It started as a lark. I notice that you could get on the ballot for some relatively modest fees and was joking to my friends about it. The campaign slogan would be simple: “Anybody is better than those guys.”
Then I pulled the trigger. Starting with forms, then payments. I found myself taking it seriously, because the stakes are so high.
While I was gathering signatures, I asked a young man to sign my nomination papers noting the rate of new laws passed in California.
He signed and told me about his father, who had pieced together a living doing multiple part-time jobs, like street sweeping. But when the state passed AB5—a massive new law attempting to force companies to give part-time contractors full benefits—his father didn’t get benefits. He just lost his work. The law’s massive, sprawling provisions effectively destroyed his livelihood. The law delivers benefits to some and harm to others. We must honestly acknowledge that harm, and actively work to minimize it.
For the record, the Governor signed 794 bills into law just last year. The sheer volume of new laws means that legislation is often rushed, poorly vetted, and drafted by special interests. We are drowning under unchecked legislative volume that crushes regular people.
The Power of No
We do not need 794 new laws every year. And the most powerful tool the Governor has is the veto. It is fundamentally the “Power of No.”
I would use it aggressively. My commitment is simple: I would veto any bill whose primary purpose is to signal virtue, rather than solve a concrete problem. I would veto bills that create sprawling new regulatory frameworks without fully offsetting the burden by repealing outdated regulations. I would veto any bill that cannot be mathematically linked to a definable improvement in the public’s well-being.
We must radically raise the threshold for adding complexity to the State of California.
The Power of Execution
But government is not just about blocking bad laws; it is about administering the ones we have. The state government is a massive operational apparatus. The fundamental tension in the executive branch is the dynamic between the Governor’s political appointees and the career civil service.
Too often, political appointees are selected strictly for ideological loyalty, while the permanent civil service is viewed as an obstacle or a nuisance. My administrative plan is fundamentally different: I will mandate that my executive appointees function as operational managers who collaborate directly with the civil service. We will empower the technical experts who actually understand the machinery of government to execute policy with competence and efficiency, rather than pushing top-down ideological directives that break the system.
Specific Examples
Here are three primary areas where we desperately need systems-level optimization:
1. Resolving the Learning Crisis (Education): Currently, only about 36% of our K-12 education budget is spent directly on teaching within the classroom. California has failed vulnerable students at the most basic task: learning to read. We must aggressively reallocate funding away from bureaucratic overhead and directly into the pockets of the teachers working with students. At the same time, we need to strip away ideological fads from our teaching methods and mandate evidence-based reading and mathematics instruction statewide (see my School Partisan Analysis for detailed numbers on district performance with regard to where things work better in California). A specific problem is the State Board of Education, which is occupied by advocates who have failed repeatedly and yet continue to inject failed and expensive approaches into our schools.
2. Public Sector Accountability (Administrative Bloat): We have allowed runaway executive salaries to explode across our public institutions while systemic corruption continues unchecked. Worse than the high salaries themselves is the cost of the staff assigned to these executives. We must drastically tighten oversight on executive compensation and overheads. An example, which I have worked on for a decade, is administrative bloat within systems like the UC network (see my Analysis of UC Salary Data here), ensuring taxpayer funds actually serve the public mission, not the administrative class.
3. Regulations as Drag: We need to reduce the crippling regulatory friction that blocks both public infrastructure and private development of housing. There has been progress made recently, and that needs to continue. We must make it vastly easier and cheaper to build robust power grids, upgrade water reservoirs, and expand housing capacity so that basic utilities and housing are affordable for regular Californians.
To be sure, optimization across the vast areas of government ($300 Billion in expenditures) is a massive undertaking, and to be fair, many people are working on them. But too often entrenched interests drown out those common-sense voices that ask the obvious questions when magical and complex solutions are proposed and implemented. Ultimately, the Governor must answer and act for these people.
Professional Bio
Government requires practical experience, such as managing a job site, running a small business, or organizing a community group. My experience is in public education.
When people think of a university professor, they may picture someone giving a lecture and retreating to an office. But at a massive public institution like UC Berkeley, the reality is much more hands-on.
I personally teach courses that are much larger than people might think—typically 500 to 800 students at a time. Over the years, I have taught Discrete Math, Probability, Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Programming, and Pedagogy. Running a class at that scale requires far more than just giving a lecture; it requires active, daily interaction with students—ranging from teaching, to administrivia, to accommodating various crises. It means constantly designing and revising materials and policies to meet their broad, diverse needs. To make that happen, I hire, supervise, and frankly, learn from dozens of vibrant young people on my course staff.
We also must handle whatever comes our way. During COVID, we built new tools from scratch to handle remote exams, catch misconduct, and grade massive numbers of papers fairly. During labor actions, I have to thread the needle—respecting course staff while still serving my students.
My academic work focuses on designing algorithms—with a particular focus on optimization. Algorithms are essentially provably efficient, effective methods for solving problems. Addition is an example of an algorithm, and without it, monetary systems don’t work. Of course, my work is far less central (see Google Scholar). In academia, being “world famous” can mean some guy in Japan read one of your papers once. That being said, my knowledge is reasonably complete with respect to techniques in algorithms and optimization.
For professors at public institutions, public service is a core part of the job. Over the years, I have conducted extensive data analysis on university budgets and public school performance. I am deeply immersed in K-12 education policy, drawing heavily from my time serving on the Berkeley High School Site Council, and, of course, I am intimately familiar with higher education through my decades of work as a college instructor and teaching Pedagogy.
Beyond the classroom and the lab, professors across the UC and State University systems are actively involved in running the institutions themselves. We participate in the design of new majors, set admissions standards, and establish the broader academic policies that govern these universities—overseeing everything from student discipline and faculty conflicts of interest, to the evaluation of peers and the rigorous review of scientific results. We are constantly forced to weigh the dual mandates of public education: maintaining elite, world-class standards while ensuring the broadest possible access for the public.
That experience—managing large teams, building systems to adapt to sudden crises, rigorously analyzing data to understand what actually works, and navigating trade-offs between competing interests—is all driven fundamentally by a dedication to public service, rather than to a company’s bottom line.