Newsom Signs SB 518, Creating a State Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed SB 518, establishing a state agency to design programs for descendants of slavery.
This move turns political rhetoric into a standing government office with a mandate to explore reparative measures, and it comes with all the risks that bureaucracies bring.
The full bill text is publicly available and spells out how the bureau could expand if the Legislature chooses to fund it.
SB 518 specifically tasks the new agency with finding ways to provide reparations to descendants of slaves.
It states:
(a) It is the intent of the Legislature in establishing the bureau to establish an initial framework and it is the intent of the Legislature that the scope and responsibilities of the bureau may expand as necessary to fulfill its mission and address additional harms as identified.
(b) It is the intent of the Legislature that, as the bureau expands its scope in the future, it shall do both of the following: (1) Address the lasting harms of disenfranchisement, segregation, discrimination, exclusion neglect, and violence impacting both descendants and communities harmed as described in Chapters 1 to 13, inclusive, of the California Reparations Report.
(2) Advise on reparative remedies to target the persistent consequences of this legacy, guided by Chapters 14 to 33, inclusive, of the California Reparations Report. (c) Implementation of this chapter shall be contingent upon appropriation of sufficient funding by the Legislature in the annual Budget Act or other statute for that purpose.
The agency is going to be called the “Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery.”
Breitbart notes:
SB 518 builds on prior efforts launched under Newsom’s administration. In 2020, he signed AB 3121, creating a task force to study and recommend reparations proposals for Black Californians. That task force—formed in the wake of the George Floyd riots—later proposed payments exceeding $1 million per eligible resident and recommended other measures such as overturning California’s affirmative action ban, Proposition 209.
The move, however, was not popular.
Breitbart continues:
While the governor initially distanced himself from the idea of direct cash reparations, saying the issue was “about much more than cash payments,” he has since approved a series of related bills, including a formal state apology for slavery in 2024 and legislation offering non-cash remedies such as homeownership and education benefits.
Newsom, no doubt, is hoping the new efforts will be more successful than the old ones.
From a Republican perspective this bill looks like mission creep dressed up as moral repair, and it raises serious questions about the size and scope of state power.
The statute itself admits that expansion depends on funding, but language like that has not stopped lawmakers from finding money once a program gets momentum.
Practical issues are glaring: setting eligibility rules, deciding what forms of relief count as reparations, and resolving tangled jurisdictional claims across generations.
There’s also a fiscal reality: when bureaucracies start designing benefits, taxpayers ultimately pick up the tab and the state grows more entrenched in redistributive programs.
Politically this is risky for Democrats too because promises can turn into unfunded obligations and fuel backlash from voters who see unequal treatment under the law.
Republicans will push alternatives that focus on opportunity, education, housing access, and removing regulatory barriers, rather than ancestry-based payouts decided by a centralized office.
Noted economist Thomas Sowell has repeatedly condemned the idea of reparations.
Take a look at this .
He said:
If you’re going to have reparations for slavery, it’s going to be the greatest transfer of wealth back and forth uh and between and cross-hauling, as they say in the railroads, because the number of of whites, for example, who were enslaved in North Africa by the barbary pirates exceeded the number of africans enslaved in the united states and in the american colonies before that put together. Nobody is going to North Africa to ask for reparations because nobody is going to be fool enough to give it to them.
