge share of policies in risky areas, growing from less than 1 to 5% of the market today. In some places, it reached 80% of market share.

In theory, California voters have some influence over their haywire insurance market. Every state has an insurance commissioner, but California is one of around a dozen states where that is an elected position. The fact that it’s elected at all is a testament to the strength of the state’s pro-consumer slant — in 1988, voters who were incensed about high car insurance prices passed a measure that turned it from an appointed position into an elected one.

In practice, this is a job no one should want. The commissioner has the power to approve or deny rate increases, and to police the industry’s compliance with state law. They also oversee the FAIR Plan, the state-backed insurer, which offers limited and expensive coverage to people like McIntyre who can’t get it on the private market. But the commissioner can’t do much else to make private insurers offer coverage or to reduce overall fire risk in wildland areas.

“The insurance commissioner has a lot of power and authority himself or herself that they should use, but the insurance commissioner alone cannot address these challenges,” said Dave Jones, who served as commissioner between 2010 and 2019.

California’s incumbent insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara, right, talks with homeowner Bruce Breslau following a 2024 public hearing in Los Angeles. Lara has faced criticism for failing to prevent private insurance companies from pulling out of risky areas.

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Robert Gauthier

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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images via Grist

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The outgoing commissioner, Ricardo Lara, has been in office for almost the entirety of the state’s fire-induced market collapse. Lara vacillated between cozying up with the insurers or clamping down on them and running the risk that they might flee the state. First he pledged to reject all insurance industry campaign money, then accepted some of that money, then appeared to cover for it by stalling on rate increases, which led insurers like State Farm to drop more policies.

Lara’s attempt at resolving the crisis was to strike a deal with the companies. He allowed them to pass on the cost of their reinsurance (or insurance for insurance companies) to customers, and he also allowed them to use forward-looking catastrophe models to predict future risk, something every other state had already allowed. That would translate to higher rates, and in return the insurers had to commit to writing more policies in the risky fire areas they wanted to abandon. But the deal turned out to be full of loopholes — insurers can meet their mandate without returning to the riskiest areas, and the state FAIR Plan has kept absorbing more market share after the Los Angeles fires in 2025. Lara said in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year that the industry had “bullied” him. (His office declined interview requests, and representatives for the FAIR Plan did not respond to requests for comment.)

The next insurance commissioner

Despite the entrenched nature of the state’s insurance problems, a dozen candidates piled into the election to replace Lara. This led to a crowded primary between four Democrats, five Republicans and two independents; none of the candidates had the funding to run a full statewide campaign, and there was limited public polling. The results were surprising even to the candidates. The top two candidates who advanced to the November runoff were Democrats. In first place with around 27% was Kim, a former San Francisco supervisor and Bernie Sanders ally who had pitched a government-run single-payer program for disaster insurance. In second place was Allen, the state senator who represents the Palisades and is one of the legislature’s foremost experts on insurance.

Allen and Kim agree on a lot. They both believe in simplifying typical insurance policies and forcing companies to be transparent about their spending and investment in fossil fuels. They both believe in beefing up the FAIR Plan so it would cover smoke and other damages, which would have saved McIntyre from months of confusion and delay. They have both vowed to crack down on insurers who delay and nitpick claim payments after disasters. And they have both rejected campaign contributions from the insurance industry.

Where they differ is on the question of how to get people off the FAIR Plan and stabilize the market — in other words, on the fundamental question of the state’s insurance system. Allen believes that if the state allows insurers to raise rates on risky homes, invests to harden homes in vulnerable areas, and takes a data-driven approach to measuring wildfire risk, it can entice insurers back and restore a healthy market. Kim would prefer to discard the market altogether. She proposes creating a state-run public insurance program for all homes and all disasters, replacing private companies and the FAIR Plan. Rather than doling out profits to investors, this program would spend its excess revenue to harden old homes against wildfire. Private insurance companies could still write coverage for burglary and other perils, but the state government would collect all fire insurance and pay out all claims, a model based on similar programs in New Zealand and France.

The philosophical debate in the election is much deeper than a question of state policies or affordability — it’s about whether the private market can protect us against climate change at all.

State Senator Ben Allen hosts a discussion with local leaders and residents to mark 100 days since the Palisades Fire.

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Carlin Stiehl

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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images via Grist

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Allen believes it can. He decided to run for commissioner after the Palisades Fire scorched a good portion of his district, plunging many of his close friends and acquaintances into a hell of displacement and insurance litigation. (Indeed, many of the Palisades homeowners I met knew him on a first-name basis, including McIntyre, who is supporting him in the election.) Even before that, he had already spent several years leading state legislative committees on insurance, energy, and wildfire risk, making him arguably the most qualified person in the state for the commissioner job.

