Science
The FDA knew long ago that red dye No. 3 causes cancer. Why did it take so long to ban it?
The Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday that the much-maligned red dye No. 3 will be banned in the United States because it has been shown to cause cancer in animals.
The decision, lauded by consumer advocacy groups, comes a full 25 years after scientists at the agency determined that rats fed large amounts of the artificial color additive were much more likely to develop malignant thyroid tumors than rats who weren’t given the food coloring. They also had an increased incidence of benign tumors and growths that can be precursors to cancer.
Those findings prompted the FDA to declare in 1990 that red dye No. 3 could not be used in cosmetics or drugs applied to the skin. The reason for the decision was clear: A federal law known as the Delaney clause says no color additive can be considered safe if it has been shown to cause cancer in animals or people.
Yet the dye remained a legal food coloring. It’s in the bright red cherries that dress up a bowl of Del Monte’s fruit cocktail. It makes Nesquik’s strawberry milk a pleasing shade of pink. It also colors beef jerky, fruit rolls, candy, ice cream and scores of other processed products.
Now food makers will have two years to reformulate their products without red dye No. 3. Drug companies have three years to remove it from their medicines.
The FDA does not seem to be bothered by the fact that this cancer-causing chemical will linger in the food supply. The agency’s view is that the biological process through which the dye causes cancer in rats doesn’t occur in people.
“We don’t believe there is a risk to humans,” Jim Jones, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for human foods, told members of Congress last month.
In announcing the ban, the agency added that people consume red dye No. 3 at levels far lower than those shown to cause cancer in two studies of rats. A host of other studies in both animals and humans did not show the dye to be cancerous.
Nonetheless, regulators revoked authorization of red dye No. 3 to satisfy a petition demanding that the Delaney clause be enforced.
Starburst-flavored Fruit by the Foot, which contains red dye No. 3. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“Regardless of the truth behind their argument, it doesn’t matter,” said Jensen N. Jose, regulatory counsel for food chemical safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which spearheaded the effort. “Once it’s established that it causes cancer, FDA must prohibit the chemical by law.”
This wasn’t the first case of the FDA banning a food additive it considers safe to comply with the Delaney clause. The situation shows why the federal law is long overdue for a refresh, food safety experts say.
“A lot of people think we need to reform this,” said Diana Winters, deputy director of the Resnick Center for Food Law and Policy at UCLA Law. “It does lead to some absurd results.”
The Delaney clause is part of a 1958 federal law that expanded the FDA’s regulatory authority over newfangled food additives developed during World War II that were making their way into consumer products, Winters said.
Back then, members of Congress were worried about the cancer risks posed by all sorts of man-made compounds. Even small amounts seemed capable of triggering cancerous growths if people encountered them over and over again.
Arthur Flemming, who served as President Eisenhower’s Cabinet secretary for health and welfare, told Congress at the time there was no way for FDA regulators to know whether any exposure level was low enough to be truly safe. Considering the many cancer risks lurking in the environment, he said, the government should “do everything possible to put persons in a position where they will not unnecessarily be adding residues of carcinogens to their diet.”
Signature Select rainbow cups, which contain red dye No. 3.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
The issue was personal for Rep. James Delaney, a Democrat from New York City whose wife was undergoing cancer treatment at the time. He made sure the new law included a zero-tolerance provision for cancer-causing substances, though it said nothing about additives that might cause other kinds of health problems.
“No additive shall be deemed to be safe if it is found to induce cancer when ingested by man or animal, or if it is found, after tests which are appropriate for the evaluation of the safety of food additives, to induce cancer in man or animal,” the Delaney clause states. A 1960 amendment governing color additives extended the rule to dyes.
As the years went by, advances in toxicology allowed scientists to expand the list of known cancerous compounds, and to identify them in ever-smaller amounts. Regulators were no longer as clueless as they’d been in Flemming’s day.
In 1986, the FDA tried to take that progress into account as it evaluated the safety of two color additives — orange dye No. 17 and red dye No. 19 — for use in lipsticks, nail polishes, face powders and other cosmetics. The agency acknowledged that both dyes were capable of inducing cancer in laboratory animals. But it argued that the regulatory decision should be guided not by a literal interpretation of an aging law but by the real-world risks to people.
When those color additives were used as intended, those risks were vanishingly small: A panel of scientists from the U.S. Public Health Service determined the lifetime cancer risk posed by the red dye was 1 in 9 million at worst; for the orange dye, it was 1 in 19 billion. In both cases, the possibility of developing cancer was “so trivial as to be effectively no risk,” the panel concluded.
