California’s legislature has a process for identifying government waste. It pays the California State Auditor — a nonpartisan watchdog funded entirely by taxpayers — to conduct dozens of audits each year. The auditors do the work. They identify the problems. They write specific recommendations. And then, according to a report published earlier this year, the legislature ignores about three out of every four of those recommendations.
That is not an accusation. It is the auditor’s own finding.
The December 2025 audit that got the most recent attention flagged $5 million in documented waste across multiple state agencies. The largest single offender was the Employment Development Department — the same agency that lost an estimated $50 billion in fraudulent COVID unemployment claims between 2020 and 2022. This time the problem was smaller but no less telling: the EDD paid at least $4.6 million in service fees over five years for thousands of cell phones that were not being used. The department had a process in place to review nonusage reports. The process existed on paper. The phones kept billing.
The High-Speed Rail project remains the state’s most expensive illustration of the same pattern. Costs have now reached $135 billion. The train, originally promised to run from San Francisco to Los Angeles, will now connect Merced to Bakersfield — and not until 2033 at the earliest. A bill introduced this year would shield the High-Speed Rail Authority’s records from California Public Records Act requests. The legislature is literally being asked to make the most over-budget infrastructure project in state history less visible to the public.
Assembly Republicans submitted multiple audit requests to the Joint Legislative Audit Committee in February, targeting programs with documented spending concerns and no accountability metrics. The committee has the authority to approve or reject those requests. Democratic Assembly Republican Leader Heath Flora put it directly: “Before Californians are asked to pay one more dollar, we need to audit these programs.”
That framing is worth examining without a partisan lens. The state faces an ongoing structural deficit. Residents pay the highest income tax rate in the country, the highest gasoline tax, and the highest sales tax. A recent Truth in Accounting analysis estimated each California taxpayer carries an additional $21,800 burden beyond ordinary taxes when unfunded liabilities — pensions, retirement benefits, long-term debt — are factored in. That number reflects the gap between what the state owes and what it has set aside to pay it.
None of this is about whether government programs are good or bad in theory. It is about whether the state is managing the ones it has. An audit recommendation is not a political document. It is a professional finding, produced by career auditors, identifying a specific problem and proposing a specific fix. When those findings get filed away 75 percent of the time, the audits become theater. And the taxpayers who funded them get nothing in return.
The deeper problem is structural. There is no consequence for ignoring an audit. No agency loses funding automatically because it failed to implement a recommendation. No official faces any formal accountability for leaving the same finding unaddressed year after year. The California State Auditor can document waste. It cannot compel anyone to stop.
Until that changes, the pattern will not.