California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a first-of-its-kind law forcing large companies to dig up slavery-era ties and post them publicly, advancing reparations without cash payouts critics call illegal.
On September 30, 2026, Governor Gavin Newsom put his name on Assembly Bill 2599, the “Truth in Disclosure Act,” authored by Assemblyman Isaac Bryan (D-Ladera Heights). The measure orders big firms doing business in California to search their records for any historical link to chattel slavery and file sworn statements the state will publish.
Fox News reported the bill as a first-in-the-nation Democratic-backed statute and a clear step in the state’s broader reparations push, even though Newsom has resisted direct cash payments.
Covered businesses are those with more than $100 million in annual worldwide gross receipts that existed, or had a predecessor, on or before December 31, 1964. They must hunt records back to 1849 for buying or selling enslaved people, using them as loan collateral, writing insurance on them, or similar deals. The findings go into sworn affidavits under penalty of perjury.
The California Civil Rights Department is charged with building a public, searchable digital database of those disclosures. First filings are due by January 15, 2029, or later if the platform is not ready. Implementation still depends on a legislative appropriation.
Newsom framed the signing as simple transparency. In remarks tied to the bill he said the law requires large companies that operated before 1965 to search their records for ties to slavery going back to 1849 and then make the results public.
"This is a bill that requires large companies that operated before 1965 to search their records for ties to slavery going back to 1849 and then we make it public. These are insurance policies on enslaved people. Human beings used as collateral, quite literally as collateral for loans. Accountability, as Bryan said, starts with the truth."
That language tracks the official claim he offered when he signed the measure.
California joined the Union in 1850 as a free state and never legalized chattel slavery. The new disclosure regime still reaches private firms whose corporate ancestors may have done business anywhere before the Civil War. Taxpayers will fund the state database that catalogs whatever those companies find.
The same pattern appears in other recent Democratic power plays, including when Newsom hit private ICE detention centers with a 25% tax aimed at blunting federal enforcement.
AB 2599 was a priority of the California Legislative Black Caucus. Bryan’s bill sits inside a multi-year campaign that began after George Floyd’s death in 2020, when Newsom signed the law creating the California Reparations Task Force. That panel’s 2023 report offered extensive recommendations and floated cost estimates running into the hundreds of billions.
Direct cash payments have not been enacted. Last year the legislature carried 16 reparations-related bills. In 2024 almost none of consequence became law, though Newsom did sign AB 3089, a formal state apology for California’s historical role in perpetuating slavery and its legacy.
In October 2025 he signed SB 518, creating a Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery inside the Civil Rights Department, and SB 437, which sent up to $6 million to California State University for research on verifying descendant status. He vetoed other measures the same cycle, including college admissions preferences, eminent-domain restitution processes, home-loan set-asides, and tax exemptions for future reparations payments, citing fiscal concerns and legal risks.
One of the blocked proposals was AB 57, the “California Dream for All Program.” It would have steered at least 10 percent of funds from the California Housing Finance Agency’s home-purchase assistance program to qualified descendants of formerly enslaved people. Newsom vetoed it.
Readers tracking the same governor’s regulatory reach have also seen him push a California AI kill-switch mandate through executive order, another high-profile Democratic mandate delivered outside ordinary bargaining.
California Globe reported the disclosure law as a quieter route to keep the reparations project alive after the cash bills stalled. The paper noted that companies must still swear under penalty of perjury and that the public database will sit inside the same Civil Rights Department now housing the new descendants bureau.
While Sacramento builds the disclosure machine, the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has moved against a local reparations-style program in Evanston, Illinois. That city distributed cash payments and housing assistance solely to Black residents and their descendants. DOJ filed a proposed complaint in intervention alleging the scheme violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fair Housing Act.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon stated the legal line in plain terms.
"Under the pretext of paying reparations for events more than 100 years ago, the City of Evanston has chosen to distribute millions of dollars in cash and housing benefits to people because of the color of their skin or the color of the skin of their parents, grandparents, or great grandparents."
She continued:
"There are sound ways for a city to remedy past discrimination or direct resources to its most vulnerable citizens and neighborhoods. Simply handing out money based on race, however, is not the answer. It is race discrimination, pure and simple. And it is illegal."
Those statements come from the Justice Department’s public announcement of the intervention.
California voters already barred the state from racial preferences. Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative, passed in 1996 and prohibits discrimination or preferential treatment by the state, public universities, public employment, and other public entities. Any future cash or set-aside program built on the new disclosure database would have to clear that constitutional and statutory wall, plus the equal-protection standard DOJ is now enforcing in Illinois.
The partisan fight over investigations and leverage has a familiar echo when Democrats threaten family investigations after midterms and political opponents start preparing defense funds.
Reparations advocates treated the signing as an important victory. Kristin Nimmers told reporters the measure begins the work of naming who benefited.
"There are connections right now from slavery to current wealth of individuals and current wealth of corporations whose foundation and who built the start of their companies off of slavery and off of benefits gained from slavery."
She added that AB 2599 is “really starting the work of identifying who really benefited from this racial harm and from slavery.” Those remarks appeared in coverage of the activist response to the signing.
Newsom has kept the cultural track open as well. He recently interviewed Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, on his podcast “This is Gavin Newsom,” under the heading of how DEI failed and whether America’s racial legacy can be fixed. The governor’s public schedule therefore pairs the corporate affidavit mandate with continued narrative work on the same subject.
Parallel Democratic maneuvers keep stacking up in Washington, where Khanna floats a third Trump impeachment if his party retakes the House, another reminder that process fights often serve longer ideological goals.
AB 2599 does not cut checks. It does compel private companies to staff historical searches, risk perjury exposure, and feed a permanent government database that activists already describe as the foundation for later claims. The Civil Rights Department gains a new public ledger; the Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery now has a sister data set to work from; and the legislature retains the option to appropriate the money that turns the database live.
Earlier coverage of the same signing noted that reparations advocates cheer Newsom’s first corporate slavery disclosure mandate precisely because it keeps the project moving after cash bills died.
The practical sequence is straightforward. Companies above the $100 million threshold that can trace a corporate line before 1965 must dig. They must swear to what they find. The state will publish it. Filings begin in 2029 if the money appears. Nothing in the statute limits how future lawmakers or litigants may use the finished list.
California never ran a slave system, voters banned racial preferences a generation ago, and federal civil-rights lawyers are already in court calling race-based cash illegal. Sacramento’s answer is a mandatory corporate dig for 19th-century paper and a public database built to outlast the current governor.
When direct payouts stall, the administrative state finds another door, and leaves it open for the next round.