A federal appeals court agreed that the dyes seemed to be safe. In fact, the risks they posed were millions of times lower than the risks of smoking, the judges wrote.
Moreover, the judges noted, forbidding the use of chemicals that carry a minute risk of cancer might prompt manufacturers to use compounds that are more toxic, albeit in noncancerous ways. Substitutions like these would be “a clear loss for safety,” they wrote.
But none of that matters, the court ruled: If a dye or any other chemical is found to cause cancer in animals, the FDA’s only option under the Delaney clause was to forbid its use.
Nestle Nesquik strawberry milk, containing red dye No. 3. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Regulators found themselves in a more absurd situation in 2018 when they were asked to revoke their authorization of a flavoring additive called myrcene.
When the synthetic compound was force-fed to rats at doses of 1 gram per kilogram of body weight for two years, the animals developed kidney cancer and other forms of renal disease. Female mice fed under the same conditions developed liver cancer as well, the FDA said.
But the amount of artificial myrcene consumed by a typical American is 813,000 times lower — around 1.23 micrograms per kilogram of body weight, the agency said.
Moreover, myrcene is a natural component of mangoes, citrus juices, cardamom, and herbs including basil, parsley and wild thyme. The amount of natural myrcene in the food supply is about 16,5000 times greater than its synthetic counterpart, the agency added.
Still, the FDA declared the additive unsafe “as a matter of law” while assuring the public that no one’s health was actually at risk when synthetic myrcene was on the market. It blamed the Delaney clause for the confusion.
In 2020, a group of food industry scientists said the problem goes well beyond confusion. Revoking approval for artificial myrcene “has contributed to the ongoing erosion of trust in regulatory agencies,” they argued in the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. Such decisions promote an irrational fear of chemicals and cause consumers to lose faith in the safety of the U.S. food supply, they wrote.
Red dye No. 3 was approved for use in U.S. food in 1907, when it was known as erythrosine. It won permanent listing as an authorized color additive for foods, supplements and ingested drugs under the name FD&C Red No. 3 in 1969.
Soon after that decision, an industry group called the Toilet Goods Assn. petitioned the FDA to upgrade the dye’s listing for cosmetics and topical drugs from provisional to permanent. The request triggered additional tests in the 1970s and ‘80s, including two long-term feeding studies in rats.
Beginning before birth and for their entire lives, the animals were put on diets that included the red dye at concentrations of 0.1%, 0.5%, 1% or 4%. Compared to male rats that didn’t consume any dye, male rats that ate the most had a significantly higher incidence of tumors — both malignant and benign — as well as abnormal cell growth in the thyroid. No other group had an increased incidence large enough to be considered statistically significant. Among female rats, the incidence of benign tumors was elevated for those on the 1% diet, though not for rats on the 4% diet, as would be expected if the dye were the cause of cancer in these animals.
After consulting with scientists from the National Toxicology Program and the U.S. Public Health Service, the FDA concluded that red dye No. 3 could cause cancer in animals. In 1990, the agency denied the industry group’s request for permanent listing.
That decision applied only to cosmetics and topical drugs, and had no immediate bearing on food products sold in the U.S. At that point, the dye had been permanently listed as an approved food additive for decades. Nothing in those rat studies indicated to the agency that its designation needed to change.
Over the years, the dye has been tested in mice, rats, gerbils, pigs, beagles and humans. An extensive review conducted by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations found “no concerns” about the dye’s ability to trigger cancer, impair fertility or cause developmental problems in people of all ages when consumed in realistic doses.
“Claims that the use of FD&C Red No. 3 in food and in ingested drugs puts people at risk are not supported by the available scientific information,” the agency said Wednesday.
Frosted sugar cookies from Favorite Day Bakery, containing red dye No. 3.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Pitting the Delaney clause’s strict legal requirements against advances in cancer research has been a longstanding challenge for the agency, officials said.
“When we ban something, it will go to court,” Dr. Robert Califf, the FDA’s commissioner, told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee last month. “And if we don’t have the scientific evidence that will stand up in court, we will lose in court.”
The elaborate regulatory process for removing an additive from the food supply can certainly result in litigation, said Emily Broad Leib, director of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School.
“The Delaney clause probably works a lot better at the outset if you’re trying to add a new substance to food,” she said. “Once things are in food, it takes a really long time to remove it.”
