The labor leader behind California’s billionaire tax showdown

OAKLAND, California — When Gavin Newsom stood before a room of economic elites in New York last December and derided a “single labor leader” pushing a tax on California billionaires, he never said his name. He didn’t need to.

Everyone in California politics knows of Dave Regan, the legendarily combative health care union chief who has spent decades wielding California’s ballot initiative system against the health care industry.

But his newest mission is on a scale orders of magnitude larger.

Regan pressed ahead with his ballot proposal — a one-time, 5 percent tax on California billionaires’ assets — despite reservations within organized labor and warnings from Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential contender, that it will backfire, blowing a hole in the state budget and weakening one of the world's largest economies.

The uproar over Regan’s pitch to backfill federal health care cuts has consumed California — even though the measure has not yet qualified for the November ballot — prompting high-profile billionaires including Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to move their assets out of the state and igniting a political countermovement as Brin and others pour millions of dollars into rival ballot initiatives and efforts to place more allies in Sacramento.

The tax has also been a rallying cry for the left, as supporters like Sen. Bernie Sanders seize on the politically potent message of challenging the might of billionaires amid pervasive discontent with the power of America's elite. They argue it is necessary, a vital response to deep federal Medicaid cuts that could shutter hospitals and devastate the health care workforce.

And at the center of it all is Regan, who is offering an object lesson in how one well-positioned, divisive advocate can leverage California’s ballot initiative system to shape the policy fights of the world’s fourth-largest economy.

“We see this freight train coming at us. There's no way to reroute the freight train,” he told POLITICO at his Oakland office, in his first extensive interview since his union, SEIU-United Health Care Workers, filed the measure last year. “This is a potential solution to a very real, potentially catastrophic problem.”

Twenty minutes later, when pressed on labor divisions over his decision, he set his jaw. “I'm not sure how to respond,” he said.

POLITICO spoke with dozens of labor leaders, elected officials, operatives and health care veterans who revealed the relentless and often contested path to power for a polarizing figure suddenly thrust into the national spotlight.

To his proponents, the 60-year-old Regan is an unapologetic combatant for working people — a fiercely intelligent but blunt tactician who is willing to use any tool at his disposal to grow his union and win better working conditions for health care workers. His detractors describe him as a bruising operator who exaggerates his leverage and picks fights that have left him increasingly isolated even as he pursues a campaign with profound consequences for California.

Even among Democrats who support raising taxes, some worry he is putting his union’s own interests above everyone else, imperiling public schools and other social services by dragging down a separate education-funding ballot initiative and driving top earners — and their tax dollars — elsewhere.

“He’s very much a lone warrior who fights by any means necessary,” said Jim DeBoo, a consultant with extensive ballot initiative campaign experience who was Newsom’s chief of staff and has advised one of the wealthy players fighting the wealth tax. “But he’s certainly not a team player.”

Regan cemented his tough reputation quickly after taking over SEIU-UHW in 2009 during a fierce battle with its former leader, Sal Rosselli, who was trying to recruit his former members into a new, rival union after leadership pushed him out.

He was recorded at an event vowing an “old-school ass-whipping” in the bitter battle for members. A lawsuit filed by Rosselli and allies accused Regan of instructing members to threaten Hispanic members with deportation if they voted the wrong way. SEIU-UHW spokesman Nathan Selzer said in a statement that Rosselli’s lawsuit contained an “old, tired, offensive, and disproven allegation” from a “disgruntled former union official” trying to “distract” from allegations — upheld in court — that Rosselli had misused funds. (Rosselli declined to comment).

A process server accused Regan in 2016 of assaulting him, although the local district attorney did not pursue charges. Selzer said the process server leveled a “false allegation and defamatory smear,” saying the individual had taken pictures of Regan’s then-eight-year-old daughter.

Then-state Assembly member Richard Bloom reported to the Legislature’s Rules Committee that Regan shoved him outside a restaurant in 2018. Bloom did not press criminal charges. Selzer called the lawmaker’s allegation an “uncorroborated exaggeration and a lie” contradicted by eyewitnesses.

Along with his domineering reputation, Regan is best known for leveraging statewide ballot initiatives to secure deals, filing nearly 50 state and local measures in California since 2009 but withdrawing or not qualifying most of them, often after elected officials enacted compromise policies.

Only eight have gone to the ballot and two have passed, one of which the courts subsequently nixed. It’s because of him that Californians were asked in three straight elections to approve obscure new kidney dialysis regulations — an effort to both rein in the industry and expand union inroads — which they rejected each time.

Despite few outright wins, Regan has been credited for using the initiatives to extract landmark deals, even as the efforts made him enemies in Sacramento.

A top Newsom official who was granted anonymity to speak candidly put it more bluntly: “[Regan] has literally alienated everyone: Democratic, Republican, independent, pro-business, pro-labor,” the official said.

But one of Regan’s frequent critics conceded he is over the right target this time, with Trump slashing health care outlays and taxes as America’s widening wealth gap fuels popular outrage.

