I wanted to walk you through something that just came across my desk from CalMatters Housing about Proposition 38, which is going to be on the November ballot. This one's worth understanding before you vote, particularly if you care about how public money gets spent in California.
So here's what's happening. Proposition 38 is asking voters to approve an $8.4 billion bond for immunology research and work on diseases like heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer's. That sounds straightforward enough. But according to CalMatters' analysis, more than half of that money over $4 billion is earmarked for one unnamed institute. The ballot language doesn't say the institute's name outright. Instead, it lays out a very specific set of qualifications that this institute would need to meet. And here's the thing: when CalMatters dug into it and even confirmed it with UCLA, it turns out that essentially only one organization in the entire state meets those qualifications, the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy.
The institute's co-founder happens to be billionaire Gary Michelson, who's also one of the two biggest financial backers of the Yes on 38 campaign. He's donated over $120 million to the institute since it became a nonprofit in 2022 and serves as its board chair. Along with another co-founder, Michelson and his nonprofit have poured at least $13 million into the Yes on 38 campaign. So you've got a situation where half the bond money appears to be structured specifically to benefit an organization whose founder is bankrolling the effort to get voters to approve it.
According to CalMatters, a political science professor at Cal State Fullerton who studies ballot measures said the language is unusually specific with numbers and raises legitimate questions about why voters would approve $4 billion going to one unnamed entity. She pointed out that the campaign seems to be banking on voters not reading too carefully and just supporting it because medical research sounds like a good thing. And apparently it can work that way sometimes. CalMatters noted that in 2024, a similarly confusing measure targeting essentially one organization, Proposition 34, passed by just 50.9 percent of the vote.
A former associate director at the National Institutes of Health who now works at Stanford has come out against Proposition 38. He told CalMatters that there's plenty of talent in immunology research across California, and concentrating half the bond funding in one institution isn't fair to the broader research community. He also expressed concern that the measure is too narrowly focused on immunotherapy at the expense of funding a wider range of biomedical research. If Proposition 38 passes, taxpayers will pay roughly $500 million a year for 25 years, which brings the real cost to over $12 billion.
What I'm seeing locally is that voters are getting more sophisticated about reading between the lines on these ballot measures, especially when there's money involved. The East Bay and Bay Area real estate communities depend on a thriving research and biotech sector, so these funding decisions absolutely matter to our economic future. That said, voters deserve transparency about where public dollars are actually going to go, even if the legal language technically doesn't name an organization. When half of an $8 billion bond is structured to benefit essentially one institute whose founder is bankrolling the campaign, that's something people should look at carefully before they mark their ballot.