The way some people see it, the problem with the Delaney clause isn’t that it forces the FDA to ban food additives that don’t pose a true cancer threat. It’s that the law doesn’t address all the other ways the foods we eat can be hazardous to our health.
“There’s a lot of things in foods naturally that cause cancer, and the Delaney clause doesn’t cover that,” said Alyson Mitchell, a food scientist at UC Davis. “It also does not speak to anything regarding other illnesses, whether it’s kidney dysfunction or ADHD or mental health issues or endocrine imbalances.”
The General Accounting Office (now known as the U.S. Government Accountability Office) raised this issue back in 1981, when it advised Congress to update the Delaney clause to reflect the latest scientific and medical knowledge. It would make sense for the law to apply “ equally to cancer-causing and non-cancer-causing substances,” the GAO said.
Other items that contain red dye No. 3: Del Monte fruit cocktail, Signature Select Jordan almonds, Betty Crocker Suddenly! pasta salad, and Jack Links beef stick and cheese. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
California has banned all uses of red dye No. 3 in the Golden State, and prohibited the use of six other dyes in foods served or sold in schools. Scientists who examined the dyes for the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment determined that “the behavioral factors are more of a concern” than the cancer risk, said Asa Bradman, an expert on exposure assessment and epidemiology at UC Merced and co-author of the comprehensive state report.
The FDA has studied the behavioral risks of color additives and hasn’t found “a clear and causal link,” an FDA spokesperson told The Times. Studies suggest some children with behavioral challenges like ADHD appear to be sensitive to food dyes, and that genetic variants affecting the body’s ability to break down histamine are a likely cause. In the FDA’s view, that doesn’t mean the dyes themselves are “neurotoxic,” the spokesperson said.
If there was convincing evidence that an artificial dye failed to meet FDA’s safety standards, the agency would take action whether the health threats were covered by the Delaney clause or not, the spokesperson added.
Mitchell, who worked on the California report with Bradman, said that because manufacturers have been phasing out red dye No. 3 for more than a decade, it’s not a significant concern for her. She’s more worried about the hyperactivity risk posed by red dye No. 40 because it’s ubiquitous in processed foods, especially those consumed by children.
“I’m grateful for the Delaney clause because I do think it’s been very helpful in trying to protect our food,” Mitchell said. “But it doesn’t go far enough. So much of this needs to be revisited.”
While it may not be remembered as FIFA’s most controversial decision of the 2026 World Cup, the institution of mandatory cooling breaks in all matches has been met with boos and derision, with critics saying the pauses disrupt the game’s flow and offer little benefit in air-conditioned environments.
“They’re in a dome here! Temperature-controlled, climate-controlled — why are we having a break?” fumed one England fan to a radio reporter outside the England-Croatia match in Arlington, Texas, where field temperatures inside AT&T Stadium approached a comfortable 70 degrees Fahrenheit despite an outdoor heat and humidity index near 105 degrees.
But for Dr. Bert Mandelbaum, chief medical officer for U.S. men’s soccer and vice chair of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s orthopedic surgery department, the breaks set an important precedent for prioritizing athlete health in extreme heat, even at the highest levels of competition.
“I do think the cooling breaks are an important part of the game. I’m really excited and happy that we are employing those,” he said by phone Tuesday morning, hours after the U.S. team’s 4-1 knockout loss to Belgium.
“Difficult weather environments bring on dehydration and can create severe exhaustion, heat exhaustion, and those [conditions] have tremendous and dire consequences,” Mandelbaum said. “Talk radio could discuss it over and over again, but from our standpoint, the real messaging should be to our communities, our club players, that this is an important part of our game, and the cooling break is how we help manage it.”
Warming climate conditions are forcing changes to human behavior all around the globe, including on the pitch.
Extreme heat kills more people each year than all other forms of extreme weather combined. Elite athletes are not immune to its effects.
As temperatures during a game rise, the circulatory system diverts blood to the skin to lower core body temperatures at the same time that active muscles require oxygen-rich blood. This places extra strain on the heart, which pumps harder to keep up with demand. Sweating players lose electrolytes faster than they can consume them, leading to muscle cramps, fatigue and dizziness.
Virtually all aspects of the game degrade in the heat, Mandelbaum said. Players’ performance, recovery ability and decision making erode. Artificial turf becomes intolerably hot, and the soil in natural grass can harden until it’s like playing on concrete. Air molecules inside the ball expand, making it a harder and faster object. Even fans risk injury: 22 people were treated for heat-related illnesses at a FIFA Fan Festival in Houston last month.