“I think we need someone in this office who really understands climate science, who understands the markets, who understands the legislature,” he said. The Palisades Fire, he said, gave him a “level of understanding from going through the experience that is just different” — he heard about friends trying to itemize vaporized dining room furniture and saw phosphate pollution harming marine mammals in the water off his home in Santa Monica.

Rather than use the insurance commissioner post to push for a major statutory change like Kim’s public fund, Allen speaks about the commissioner as having a poder de convocatoria, a Spanish phrase that translates to “convening power.” He wants to bring together the state agencies and the insurance industry to have a real conversation about reducing fire risk and cajole the state’s market back into existence. He has just passed a bill that offers low-interest loans to homeowners who want to fire-harden their homes. He wants to pursue a sort of grand bargain with the industry, speeding up rate increase decisions while also disciplining the insurers who delay and deny claims.

Kim’s audacious proposal may be gaining more traction than Allen’s proposed compromise. She outperformed Allen in the primary in almost every county, including in his home county of Los Angeles, and given her progressive background, she did fairly well in the rural and red parts of the state. She admits her strong performance is partially “a mystery to me,” but attributes it to the fact that many voters are fed up with the insurance industry.

California insurance commissioner candidate Jane Kim speaks to reporters during a rally in San Francisco. Kim is pitching a single-payer disaster insurance model that would replace the private market for wildfire coverage.

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Stephen Lam

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San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images via Grist

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“There's this sense of immense unfairness, and once we articulate the problem, and then on top of that, actually propose big policy ideas, I think that that resonates,” she told me. We were speaking at a home in San Francisco’s Presidio Heights, where Kim was attending a fundraiser for the radical climate activism group Climate Defiance.

Some experts are skeptical of a government takeover in the style Kim is proposing. Jones, the former insurance commissioner, said the program has two key flaws. First, Kim’s promise to keep insurance affordable could mean keeping prices too low on mansions in fire-prone areas, where homeowners may currently pay premiums that are inadequate to their risk. Second, insurers in California are required to have tens of billions of dollars in extra cash to pay during big loss events, and Kim’s new fund would have to find that money in a state whose public budget is already strained.

“Not only does she not come clean as to where the money's going to come from, if her thought is that it's going to come from the general fund of the state of California, good luck,” said Jones. He pointed out that the model Kim cites in New Zealand is far smaller than California’s, has low coverage limits, and doesn’t cover fires. (Allen described the proposal as “red meat, sugar rush stuff,” and said taxpayers would end up footing the bill if the public plan lost money.)

Kim allows that the legislature might not jump for her public insurance fund, but she has a compromise in her back pocket — one not dissimilar from Allen’s own agenda. Instead of creating a single-payer insurance program that would use profits to fund fire resilience, the commissioner could turn the FAIR Plan into such a program. The plan already pools money from all the state’s big insurers, and Kim could force them to pay an extra fee that would fund hardening for FAIR Plan homes. She returned to this theme when she delivered a stump speech to the activists in the Presidio Heights living room, saying that private companies would never act on their own to reduce the state’s fire risk.

“What the insurance industry does is that they price risk, but they don't actually address it,” she said. If that’s the case, she argues, then the industry shouldn’t be the one charged with keeping Californians safe from climate disasters.

For all their other points of alignment, this question represents the major philosophical disagreement between Allen and Kim. Allen agrees that the industry has not yet acted to reduce California’s enormous fire risk, but he believes that it can fill that role — and he can be the one to make that happen.

“The insurance commissioner is uniquely positioned to bring the insurance to the table … and actually say to the insurance industry, ‘OK, guys, you've got to be a part of the solution here,’” Allen said.

A daunting challenge

The problem for both Kim and Allen is that reducing risk is very difficult.

Take the case of Tony Byers. He is a retired electric utility worker and a longtime resident of Placerville, an old mining town high in the forest-covered hills east of Sacramento. He bought insurance from AAA for years, but the company dropped him after a 2022 fire burned a nearby stretch of the Sierras. State Farm gave him a quote, but then rejected him because it claimed he didn’t have a fire hydrant near his house, even though he did. Byers ended up going with Lemonade, the online insurer, and even paid to have some flammable trees removed at the company’s request, but last year they told him they were leaving California. He ended up on the FAIR Plan, and he now pays $3,400 a year for fire insurance alone, triple what he used to pay. Byers lives at the end of a narrow mountain road, and if he wants to get back on a private insurance plan, he’d likely have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to retrofit his property, which is a lot more than he can afford on a retiree’s budget.

The only people who can opt out of this gauntlet of risk reduction are those who can pay for elite coverage. That was the case for Kevin Roberts, a retired golf course owner who lives in Huntington Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood on the edge of the Palisades Fire burn scar. Roberts likely couldn’t get fire coverage for his two-story Spanish colonial from bigger insurers like State Farm, but years ago a former fraternity brother told him about a company called Chubb that offered boutique insurance at high prices. The company now charges him more than $30,000 a year for his coverage on a “surplus lines” policy that isn’t subject to state regulations. It’s an eye-watering payment, but the company came through with a $2.65 million payout for smoke damage after the fire. Many of the state’s wealthiest homeowners are already on this unregulated market: the number of surplus lines policies in California has doubled over the last four years to around 1.3 million.

