(DCNF)—California is known for pushing hundreds of bills through its Legislature each year, but many residents don’t realize what Democratic leaders have approved until the laws take effect.
In the 2025 state legislative session, lawmakers sent 917 bills to Democrat California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who signed794 of them. Though it’s not Newsom’s highest total, as he signed 997 in 2022, several of this year’s laws are expected to reshape policy once they roll out in 2026 and after, potentially influencing other Democrat-led states.
1. Fast-Track Caregiver Designations — AB 495
Newsom signed AB 495, the Family Preparedness Plan Act, by Assemblymember Celeste Rodriguez. The law creates a simplified, one-page affidavit allowing parents to designate a short-term caregiver, including nonrelatives, if they’re detained or deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The bill notably applies broadly, not just to children of illegal immigrants.
Rodriguez told the Daily Caller News Foundation in August the measure educates “childcare providers to prepare for ICE raids” and strengthens tools for families to maintain care arrangements during detention, deportation or hospitalization.
While Newsom’s office says the act doesn’t change who can legally become a guardian without a court order, critics argue the affidavit is too easy to misuse. According to paperwork, the affidavit requires only basic child information, a checked box confirming parent notification attempts and an ID such as a driver’s license, state ID or consular card. Republican lawmakers warned it could create “unintended consequences for sex traffickers [who] could easily exploit” its gaps.
2. California’s Glock Ban — AB 1127
Despite Glocks being among the most popular handguns sold in the state, Newsom signed AB 1127, effectively blocking Californians from buying new Glock-style pistols.
Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel and other Democrats argued the measure forces Glock to redesign certain models so they can’t be easily modified with a small plastic device known as a “Glock switch,” which can convert the firearm into a fully automatic weapon. The state says the bill targets the modification issue, not the brand.
Republicans countered that the attempt to curb illegal “switches” ends up disproportionately punishing lawful buyers, restricting access to one of the most widely used handgun platforms in the country. A gun-store owner told CBS News in October that Glock already produces newer models with built-in protections against switches, but the attorney general hasn’t approved them for sale in California, leaving buyers with no path forward.
3. ICE Alerts In Schools — SB 98
Another law hitting schools in 2026 is SB 98, drafted by Democratic state Sen. Lena González Pérez.
The measure requires K-12 schools and colleges to send out alerts anytime ICE is confirmed on campus. This will include when it happened, where it happened and links to “know your rights” resources. Every district will now have to build these procedures into its school-safety plan by March 2026.
Supporters say it’s meant to keep families from being blindsided, but critics argue it drags schools deeper into immigration politics and could stir up more fear than clarity. It’s a big shift in how districts communicate about law enforcement activity on campus.
4. Building A Reparations Eligibility System — SB 437
Despite Newsom vetoing a handful of measures and efforts to push reparations in California, the governor did end up approving Senate Bill 437, a quiet but sweeping change. The measure will directs the California State University system to develop a formal process for verifying whether someone is a descendant of enslaved African Americans. The state plans to give CSU up to $6 million to build out the research, standards and documentation needed to prove lineage, everything from genealogical tracing to how records should be evaluated when documentation is incomplete.
The law is part of California’s broader reparative-justice framework, and it essentially puts CSU in charge of creating the state’s “proof of ancestry” system. Beginning in the 2026–27 academic year, universities must start designing the methodology and reporting their progress back to the Legislature and the governor. Full implementation is expected by the 2029–30 school year, long before any future reparations program could be launched.
Supporters say SB 437 gives California a credible way to determine eligibility for possible reparations benefits. Critics, however, see it as an expensive and highly political mandate for a university system already struggling with enrollment, staffing and budget pressures. Either way, it marks one of the most concrete steps the state has taken toward building the infrastructure for a potential reparations program.
5. Seat-Belt Fit Test for Teens — AB 435
AB 435, introduced by Assemblywoman Lori Wilson, began as an effort to keep smaller teens out of the front seat and in booster seats. After internal Democratic pushback, the bill was rewritten to update how police assess whether a child can safely use a seat belt.
California already requires booster seats until age 8 or until a child reaches 4 feet 9 inches. Under the new adjustment of police standards, kids ages 8 to 16 will need to pass a five-step seat-belt fit test like checking posture, knee bend, shoulder belt placement, lap belt position and whether the child can stay seated correctly for the entire ride.
If the child fails the test and doesn’t meet the state requirement, drivers face a $490 fine and a ticket.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.