Mandelbaum directs the FIFA Medical Center of Excellence at Cedars-Sinai and was part of the FIFA Medical Committee in 2014, when the first World Cup cooling break was called during a Netherlands-Mexico match in Fortaleza, Brazil.
At the time, the sport’s governing body recommended hydration breaks if temperatures surpassed 102.2 degrees.
This year’s World Cup, hosted across the U.S., Canada and Mexico, is the hottest played since the tournament began in 1930. It has coincided with a withering heat wave in the eastern U.S. With a heat index of nearly 104 degrees at kickoff, the July 4 match in Philadelphia between France and Paraguay is believed to be the second-hottest game in World Cup history, after a 105-degree match in 1994 between Ireland and Mexico in Orlando, according to meteorologist Brad Maushart.
FIFA announced in December that this year’s tournament would be the first in which all matches must pause once in each half for hydration and cooling, regardless of temperature conditions.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino said mandatory breaks equalize playing conditions in all matches. When they haven’t been loudly booing, many fans have noticed that teams often appear to spend as much time strategizing during the pauses as they do hydrating.
Given this, “if we were to use hydration breaks only in those matches where it was too hot and not in the other matches, we would give an advantage or a disadvantage to some of the coaches or some of the teams,” Infantino told Sports News Television.
Harry Brown, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney’s Heat and Health Research Centre, expressed frustration over the universal breaks in an op-ed in the journal Nature.
“Although it might seem fair to treat all games in the same way, this blanket approach risks undermining trust in heat-safety measures. If breaks are always used, regardless of risk, they stop being meaningful and start looking like routine stoppages,” Brown wrote.
Without active efforts to lower players’ core temperatures, pausing game play may not be enough to effectively stave off heat injury, he wrote. In his own research, Brown’s team compared the effects of passive breaks against breaks with active cooling measures on the health of players participating in 90-minute soccer games in 104-degree heat and 41% humidity.
When players cooled themselves with cold drinks and icy towels during short breaks and took longer halftimes, their core temperatures and cardiovascular strain lowered considerably more than they did after only passive breaks, Brown wrote.
Other physicians argued that even an under-utilized break was better for athletes than nothing at all.
“I would say that it’s better to err on the side of having cooling breaks rather than risk not having them,” said Dr. Miho J. Tanaka, an associate professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard Medical School who also serves as a team physician for the Boston Red Sox and the New England Revolution.
“Ultimately, an individualized screening or monitoring process may be the safest approach, but we are still far from being able to precisely identify and intervene when an individual player may be at risk,” she said. “Until we are able to do so, having standardized breaks is a step in the right direction, as long as teams and players are informed when to escalate their level of concern and take action when more aggressive measures are truly needed.”
While a cooling break is rarely medically necessary inside a climate-controlled indoor stadium, Mandelbaum said it still sends a valuable message to players around the world: If hydration breaks are a part of the sport’s biggest event, they should be allowed at every other level of play.
“Not only is [the hydration break] a good thing, it’s a necessary thing,” Mandelbaum said. “This is the world’s game … we have to figure out how to help players at all levels and ages to have the ability to thermoregulate, hydrate, how to do it well.”
A trio of satellites set to launch early Tuesday will give wildland firefighters more time to respond and scientists more information about fire-prone regions across the globe.
The launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base is the first phase in a constellation called FireSat that will eventually cover the globe with 50 satellites collecting high-resolution imagery of fires and conditions on the ground every 20 minutes.
Earth Fire Alliance, the nonprofit group behind FireSat, got the project off the ground with $69 million in grants from the Bezos Earth Fund, Google and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
San José-based Muon Space built the satellites. Muon and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection are both FireSat partners.
The satellites use advanced thermal sensors to detect heat and can pick up signals from fires as small as a beach bonfire, as well as cooler fires that have been smoldering for days, according to Michael Falkowski, lead scientist at Earth Fire Alliance. That information will help fire officials, including the Los Angeles and Los Angeles County fire departments, understand whether blazes are growing, where they are headed and how much soot and smoke they are generating.
FireSat’s infrared instruments detected this small roadside fire in Medford, Ore., during a 2025 test flight.
