Supervisor Lindsey Horvath has already announced she wants the job she helped create. Los Angeles County is racing toward a brand-new elected County Executive position that could pay roughly $558,000 a year with benefits and a pension, more than double what the governor of California earns and more than the President of the United States.
No professional qualifications are required. No term limits exist. The winner would oversee a $54 billion budget and more than 110,000 county employees while holding veto power over the Board of Supervisors.
That is not reform. That is a permanent high-dollar seat with almost no guardrails, and one of the people who designed it is already running for it in 2028.
Measure G barely passed in 2024 with 51.6 percent of the vote after being rushed onto the ballot in 21 days. Supporters sold it as greater representation through an expanded Board of Supervisors and a new Ethics Commission. Quietly included was the replacement of the county’s appointed, professionally qualified chief executive officer with this elected executive who would take over powers currently held by the Board under state law.
Former federal judge Stephen Larson, representing former LA City Councilman Dennis Zine, has already raised constitutional questions about whether the county can lawfully transfer those powers and whether taxpayer money can be spent preparing an office whose authority is still in dispute.
Kathryn Barger, Horvath’s colleague on the Board, laid out the problems in the New York Post. She supported the Board’s October 20 decision to pause implementation for 90 days because the process was moving too fast with too little public scrutiny. Only a handful of residents have shown up for the discussions. One early proposal even tried to create a new Legislative Analyst office more than a year early without a cost estimate.
Barger called that asking taxpayers to sign a blank check. She has pledged not to run for the position herself and urged her colleagues to do the same, arguing that elected officials helping design a powerful new office should not be positioning themselves to occupy it.
Barger is right on the conflict. Public service is not supposed to be a vehicle for creating the next political opportunity and then filling it. Yet Horvath, a leading architect of Measure G, has already launched her campaign. Other supervisors including Hilda Solis and Holly Mitchell have pledged to stay out. Horvath has not.
While the Board debates titles, salaries, and new layers of government, basic needs remain unmet. Homebound seniors still wait for food deliveries. Homelessness programs still fail to deliver lasting results despite massive spending. Families in Altadena are still trying to rebuild after the Eaton Fire. Creating another high-paid office does not feed anyone, house anyone, or rebuild a single home.
How does creating a new, powerful, highly paid office make government more accountable?
That is the question Barger put to taxpayers. The honest answer is that it does not. It concentrates extraordinary power and money in one set of hands, removes experience requirements that even lower county jobs often demand, and installs the officeholder for as long as the voters can be persuaded to keep them. America’s founding complaint was taxation without representation. Los Angeles County appears ready to try more taxation with even less real accountability.
Scripture is clear about the kind of people who should be placed in authority. “Moreover thou shalt provide out of all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens.”
The new Los Angeles County Executive position, as currently designed, requires none of those things. It requires only a willingness to run and enough votes to win.
Voters approved a measure. That does not mean every detail of its implementation is wise, legal, or free of self-interest. If the office is going to exist, the foundation should be solid before anyone is paid half a million dollars a year to occupy it.
Term limits, professional qualifications, and clear limits on power are not obstacles to accountability. They are the minimum requirements for it. Anything less is simply another permanent government job created by the people who hope to hold it.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