“Dave Regan has always been a shakedown artist, but at the moment he’s shaking down the right people,” said Consumer Watchdog president Jamie Court, who has excoriated Regan for making pacts with health care employers. “Now he’s shaking down the billionaires and the politicians.”

‘Why don’t we use this more?’

Some newcomers to California marvel at its majestic mountains or rugged coastline. Regan, in 2009, was drawn to the state’s ballot initiative system, in which anyone who can gather enough signatures — an expensive proposition — has a good shot at qualifying.

“It was just the obvious question as an outsider coming to California,” he said in the interview. “Why don't we use this more?”

Regan grew up in Buffalo, New York, the son of a police officer in a blue-collar town. By the time he was a student at Cornell University’s School of Industrial Relations, he was already thinking about labor’s role in shaping policy and winning elections, said Ileen DeVault, who taught him in the 1980s.

“I was always impressed with the way he had a very broad view of labor and always saw it as more than just workers and unions,” DeVault said. “It was always how that intersected with larger political issues, and I think that’s been pretty consistent from way back in the 80’s.”

A newspaper ad led Regan to an SEIU local spanning Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia, where his early exposure to ballot politics included a health and human services tax campaign that descended into labor infighting after Regan’s union conditioned its support on a clearer path to organizing.

He became an executive vice president of SEIU and an ally of its president, Andy Stern, who would later dispatch Regan to California as a frontline soldier in a bitter labor feud.

It was clear to him early on, Regan said, that the shrinking labor movement needed to adapt.

“We have to be honest with ourselves in organized labor that we are an institution … that has been in steady decline for a long time,” he said. “We do not believe that the way we succeed as a union is by just looking inward. We have to look outward, too.”

In California, he saw ballot initiatives as a way to expand the union’s influence and boost its membership. In what would become his signature move, he embraced the “leverage play,” in which groups file measures to force deals they couldn’t win through legislation. It marked a critical strategic pivot for a labor movement that was too often working to fend off external threats, said Steve Trossman, a former longtime top Regan aide.

“Dave was like: ‘Why are we just playing defense?’” Trossman said. “‘We can use this to offensively make changes for working people.’”

Among the breakthroughs Regan used ballot initiatives to help secure: 2016 legislation creating a $15-per-hour minimum wage and, in 2023, a $25 hourly floor for health care workers that included a ballot initiative moratorium in which Regan agreed to back off the dialysis industry.

SEIU-UHW has also added some 40,000 members since 2015 — an important counterpoint, allies say, to the criticisms that swirl around Regan.

“He has unionized more private-sector workers probably than anyone in California the last few years,” said California Labor Federation leader Lorena Gonzalez. “I don't know a single militant labor leader — whether it’s through organizing, whether it's through demanding a great contract, whether it’s through taking on corporations and billionaires — who doesn’t put a target on their back.”

The union began exporting its model to other states with the Fairness Project, a nonprofit conceived by Regan that SEIU-UHW has seeded with some $30 million since 2015. That group has helped pass dozens of state ballot measures to shore up abortion rights, raise wages and more — a record Regan and allies say vindicates his strategy of looking beyond the narrow interests of his members.

“Dave has a lot of ideas about unions looking outside of themselves instead of always looking inward,” Trossman said. “It wasn't without controversy on the front end, but now people are incredibly proud of what they’ve been able to create.”

Arguably no Regan initiative has attracted as much scrutiny as his repeated pursuit of the dialysis industry and its largely non-unionized clinics. Over three election cycles, SEIU-UHW qualified measures to regulate the clinics, spending $31 million to make the ballot and forcing the industry to drop nearly $300 million over that period to defeat them.

Regan and his allies say the campaigns shined a light on industry abuses and that dialysis workers hoping to organize regularly approached the union, and that they now represent roughly 1,200 workers.

It also galvanized dialysis companies like DaVita, whose political spending in California exploded from about $500,000 in 2018 to more than $40 million total over the next three cycles as the company sought to elect allies in Sacramento. Some see a parallel to the wealth tax drawing more billionaires into state politics.

“DaVita engaged in state politics because they got tired of getting kicked in the face — the rise of DaVita as a power player is because of Dave Regan,” said DeBoo, and now, with the wealth tax, “Regan has done a really good job of awakening a sleeping giant.”

Regan countered that the ultra-affluent have long exercised enormous sway and spent heavily on politics. The wealth tax is simply sharpening that dynamic. And despite critiques of his tactics, Regan is regularly reelected by commanding margins — a testament to his staying power.

“He’s both fiercely devoted to his members and making sure they’re treated fairly and with respect and that their contracts respect that,” said Julie Su, who was California’s top labor official before becoming acting U.S. labor secretary in the Biden administration, “and he believes working-class issues extend beyond any one union.”

But Regan has also faced internal criticism, including a 2018 lawsuit against the union and a top official that accused Regan of overseeing and participating in a workplace culture of discrimination and retaliation. The parties reached a confidential settlement in 2020. Selzer noted in a statement that Regan was not a named party and that “there were no charges or court-imposed judgements rendered against the union or its president.”

