California‘s first-in-the-nation Fast Food Council is another one of its run-of-the-mill duds, proving that the state’s obsession with bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake is suffocating California taxpayers and businesses.
The council, designed to micromanage regulations of the fast-food industry (including minimum wage hikes), has not had a leader since May, when Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) appointed its chairman to another regulatory bureaucracy. The nine-person council last held a subcommittee hearing in February and has not met at all in 2025, despite being required by the state law that created it to meet at least every six months.
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This means California has so many bureaucracies that the highly touted, fast-food board, which was crafted to appease labor unions and has already jacked up the fast-food minimum wage from $16 an hour to $20, has done practically nothing all year. Apparently, no one in Newsom’s office has noticed or cared. The council was allocated $1.1 million from the state’s budget despite not meeting at all, a violation of state law.
Yes, you read that correctly: A nine-person council solely focused on regulating fast-food restaurants has subcommittees. What exactly are we even doing here?
California’s bloated state bureaucracy continues to expand with each passing year. From January 2022 to June 2024, 96.5% of the state’s employment growth resulted from the hiring of new state government employees. Since January 2023, California’s private sector employment has seen a loss of 46,000 workers. The state’s growing bureaucracy is suffocating businesses across the state. The Fast Food Council, even in its functionally inactive state, is part of that problem: Since the minimum wage hike, California has lost about 18,000 fast-food jobs.
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California, under Newsom and the Democratic Party‘s monopoly on power, has made this the standard operating procedure in the state. California’s ever-growing bureaucracy has imposed more regulations on its people than any other state in the nation (a whopping 120,000 more regulations than second-place New York), and it has done so with the same attitude as its Fast Food Council, throwing regulations at the public and disappearing for months at the cost of millions in taxpayer dollars.
California is governed by progressive elites for progressive elites, and no working man’s message from Newsom is ever going to change that. California can’t even keep track of its invasive bureaucracies, but it allows them to strangle its economy.
