California Governor Gavin Newsom just unveiled a $20 million taxpayer-funded free diaper program called "Golden State Start" — and wouldn't you know it, the money trail leads right back to his wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom's personal network. Because of course it does. This is Gavin Newsom we're talking about. The man has never met a public dollar he couldn't redirect toward someone in his Rolodex.
Twenty million bucks for diapers, and it still stinks.
Here's how the grift works. The program — billed as a "first-in-the-nation" initiative to give free diapers to every newborn in California hospitals — was rolled out as a partnership between the state and Baby2Baby, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit. Sounds nice. Except Norah Weinstein, co-CEO of Baby2Baby, just happens to sit on the board of California Partners Project, an organization co-founded by none other than Jennifer Siebel Newsom. The governor's wife.
Small world, right? Gets smaller. Kelly Sawyer Patricof, Baby2Baby's other co-CEO, is married to film producer Jamie Patricof, whose father Alan Patricof is a longtime Democratic mega-donor with deep Clinton-era ties. So we've got a taxpayer-funded diaper pipeline running from Sacramento straight through the governor's wife's nonprofit board and into the laps of connected Democratic insiders.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton did the math, and it's ugly. "If you take the number of diapers they're planning to send out and the amount of money that he's spending on it, it's 50 cents for each one, which is like 100 times more expensive if you just bought them in Costco," Hilton said. "But where's the money coming from? Us."
Fifty cents a diaper. You can buy a box of Huggies at Costco for a fraction of that. But efficiency was never the point, was it?
The state has already approved $7.4 million for the program, with another $12.5 million proposed in the 2026-2027 budget. That's nearly $20 million in taxpayer money routed through an organization run by women who sit on the governor's wife's board and are married into one of the Democratic Party's most connected donor families. Newsom debuted the whole thing right before Mother's Day, because nothing says "I love moms" like skimming the public treasury.
Hilton put it perfectly: "Instead of taking our money, putting into some scheme that benefits their friends and cronies, why don't they let us just keep more of our money in the first place so we can decide how to spend our money?"
Great question. We all know the answer.
This is the man who wants to be President of the United States. He can't run a diaper program without it turning into a sweetheart deal for his wife's pals. As first reported by the California Post and the New York Post, the connections between Baby2Baby's leadership and Jennifer Siebel Newsom's California Partners Project aren't even hidden — they're right there on the org charts, plain as day.
Gavin Newsom looked at $20 million in taxpayer money, looked at the state's crumbling infrastructure and soaring homelessness, and said, "You know what California really needs? Overpriced diapers distributed by my wife's friends."
And they wonder why people are fleeing the state.