Some dissenting members are frustrated by Regan using their dues on an aggressive approach to politics — including the dialysis crusade, the expansion into other states and his pursuit of deals with employers — but say he is shielded from such concerns by an electoral slate of allies.

“Dave Regan has created a position for himself where he’s very insulated” despite a record of “a lot of failed politics, a lot of failed initiatives,” said Tina Brown, a UHW member who supported a different leadership slate.

‘They fall back on solidarity’

Regan has built outsize power in California politics partly by virtue of leading one of the largest union locals in the state. He has also commanded deference within labor, where leaders prize unity and are wary of antagonizing a man known to lash out at critics.

“It becomes contentious,” said Wade Rose, who crossed paths with Regan when he worked at the health care chain Dignity Health and now leads a business group fighting a labor-backed tax in San Francisco. “You start to hear mutterings about his perspective — ‘he’s not right, this is wrong’ — but in the end they fall back on solidarity.” 

Again and again, Regan has clashed with both the health care players he drew into negotiations and his labor brethren — a record that causes his detractors to question if the damage outweighs the wins.

“There’s a track record of breaking coalitions to the detriment of the people they’re supposed to be advocating for,” said California Primary Care Association President Francisco Silva, who is facing a UHW ballot measure this cycle cracking down on his organization's network of clinics.

Deals with hospitals, often forged under the threat of ballot initiatives, collapsed in recrimination and acrimony — in one case, a court invalidated an initiative for violating one such pact. Regan has fought with unionized nurses, SEIU leadership and healthcare unions who accused SEIU-UHW of undermining a labor alliance. During complex tax negotiations in 2016, other labor leaders refused to meet with Regan — who had filed his own initiative — and cut a deal with Gov. Jerry Brown.

That dynamic is emerging again. In the months before his union filed the wealth tax, labor leaders — staring down years of budget deficits in California — agreed to pour their efforts into extending an income tax on top earners in 2026 and potentially pursuing another revenue proposal in 2028, according to several people familiar with the discussions.

But Regan went ahead despite that agreement and a lack of consensus within SEIU State Council, a 17-union group of which UHW is the largest member.

While unions like the Teamsters and AFSCME have endorsed his wealth tax proposition, other labor officials fear it could undercut a separate tax initiative that would lock in $5 billion to $15 billion annually, much of it for schools, and imperil future efforts to raise taxes after setting off a political counteroffensive from deep-pocketed foes. Almost all of the wealth tax’s proceeds would flow to health care services, with 10 percent going to education and food assistance.

“‘What are we going to do about it?’ is the only question,” Regan said. “And we respectfully disagree with people who say we should do nothing, because if we do nothing, hospitals close, clinics close, people lose coverage, people die.”

Newsom’s wish list

Last December, Regan recalled, he sat in Newsom’s office as the governor made a plea. Newsom had opposed wealth tax bills in the Legislature and was hoping to convince the union leader to sideline this latest proposal.

“He said — seriously — ‘Dave, what I would really like for Christmas is for you to withdraw the billionaire tax ballot initiative,’” Regan said.

Here, in Regan’s view, was what makes ballot initiatives invaluable: Elected officials were too beholden to elite interests to support new taxes. And now Trump had forced the issue with a bill that would slice tens of billions of dollars from health care.

“I said: ‘Governor, this is our solution. We have a solution. Do you have a solution?’” Regan said. “And he said, ‘I do not have a solution.’”

A representative for Newsom’s office declined to comment on private conversations.

The idea of a wealth tax — which covers assets like yachts and artwork and investment accounts that comprise a person’s total net worth — had been in the ether for years, since before Sen. Elizabeth Warren elevated the notion in her 2020 presidential campaign.

But in Sacramento, wealth tax bills faded quickly in 2020 and 2024 despite support from organized labor. Even if Newsom was not adamant he would reject them — and he was — securing a two-thirds vote from legislative Democrats was likely too high a hurdle.

“Legislatively, it was totally impossible,” said UC Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez, who helped craft the bills and has worked on the ballot measure. “It was obvious.”

So SEIU-UHW moved ahead. An idea that had struggled to gain political traction was 874,641 valid signatures and one public vote away from reality. And the backlash has been ferocious.

Billionaires and Silicon Valley executives have said they will do anything they can to stop the wealth tax. And they’re committing tens of millions of dollars to influence campaigns across the ballot, describing Regan’s initiative as an impetus for reshaping California’s balance of power. That could mean elevating the kinds of moderate Democrats in the statehouse who are less likely to vote with labor.

“No one had to twist arms here,” Chris Larsen, a cryptocurrency mogul who has already put $12 million into a trio of committees respectively focused on ballot initiatives and legislative races. “There’s a collective outrage.”

For a wide swath of the left, the intensity of the pushback is a clear sign Regan is doing something right. While a listless Democratic Party casts about for a coherent economic message, he is going straight after an overwhelming concentration of wealth and trying to redirect it to workers reeling from Trump’s agenda.

“All of a sudden, we've got, you could argue, the world's attention, certainly America's attention around this issue, and it’s because we decided to do something,” Regan said. “That is a very, very powerful and healthy and positive thing.”