(Muon Space)
“If we can differentiate between a smoldering fire and a flaming combustion fire, it really has a big impact on how we can understand the air quality emissions coming off the fire,” Falkowski said.
Fires that burn at low temperature produce more harmful gases than hot fires. Think about a campfire. When it’s burning hot with bright flames, there is relatively little smoke. When it’s smoldering, it produces lots of thick, white or gray smoke.
Wildfires work the same way.
A hot, fast-burning fire has enough oxygen and heat to burn with more complete combustion, producing less smoke for every pound of wood burned.
Earth Fire Alliance will provide data from these first three satellites in the next few months to Cal Fire and fire agencies in Oregon, Texas, Australia and Portugal. Cal Fire will share it with Southern California fire agencies.
The network will also turn its sensors on in the Amazon Basin for the Brazilian nonprofit Amazon Environmental Research Institute.
Cal Fire should begin receiving data from the scientists later this year, according to Falkowski, who joined Earth Fire Alliance last year from NASA, where he was an earth science program manager running the agency’s fire science program.
Instruments on the satellites will be able to detect fires the size of a shipping container, and distinguish between hot, intense wildfires and cooler, smoldering ones.
(Muon Space)
Falkowski said the new FireSat satellites are a big improvement over existing ones because they will be able to see smaller fires with better resolution and distinguish low-intensity “cool” fires from high-intensity hot ones.
“The satellites are really designed to measure fire across the entire temperature profile, so we can see cool fires all the way up to really hot fires,” he said.
That kind of granular information is important for emergency responders in the field and planners who make decisions about calling for extra help or ordering evacuations.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration operates three satellites that can detect a fire somewhere inside a square 1,230 feet across.
In contrast, instruments on the FireSat satellites will be able to detect small brush and roadside fires 16 feet across.
Cal Fire officials have long embraced new technology to get ahead of wildfires in recent years, testing autonomous firefighting helicopters and partnering with UC San Diego to use artificial intelligence to filter images from a network of more than 1,200 cameras on lookout towers and mountain tops. The Alert California program is able to spot smoke in a video and sends automated messages to one of 21 agency command centers across California.
In 2025, Alert California sent out automated warnings before authorities even received 911 calls from the public 51% of the time, according to Phillip SeLegue, staff chief of Cal Fire’s intelligence program.
A worker at Mountain View-based Muon Space puts the final touches on a wildfire-detection satellite scheduled to launch Tuesday on a SpaceX rocket. The satellites will be tracking fires across the globe.
(Muon Space)
FireSat will help incident commanders get better information more quickly, and, unlike fire-spotting aircraft, the satellites can linger over a fire for days or weeks and aren’t hampered by high winds or smoke.
Travis Medema, chief deputy for the Oregon State Fire Marshall, said his office will use FireSat to plan escape routes and monitor fires. “If we can fight these when they are small, we feel we will be more efficient and can protect Oregonians,” he said.
One expert noted that turning satellite data into information useful to firefighters and forestry managers will take some time. The FireSat data will “be amazing for fire nerds, but how and whether it helps individual fires remains to be seen,” said Joe H. Scott, founder of Pyrologix, a wildfire analysis firm based in Missoula, Mont. “Right now, we are not basing decisions on where satellites tell us a fire is,” Scott said.
Pyrologix develops wildfire risk management models for federal agencies, local governments and utilities. Scott said FireSat’s high-resolution data will help him build better prediction models that take into account weather, drought, plants and the history of fires in a region.
California voters will decide 14 statewide propositions in the Nov. 3 election, measures placed on the ballot mostly by either powerful interest groups or lawmakers that will affect the lives of millions of Californians.
While a proposed tax on state billionaires has dominated headlines, voters will also have a chance to weigh in on a number of consequential issues, from healthcare to voter identification requirements and more.
Californians are accustomed to legislating by the ballot and often face a list of propositions. But even by the standards of the state’s direct democracy process, the 2026 election stands out. The campaigns supporting and opposing the ballot measures have already collected more than $100 million in contributions, and are expected to use their money to inundate the television airwaves, livestreams and social media feeds and to flood mailboxes with glossy campaign mailers over the coming months.
Here are the measures on the Nov. 3 ballot:
Proposition 1: The Veterans and Affordable Housing Bond Act of 2026
Spurred by the state’s affordable housing shortage, state lawmakers are asking voters to approve an $11.25-billion bond to boost affordable housing construction around the state.
