The California state Capitol building seen from a drone on Thursday, April 30, 2026. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s May Revision to the state budget eliminates, beginning in April 2027, $169 million in state funding for mobile teams that deal with people suffering from a mental crisis.
HECTOR AMEZCUA
hamezcua@sacbee.com
Gov. Gavin Newsom faces rising opposition to a proposal in his budget to end the state’s responsibility for funding teams California cities and counties have used to respond to people in the grip of a mental health crisis.
Opponents, which include behavioral health experts, hospital doctors and a large swathe of legislators who have heard from their county supervisors that they want the funding protected, say Newsom’s budget would derail an effective street-level intervention program painstakingly built up over recent years.
The program has been widely embraced by local governments both in California and nationwide. It is, by some accounts, one of the policing reforms elected officials initially embraced in the aftermath of the 2020 police killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd that has demonstrated the most staying power.
Sacramento County’s program is called the Community Wellness Response Team. Data maintained by the county indicates the team responded in the field to an average of 82 calls a month in 2025.
Newsom’s finance staff argues the state was never meant to fund the programs forever. The programs have grown since the pandemic, when the federal government began paying a generous 85% of their costs. Starting next spring, however, that program ends and costs would be split 50-50 with the federal government.
The state previously covered the remaining 15% and counties were required to launch the programs beginning in 2023. Newsom’s proposal would shift the enlarged cost burden to counties, and at the same time leave it to local officials to decide whether to continue the programs or not.
Social workers, county behavioral health department directors and other advocates say the change could wipe the program out in many counties, particularly as cash-strapped local governments contend with the cuts to federal healthcare dollars made by President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans last year.
Funding cut puts pressure on counties of all sizes
Those advocates worry that will leave people in the grip of a mental health crisis facing vastly different options depending on their ZIP code. More remote, and sometimes poorer, counties will likely struggle to fund the programs, advocates say, even when in places like Lake County, the mobile response teams were eagerly embraced and have been effective.
Even wealthier counties that highly value their response teams will struggle to maintain funding for them as county governments face other cost pressures and cuts.
“Mobile crisis teams are a regional asset and arguably the most effective behavioral health intervention added in decades,” San Diego County Behavioral Health Services Director Nadia Privara Brahms said at a press conference this week. “The counties cannot simply absorb the costs to maintain them,” she said, “and being forced to choose one essential mental health service over another isn’t a reasonable solution.”
San Diego County runs 44 such teams, Brahms said, at a cost of around $24 million annually, including the federal share.
Newsom’s proposal would save the state about $169 million a year, as the state grapples with deep-seated fiscal issues. Some legislators, however, have signaled that they see pulling the state back from funding the crisis units as symptomatic of their largest issue with Newsom’s budget — that the savings he seeks come from programs to aid California’s most vulnerable residents, including healthcare programs like the mobile crisis units.
“The May Revision does still dismantle healthcare in California in a very inhumane way,” Assemblymember Dawn Addis, D-San Luis Obispo, said at the first hearing of the Assembly Budget Subcommittee on Health, which she chairs, after Newsom unveiled his budget proposal on May 14.
“Legislators have been speaking up, dozens at a time, on specific issues that are going to hit their communities and all of our communities in a negative way,” Addis said. The mobile crisis units were the first programs she named.
That Newsom’s cuts to such programs came amid surging tax revenues from booming artificial intelligence companies’ stocks are making cuts to such programs even harder to swallow.
“There are a lot of mechanisms to balance this budget,” Addis said later in the hearing.
How do the mobile units work?
Mobile crisis units send social workers instead of, or sometimes alongside, armed police officers and sheriff’s deputies to reported cases of someone undergoing a mental health crisis in public or at home.
The teams seek to stabilize people in their homes or in the community where they may have familial support. Some data indicates the program effectively reduces the number of people routed to incarceration (law enforcement officers often jail people in a mental health crisis on minor infractions for lack of a better option) or involuntary commitments to a hospital.
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, mobile crisis teams have ultimately led to government savings, as they’re cheaper than incarceration or hospitalization. People who receive the services and their loved ones have told surveyors they’d rather call on such teams than bring in traditional law enforcement.
But on the whole, most research into the topic has concluded more precise surveys are needed, as the programs vary greatly depending on the area in which they operate and the funding available. It remains a relatively new shift in the way cities and counties confront growing numbers of mental health crises in the streets, but it is one advocates say has shown promise and shouldn’t be undercut too soon.
At this week’s press conference, Dr. Steve Koh, the psychiatrist in chief at University of California San Diego Health said he used to see a dozen or more new psychiatric patients in the emergency room every day. Two-thirds of them didn’t need to be there, he said.
Many “simply needed someone to talk to and be treated with compassion out in the field or at their homes,” he said. Since San Diego built up its mobile response teams, the number of psychiatric patients arriving at his ER has dropped, and the ones coming in truly need to be there, he said.
“If this type of program goes away, we will actually be going back in time,” he said.
The Sacramento Bee
Andrew Graham reports for The Sacramento Bee’s Capitol Bureau, where he covers the Legislature and state politics. He previously reported in Wyoming, for the nonprofit WyoFile, and in Santa Rosa at The Press Democrat. He studied journalism at the University of Montana.