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Former U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra announced Wednesday that he was running for governor, joining the busy Democrat field, hoping to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Becerra said she had been thinking about running for a while, and because of her experience fighting President Trump and managing disasters, she decided to jump into the race due to two traits that seem important to the next leader in the state.
“Looking at what unfolds in front of me, it became clear that this wasn’t the time to sit on the sidelines,” Becerra said in an interview.
He said his experience dealing with natural disasters, particularly the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, is unique in navigating the man-made disasters created by the president’s top advisor Trump and billionaire Elon Musk.
“Americans are being punished,” he said. “Cancer patients are no longer trying to watch a fruitful study complete, whether they are elderly people living in nursing homes where no inspectors come to investigate elder abuse, or whether they are looking at the leads with toys their children put in their mouths.
He said he believes California is at a turning point and needs wise executive leadership that clearly swipes on the state’s democratic leadership to pull back businesses and facilitates local wildfire casualties such as the Pacific Palisade and Altadena. Becerra said environmental protection needs to remain a priority, but laws like California Environmental Quality Act, Coastal Commission power and state regulations must be open for review.
The question looming in the race is whether former Vice President Kamala Harris has decided to run, and she is not expected to take it until the summer. If she participates in the contest, the move is expected to win the field due to her national profile, fundraising ability, and successful campaigns from her multiple statewide campaigns.
Becerra said he would stay in the race if Harris ran.
Other announced candidates include the following Democrats: Lieutenant Colonel Eleni Kunarakis, state controller Betty Yi, state schools chief Tony Thurmond, former Los Angeles Antonio Villarigoza, former Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, and businessman Stephen Klubuk. Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco is also running.
Becerra joins another prominent Latinos, Virla Lagoza, in a race where Latinos voting may be important. Becerra said he believes his qualifications and experience speaks for himself.
“I feel very comfortable knowing who I am, what I did, what I did, what I did, what I did, what I built, how I protected, how I achieved it,” he said. “It’s one of the things you try to give people choices. That’s the purpose of elections.”
Becerra, 67, has been in public office for 35 years. He served in the state legislature for two years before being elected to Congress in 1992. He ultimately served 12 terms in the house and served multiple leadership positions under former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco).
In 2016 he was appointed to the then Gov. After Harris was elected to the US Senate, Jerry Brown became state attorney general. During his tenure as the state’s top prosecutor, he filed more than 120 lawsuits against Trump during his first term as president. Trump is expected to become a major focus of governors’ race in the state, once again expected to become a major force in the efforts to fight the Trump administration.
“I’ve seen this B-rate movie before and we’re ready to take on it,” he said.
Becerra, the first health and welfare secretary to visit a planned parent-child clinic, pointed to the administration’s work pushing back the Trump administration’s policies on reproductive care during her tenure in the cabinet. He noted that the Biden administration went to the Supreme Court to protect access to Mifepristone, one of two drugs medically used to end pregnancy.
“We obviously had a strong defense,” he said in an interview earlier this year in a formal conference room outside his office before Trump took office.
Becerra took the oath of office in March 2021, leading 95,000 members of vast health and human service bureaucrats at a time when Covid was the highest concern. He said one of his agency’s biggest achievements is to win 700 million Covid vaccination shots in the American arm.
He also highlighted the launch of a 988 hotline, offering 24-hour suicide and crisis counseling, and the availability of health care for over 300 million people.
However, reports released by The New York Times, The Washington Post and others revealed that Becerra was not urgent and faced criticism as a secretary for her handling of issues, including the Monkeypox outbreak, including members of the Biden administration who allegedly tried to eliminate liability to the state. He defended his response, claiming that his division was ahead of the curve in distributing the Salpox vaccine across the country, and that state and local jurisdictions ultimately made decisions on how they were distributed.
“We can’t control how the state and local jurisdictions distributed the vaccine, but we’ve made sure they got it,” he said.
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