Advocates say the funds would help build more than 40,000 shovel-ready affordable homes that are unable to move forward because of a financing gap and help preserve thousands of other existing units.
Proposition 1 includes specific funding for high-need groups, including $1.25 billion for a veterans’ home loan program, $1.15 billion for supportive housing for homeless people, $350 million for student housing at state universities, $450 million for farmworker housing and $200 million for Native American tribes.
“In California, we don’t turn away from the needs of our people — we meet them head-on,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom in a statement about the measure. “We are giving voters the power to help shape the future of housing in our state. This bond is about building communities, expanding access and affordability in California, where every family has a fair shot at a place to call home.”
Some Republicans took issue with the measure’s title — “The Veterans and Affordable Housing Bond Act of 2026” — arguing that it included veterans to have broader appeal while doing little to actually help homeless veterans.
“It’s a sad thing to say that you have to use the veterans as bait to get the people of the state of California to approve an $11-billion bond, and I just think that’s shameful,” said Sen. Shannon Grove (R-Bakersfield), an Army veteran. “Call it what it is. It’s a homeless bond, and it does include some veterans’ benefits, but it is not a veterans bond.”
Proposition 2: Save for California’s Future Act
This measure would give California lawmakers more flexibility over state spending and allow them to save money that could otherwise go back to taxpayers.
The measure, supported by Newsom, seeks to exempt deposits into state savings accounts from a spending limit that voters adopted through a series of ballot measures dating back to the late 1970s, and to increase the share of tax revenue that can be put into the rainy day fund.
Under an existing state appropriations restraint, also known as the Gann Limit, lawmakers cannot spend more than an amount determined by a formula that takes annual tax proceeds, changes to the population and cost of living into consideration. Tax revenue above the limit must be divided between schools and refunds to taxpayers.
The measure could incentivize lawmakers to save more money because funds tucked away in the rainy day fund would no longer be considered expenditures counted toward the spending limit. By allowing lawmakers to set aside more money that is not subjected to state spending limits, it could also allow them to hold onto money that otherwise would be returned to taxpayers under current law.
This proposed constitutional amendment was placed on the ballot by state lawmakers.
Proposition 3: Fund schools and healthcare
If passed, this proposition would make permanent an existing tax on high-income Californians.
The existing tax, passed by voters in 2012 and extended in 2016, is set to expire in 2031. It applies to people who earn more than $360,000 for single filers, $721,000 for joint filers, and $490,000 for heads of household. It adds between 1% to 3% to these high earners’ personal income tax rates.
According to the initiative text, the funds are largely earmarked for local school districts and community colleges, with some portion of the money going to California’s rainy day reserves — which the state uses to prevent cuts to healthcare and other services when revenues decline. The measure says revenues cannot be spent on state bureaucracy or administrative costs.
The state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office expects the measure to bring in between $5 billion and $15 billion annually, depending on how the stock market is performing, with the amount expected to grow over time.
Proposition 4: Public financing of campaigns
This measure would allow the state and local governments to offer public campaign financing to candidates running for elected office. Candidates receiving the funding must abide by expenditure limits and adhere to the criteria set by statute, ordinance or charter to demonstrate broad support, such as demonstrate a large number of small dollar contributions.
None of the public campaign financing can come from funds designated for education, transportation or public safety. The financing cannot discriminate based on party or whether a candidate is a challenger or an incumbent. The public funds cannot be used for legal costs, fines or to pay back personal loans to a campaign.
This measure was placed on the ballot by the California Legislature and governor.
Proposition 5: Recall elections
This measure would change the way recall elections are conducted in California. Under this proposed constitutional amendment, during a recall election, voters would decide solely whether a politician should be removed from their elected position. If the recall is successful, that office would remain vacant until it is filled in accordance with existing law — either by a separate election or by appointment.
Under current law, voters make two separate decisions during a recall election: Whether to remove the subject of the recall from office and, if they are booted, which candidate running to replace them should fill the position. The candidate who receives the most votes wins, even if they receive far less than 50% of the vote.
The proposed constitutional amendment would also allow the recalled politician to run in the next election to fill the vacancy, though they cannot be appointed to their former post. Under the current system, office holders targeted in a recall are barred from being a candidate to replace themselves in that same election.
The proposal comes in the wake of the unsuccessful, Republican-led recall campaign against Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021, which in part tested voter sentiment about his response to the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the sponsors of the recall-reform measure was Sen. Josh Newman (D-Fullerton), who was recalled from office in 2018 after he voted to increase gas taxes for road repairs, legislation pushed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown. Newman won back his seat in 2020.
