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MY P.O.V. - During my years in public service, one truth has never changed: when government operates without scrutiny, misconduct follows. Oversight is not a bureaucratic nuisance. It is the foundation of honest government. When those in power are shielded from independent review, failure is not merely possible; it is inevitable.
California is now flirting with that failure.
As reported by CalMatters journalist Yue Stella Yu, Assembly Bill 1608, authored by Assembly Transportation Committee Chair Lori Wilson, represents a brazen and deeply troubling effort to weaken transparency. The bill would allow the Inspector General of the California High-Speed Rail Authority to withhold information deemed to “reveal weaknesses” and to block the release of personal papers and correspondence if the subject simply asks that the records remain private.
At the same time, a recent report by KCRA Political Director Ashley Zavala underscores why this proposed retreat from transparency is so alarming. As KCRA reported on February 10, 2026, the High-Speed Rail Authority is moving to settle litigation through a $537.3 million change order, the single most expensive in the project’s history, approved just one day after AB 1608 was filed. The timing has raised serious concerns among lawmakers that the bill is designed to shield embarrassing or damaging information related to cost overruns, hundreds of prior change orders, and more than $1 billion paid to a single contractor from public scrutiny. While the Authority denies any connection, critics warn that AB 1608 would allow exactly this kind of information, records revealing “weaknesses” in a deeply troubled project, to be withheld from the public at the precise moment accountability is most urgently needed.
That is not oversight. It is concealment.
Independent watchdogs and a free press exist for a reason: to ensure that inefficiency, mismanagement, and abuse are exposed so they can be corrected. When the very office entrusted with uncovering problems is empowered to hide them, transparency collapses. Legislators, journalists, and the public are left in the dark, unable to assess how taxpayer dollars are spent or how critical decisions are made.
This could not come at a worse moment.
California’s High-Speed Rail project has been plagued for years by delays, ballooning costs, and a deeply uncertain path to completion. State Auditor reports and countless investigative journalism stories have repeatedly documented systemic dysfunction in what is now a multi-billion-dollar undertaking. The appropriate response to this history is more oversight, not less.
We have already seen what happens when accountability is dismantled. The Trump administration’s systematic attacks on Inspectors General and hostility toward the media unleashed a federal government operating behind closed doors, shielded from consequences, and emboldened to pursue actions that were, at best, reckless and, at worst, unlawful.
California once stood as a counterexample, a model for transparency, debate, and public accountability. Yet today, some of the same leaders who loudly condemn federal abuses of power are quietly attempting to weaken safeguards at home. AB 1608 exposes that contradiction. Rather than confront hard truths and fix what is broken, lawmakers are choosing stonewalling over sunlight. It is crisis containment masquerading as governance.
That is unacceptable.
Government too often forgets a simple fact: it operates on public money. Taxpayers are not bystanders; they are, in effect, the board of directors. No board can make informed decisions without timely, complete, and unfiltered information. And no government deserves the public’s trust if it actively withholds the truth.
Efforts to obstruct transparency at this scale raise unavoidable questions. Whose interests are being protected? Who benefits from secrecy? It is certainly not the people of California.
Oversight is not an attack. Transparency is not a threat. Accountability is not optional.
The least a democratic government owes its citizens is the truth, unfiltered, unspun, and subject to independent scrutiny. Anything less is a betrayal of the public trust.
(Laura Chick served in public office for nearly two decades, including as a member of the Los Angeles City Council, Los Angeles City Controller, and California Inspector General for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, overseeing roughly $50 billion in federal stimulus funding to ensure accountability and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.)
