California's diaper program costs 18.5 cents per unit, not 50 cents—but state withholds contract details

In the early weeks of California's new free diaper initiative, a collision between viral arithmetic and bureaucratic opacity revealed something older than any single policy dispute: the difficulty of governing in good faith when trust has already eroded. The state's program, designed to ease a documented crisis of diaper insecurity among low-income families, was distorted by faulty social media math that inflated costs nearly threefold — yet the administration's refusal to release key contract records made it impossible to fully exonerate itself either. What began as a question about diapers b