This proposed constitutional amendment was placed on the ballot by the California Legislature.
Proposition 37: Homeownership loan program
Proposition 37 would create a down payment assistance program to help middle-class Californians buy a new home.
The measure, spearheaded by former state Senate Majority Leader Bob Hertzberg, would allow middle-class California residents — defined as anyone who makes less than 200% of an area’s median income — borrow most of their down payment for a new home that they plan to live in. It is designed to boost construction of single-family homes.
A down payment is traditionally about 20% of the purchase price of a home. If passed, the measure would create a state-administered loan program that offers qualified homebuyers a second mortgage of up to 17% of a home’s sale price.
The proposition would allow the California Housing Finance Agency to issue up to $25 billion in revenue bonds to administer the program.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office does not anticipate the measure to result in direct state or local costs because the costs are meant to be covered by homeowners’ mortgage payments.
Proposition 38: Immunology research bond
Proposition 38 asks voters to approve an $8.4-billion bond to support research in the burgeoning fields of immunology and immunotherapy, which study the human immune system and how it can be used to prevent, treat and cure diseases.
If approved, half of the funding would go toward the creation of a new immunology and immunotherapy research institute affiliated with the University of California. The other half would fund research grants for other California-based universities and nonprofit medical research institutions to study potential treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and heart disease.
The measure has a built-in discount program for Californians — it requires that any technology or drugs developed from bond-funded research be sold to California patients for a price at least 20% below the national average.
Backers of the proposal include the Alzheimer’s Assn., National Multiple Sclerosis Society and other healthcare groups. Supporters argue the funding would facilitate research that could save lives and save patients “billions of dollars in health care costs by preventing and curing a range of debilitating diseases and illnesses,” according to the initiative text.
Proposition 39: Voter identification
Proposition 39 would require Californians to show government-issued identification every time they vote at the polls.
Currently, Californians must affirm under penalty of perjury that they are U.S. citizens and provide information to verify their identity, such as their birth date, driver’s license or Social Security number, when registering to vote, but they don’t have to present identification when they cast their ballot.
Under this measure, voters would also need to present government-issued ID each time they vote in-person at the polls or, if voting by mail, provide the last four digits of a “unique identifying number from government-issued identification” that matches the one they provided when they registered to vote. California would be required to provide free voter ID cards on request, and state and county election officials would be required to verify registered voters are U.S. citizens by using government data.
The voter ID measure has support from Assemblymember Carl DeMaio (R-San Diego), who has framed it as necessary to prevent voter fraud and restore trust. It comes as President Trump is pushing for stricter voter identification requirements and severe limits on voting by mail.
Democrats and voting rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, oppose the measure, saying California’s elections are already secure — voter impersonation and noncitizen voting cases are rare — and that it would make voting harder for many eligible voters, including people who have changed names, move frequently or face housing instability.
According to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, the measure would make election administration more expensive, costing state and local governments anywhere from tens of millions to low hundreds of millions of dollars annually, plus tens of millions in upfront implementation costs.
Proposition 40: Billionaire tax
This proposition, supported by a healthcare worker union, would impose a one-time tax of 5% on taxpayers and trusts with assets valued at more than $1 billion.
According to a state-prepared summary of the measure, 90% of the tax revenues would be spent on healthcare and 10% would fund food assistance or education-related programs. California’s richest residents would be able to spread the payments over five years.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates it would generate “tens of billions of dollars” spread over several years, but would lead to an annual decrease in state income tax revenues of “hundreds of millions of dollars or more.”
Newsom has publicly opposed the tax, arguing it would lead wealthy residents to leave the state and lead to future budget problems. Other opponents include Planned Parenthood, the California School Boards Assn. and a nonprofit called Building a Better California that is backed by tech execs and venture capitalists.
Some billionaires have already proactively moved themselves or their businesses out of the state because of the proposal, which as written would retroactively apply to residents of the state as of Jan. 1.
Proposition 41: Requires limits and audits on new state special taxes
This is one of two ballot measures crafted by opponents of the proposed initiative to impose a new tax on California billionaires, and it would in effect undercut or curtail that wealth tax.
This proposed ballot measure would also prohibit any new state taxes from being excluded from the state’s current voter-approved spending limit. The proposed billionaire tax would have such an exclusion. If the billionaire tax proposal is approved by voters but this proposal receives more votes, the billionaire tax measure would be voided.
