California’s Government Diaper Dispensary Serves Fraudsters, Not Families

Babies are proverbially easy to steal from, and California is going to swipe the very diapers off their bottoms.

Of course, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has promised the opposite, announcing a program to provide “free” diapers to newborns. This is meant to appear as a generous and pro-baby plan, and Newsom was even applauded by some pro-life and pro-family writers and activists. 

But this is California, notorious for fraud and boondoggles ranging from fake hospices to the high-speed rail train to nowhere. So, in evaluating this program, it is pointless to try to parse the projected cost-per-diaper because California cannot accurately estimate such costs. That high-speed rail project was supposed to cost $33 billion and be done in 2020; it is now projected to cost $231 billion with no end in sight.

As this suggests, it would likely be far more cost-effective just to ship diapers from big retailers such as Amazon, Costco, and Walmart than to provide state funding for a boutique diaper NGO run by a Newsom crony. Though a few optimists saw this as a welcome effort to make California more baby-friendly, it is more likely a wasteful grift conducted under the PR veneer of helping babies. 

Of course, it can be argued that free diapers for babies, even with some grift, are better than no free diapers for babies — it may be a poor start, but at least it’s a start, and making sure there are diapers for newborn babies is not the worst use of taxpayer money. Nonetheless, if this program is administered with typical California inefficiency, it will be not only wasteful but wicked. 

There is, after all, no such thing as a free diaper. Someone is paying for it; in this case, it’s California taxpayers. And it is evil to siphon off that money for other (self-serving) purposes. It is theft from both the taxpayers and the babies the money was supposed to help. 

The wrongdoing is obvious in cases of outright fraud, such as the now-infamous “Quality Learing Center” in Minnesota. But ostensible help for the poor that is mostly spent on, say, generous NGO salaries, is not much better. If the government appropriates however many millions to help the poor, but most of it is eaten up by overhead and graft, this is just another form of stealing. Inefficiency slides into iniquity.

Yes, even the best charities, programs, and NGOs will make mistakes. Sometimes something won’t work, or a project will fail. And different missions require different uses of resources. But those that are still serving their mission will always be asking whether they are spending wisely and well. Furthermore, though charitable work may have goals beyond efficiency — teen service projects, for example, are often less about cost-effective results and more about forming character and inculcating a sense of service — there is little place for them in most government programs. And though workers, including those caring for the poor, deserve fair wages, those helping the poor have a duty to make sure that they are, well, helping the poor and not just using them to get comfortable sinecures for themselves, generate kickbacks for patrons, or indulge in activism.

But those are what Democrats use government programs for. Though they use government spending to preen about caring for the downtrodden, their deeds demonstrate otherwise. For instance, when it comes to caring for babies, it is not pro-abortion Democrats who have been giving their own money to fund crisis pregnancy centers across California and the nation, many of which give diapers to mothers in need. Democrats prefer to spend government funds, which is to say, taxpayer funds. So, from education to homelessness, vast sums are expended with, at best, mediocre results — if we judge by the stated goals of educating children or reducing homelessness. 

However, if we judge government spending by the metrics of employing the sort of people who make up the Democrat base, funding left-wing ideas and activism, and funneling money to left-wing client groups, it is very effective. This is why Democrats have to be prodded and shamed into restraining fraud, waste, and inefficiency. For them, those are features, not bugs. 

So we should be skeptical of Newsom’s crony-run diaper giveaway. And when the program proves to be just one more entry in the long list of California grifting, we should emphasize the sinfulness of how Democrats run these programs. Taking money meant to help babies and instead using it to fund the Democrat adjutant class is evil, a crime that cries out to heaven for vengeance.

---

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of "Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All" (Ignatius, 2025).