Anatomy of an Influence Machine

The players

It starts with three companies.

PG&E, Southern California Edison, and Sempra are California’s for-profit utilities. Their equipment has repeatedly sparked catastrophic wildfires — and now they want a bailout that shifts billions in liability onto survivors, homeowners, and taxpayers.

To make that politically possible, they built a machine. Watch it assemble.

Step 1 · Buy the deciders

First, fund the politicians.

California’s investor-owned utilities targeted the politicians with the greatest influence over wildfire policy: $962,500 to Governor Newsom’s statewide campaigns and initiatives; $1,989,511 to legislative leadership and key committee chairs. Top recipients included Republican Leader Heath Flora ($191,500) and Speaker Robert Rivas ($148,700).

Step 2 · Lobby relentlessly

Then, lobby around the clock.

More money lobbying the Legislature, the Governor’s Office, and the regulators at the CPUC — including a record $16.7 million this session alone, with two quarters still to count, as the bailout was hammered out behind closed doors.

Step 3 · Manufacture “grassroots”

Build a coalition that looks like the public.

Wildfire Victims First presents itself as a grassroots survivors’ movement. It isn’t. The group is 100% funded by the for profit utilities. Two-thirds of its member organizations — 142 of 214 — are directly utility-funded, to the tune of $7.3 million.

66% of Wildfire Victims First’s member organizations are directly utility-funded — 142 of 214.

Step 4 · Staff it with insiders

Run by the Governor’s own people.

After the Governor received nearly $1 million from utilities, the utility coalition — Wildfire Victims First — hires Nathan Click, Governor Newsom’s former communications director, to run it. Its TV ads are placed by Polaris / Bearstar — Newsom’s longtime political consulting firm.

Step 5 · Fund the echo

Pay the chorus.

Hundreds of millions in “charitable” giving flows to non-profits, chambers of commerce, business councils, and legislative caucus foundations — groups that echo the utilities’ talking points as their own. Edison alone steered $1.77M to the state Chamber of Commerce and $894K to the Business Roundtable.

Step 6 · The payoff

It all points at one thing: a bailout.

In 2025 they won SB 254 — what the LA Times called “effectively a bailout.” Now the Governor and the Legislature are proposing the next one. Meanwhile AB 1774, a bill simply to audit utility wildfire spending, quietly died — after auditors couldn’t account for $2.5 billion.

“The current proposal did not emerge organically. It is the culmination of years of coordinated spending designed to manufacture the appearance of public support.” — The Disinformation Echo Chamber