The measure would require the state auditor to conduct a financial and performance audit of proposed ballot initiatives and of the programs they fund. The measure would require audits of any program that would receive funding from the special tax in the proposed initiative to assess the efficiency of the program and recommend who ought to reduce its annual costs by 10%. If the measure passes, the costs of the audits would be paid via the revenues generated by the special tax.
This ballot initiative is one of two so-called poison pills to sink the billionaire tax that is being bankrolled by Building a Better California, which has raised well over $100 million from the state’s most affluent. The largest donor is Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, who has reportedly moved out of California because of the tax proposal. He donated at least $82 million to the group as of late June.
Proposition 42: Ban on new state personal property taxes
This is one of two ballot measures created by opponents of the proposed initiative to impose a tax on California billionaires, and it would in effect void that wealth tax.
This proposed ballot measure would prohibit new taxes on personal property, intellectual property, retirement accounts and other assets and would limit situations in which a ballot measure or state lawmakers can impose or raise taxes retroactively — both of which are essential parts of the billionaire tax initiative.
If the billionaire tax proposal is approved by voters but this proposal receives more votes, the billionaire tax ballot measure would be voided.
This ballot initiative is one of two so-called poison pills to sink the billionaire tax that is being bankrolled by Building a Better California, which has raised well over $100 million from the state’s most affluent. The largest donor is Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, who has reportedly moved out of California because of the tax proposal. He donated at least $82 million to the group as of late June.
Proposition 43: Voting thresholds for special taxes
The measure would prohibit local governments from imposing new special taxes unless the proposed tax receives approval from two-thirds of voters. The restriction also applies to citizen initiatives, which currently only need a simple majority vote to be approved.
The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. supports Proposition 43. The advocacy group has characterized the measure as an effort to “save” 1978’s Proposition 13, the landmark initiative that capped California property tax increases and required a super-majority of votes to approve most future tax increases.
Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), who authored the legislation that became Proposition 43 — ACA 22 — opposes the measure and has urged Californians to vote against it. She said the only reason she crafted the bill was because it was a necessary bargaining chip to torpedo another ballot measure backed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. that would have devastated revenues for local governments and retroactively rescinded some local tax increases.
“I authored ACA 22 not because I wanted it to become law — but because it was the only path left to get the more dangerous initiative off the ballot before time ran out,” Wicks posted on social media.
Proposition 44: Regulate health clinic spending
If passed, Proposition 44 would require federally qualified health centers to spend 90% of their revenue on “program services advancing their charitable purpose” rather than management and overhead. Community clinics that fail to comply would be penalized, with fines placed in a state-managed fund to be spent on clinic workforce programs.
Advocates say clinics spend too much on executive pay and other administrative costs and not enough on patient care. The measure, which would dictate how clinics spend money, is designed to fix that. The measure is backed by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, an influential healthcare workers union, which argues it will help hold clinics accountable.
In May, the California Primary Care Assn., which represents more than 2,300 community health clinics, sued to block the ballot measure. The state’s powerful doctors’ lobby, the California Medical Assn., also opposes the measure, arguing it would ban clinics from keeping funding in reserves and hamper their ability to upgrade equipment or expand to new locations.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates that enforcing the measure would cost the government up to the low tens of millions annually, and that much of the cost would be paid for through penalties and fees charged to affected clinics. The office says the measure has “uncertain” impacts and could lead to clinic closures.
Proposition 45: CEQA reform
This proposition would amend the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, and speed up the process for projects deemed “essential,” including certain housing, water, health, public safety, energy and transportation projects.
Jails, detention facilities and oil or natural gas production facilities would not be considered “essential” projects, according to the measure text.
If passed, the measure would set deadlines for public agencies to complete environmental review, allow expedited review of a project’s environmental impacts — currently, public agencies are required to consider a range of feasible alternatives to reduce environmental impacts — and establish deadlines for filing and resolving lawsuits.
CEQA lawsuits have often been used to block construction of housing in the state. For instance, in Berkeley, neighbors used CEQA — citing potential noise impact from partying students — to delay, for years, UC Berkeley’s construction of student dorms on People’s Park.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates that the state and local government implementation will cost in the tens of millions of dollars for the first several years. It notes the legislation would probably result in net savings in the long term due to reduced administrative and legal workload.
Times staff writers Seema Mehta and Phil Willon contributed to this report.
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