“You'll pay more, but if you need them, they'll deliver,” said Roberts.

Neither Byers nor Roberts expressed strong feelings about the insurance commissioner’s election, and indeed, both candidates will face tremendous barriers before they can address the issues that someone like Byers faces in Placerville. That’s because scaling California’s efforts to reduce more than a century of fire risk is one of the most daunting adaptation efforts faced by any place in the United States. The challenge is not just in finding the money to help homeowners who can’t do it themselves, but in figuring out how to reduce risk for millions of old and ill-built homes.

The day after Kim’s fundraiser, I met two employees from North Coast Opportunities, a poverty-fighting organization that serves Lake County, north of San Francisco. The organization is the first to receive money from a $117 million state grant program designed to retrofit whole communities against wildfire. The organization chose to focus on a tight-packed community called Kelseyville, where hundreds of homes cluster on small lots against the side of a windy mountain ridge. As the employees from North Coast drove me through the area, it became clear just how hard it will be to achieve the scaled-up resilience that both Allen and Kim want.

Lake County has an urgent need for this. The mountainous area is among the state’s most vulnerable to wildfire — some 85% of its land area has burned since the turn of the century — and it is also one of its poorest counties. Insurers have abandoned the area en masse, forcing many people onto the FAIR Plan, or causing older homeowners to go without insurance altogether.

The state program is the exact kind of intervention that insurers have long said will induce them to offer more coverage and stop raising rates. The nonprofit can give each participating home in Kelseyville about $70,000 to fund easy tweaks that will stop ignitions — such as removing trees from around homes, replacing vinyl siding with fiber cement, and deconstructing flammable wooden decks. The mitigated houses don’t look much different from the old ones, except for the emptier yards and fresh paint, but even these tiny fireproofing changes required painstaking work. North Coast has had to ask contractors to redo flawed retrofits and cajole local hardware stores into selling fireproof equipment. Many homeowners aren’t interested in participating at all.

“What creates an insurable community is for the whole community to have buy-in,” said Deanna Fernweh, the program manager. “It's changing the mentality, because they're like, ‘Well, we've always done it this way.’” She said she’s cautiously optimistic that companies will come back — insurers have been reaching out to learn more about her work, but they’ve also pushed for full neighborhoods to meet the strictest fire standards.

The project underscores the scale of the challenge the next commissioner will face in reducing fire risk. The project only touches around 300 of the 1,200 eligible homes in the neighborhood, and the grant typically isn’t even enough to do full mitigation on each home. The funding came from the federal government after years of delay. The best possible result is to bring insurers back to just a few streets, a fraction of the risk in Lake County alone. For millions of homeowners who don’t have access to grant funding, resilience is still out of reach.

“A home is only as strong as the weakest link,” said Steve Hawks, a longtime California fire official who is now the director of wildfire at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, which develops standards for fire hardening. “If you leave a weak link on the table, a fire of [significant] magnitude can exploit any vulnerability.”

Hawks describes the challenge as “daunting,” and that may be an understatement. Retrofitting a home for fire can cost several times as much as building a new fire-resilient home, and the bill for hardening the millions of homes in California’s fire zones would run to the double-digit billions at least. This money has to come from somewhere, and Allen and Kim both acknowledged that their biggest challenge is to find out where.

This is the irony of the fact that both candidates are appealing to voters by talking about “affordability.” No matter which path one takes through the maze, one arrives at the same conclusion — to fix this crisis will take money, and much of that money will come from the people of California. As Allen says, “risk doesn't disappear, it gets allocated.” The “affordability” challenge in this case is not to help voters keep up with inflation but to pay down a massive debt of risky development that has been accumulating for decades. The challenge is to remake a society that was not designed to be remade.

“I think we’re still at the beginning,” said Holly Sacks, the director of underwriting for Mercury, a California-based insurance company that has committed to remain in the state and to help incentivize risk mitigation. The company is selling in burned places like Paradise and Altadena, but only for hardened homes, and Sacks says it’s one of the only companies doing so. “We are out there, and we don't hear about a lot of other carriers getting out there,” she said. “I think there's still a ways to go … to really make the market more stable.”

The scale of this work is enormous, but the stakes are even larger. When we purchase insurance, we purchase not only the privilege of owning a home or driving a car, but also the privilege of belonging to a community in which all support all. Insurance, as Kim likes to say, is a prerequisite for participating in the economy. A healthy insurance market is also an indication that society can still hold together, that there is no home so vulnerable to the ravages of global warming that the rest of the community can’t afford to protect it.

Of all the things that climate change may take from us, this guarantee might be the most dear.