Californias embarrassing $2 billion budget error exposed, even as state leaders knew about blunder for months

California’s budget mess just got a whole lot messier — and a whole lot more embarrassing.Top lawmakers sat on a staggering $2 billion accounting blunder for months while publicly warning of a looming budget crunch, according to a bombshell memo that’s now blowing the lid off the quiet deception.Gov.Gavin Newsom’s administration built its January budget proposal around a projected $2.9 billion shortfall — but that figure was quietly thrown into doubt after officials discovered they’d badly botched the math tied to the state’s massive pension system, CalPERS.Instead of sounding the alarm, legislative leaders kept the mistake under wraps.The error — actually two separate miscalculations totaling roughly $2 billion — was flagged as far back as February by the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, led by Gabe Petek.

Yet despite months of budget hearings and public hand-wringing over deficits, the public was left in the dark.“Given the size and complexity of California’s budget, it is not uncommon that we come across errors stemming from calculation mistakes or formula errors etc,” Petek said to KCRA 3 on Friday.“Part of the role of our office is to serve as a check on the administration’s budget calculations.

So, in the case of this CalPERS example, you are correct, we did identify a double-counting error and given that this error is on the larger side, we notified the Legislature of it for their situational awareness.”It’s still unclear why neither lawmakers nor Newsom’s team bothered to come clean while hammering out the state’s spending plan behind closed doors.Newsom’s camp is now scrambling to downplay the fiasco, insisting it wasn’t really a mistake at all.“This isn’t a calculation error – it’s revision to better estimate how these payments are made,” said H.D.Palmer, a spokesman for the governor’s Department of Finance.

“We told legislative leaders and the LAO back in February that we would ...