The California legislature is about to begin its summer recess after passing the latest state budget. The $310 billion plan is a reflection of our values, committed spending to get the homeless off the streets, support schools, keep public transportation running and treat mental illness. As a member of the Senate Democratic majority, I voted for all of those things.

But as many Californians know, we’ve already spent billions of dollars on the same problems with little return.

Our failures are proof that good intentions and big money aren’t enough to fix what’s ailing the Golden State. For our progressive beliefs to mean anything, legislatures must ensure that the money we spend actually improves the lives of the people we say we want to help.

We can do that with two major changes to the way we work. First, we need to stop crippling programs and services with special interest requirements that condemn them to failure. Second, we need to collect and evaluate data on how our programs work, and that includes supporting independent watchdogs to tell us when the government is wasting our money and failing to get the job done.

Think of our much-discussed commitment to affordable housing. Five years ago, the Senate Judiciary Committee overturned a proposal to make it more difficult to use the courts to delay and ultimately block new affordable housing. Not a single Democrat voted for the bill. A year later, a similar bill passed the Senate, but was killed in the Assembly.

Finally, in 2021, the idea received overwhelming Democratic support. What changed? The bill was amended to require affordable projects to use only skilled and trained labor laws for unionized workers, even though state law already required such projects to pay union-level wages. The provision will make it much more expensive and difficult to build housing, putting the interests of construction unions above the needs of low-income people who cannot afford housing.

Efforts to help homeless Californians have also been hampered. Proposals to demand treatment for mentally ill individuals living on the streets who are too ill to care for themselves have been repeatedly thwarted by civil rights groups who argued that people essentially have a right to live homeless and untreated.

Or think of the public schools. Democrats know that hundreds of our schools are failing and far too many children are unable to read, write or do math at grade level. And we know that those struggling students are kids of color with disproportionately low incomes. But that issue is getting almost no attention from Democrats in the Capitol, who have recently made no effort to discover why schools are falling short and what can be done to improve them.

Legislation to hold bureaucracies more accountable is also a hard sell in Sacramento. The legislature wants to save the Bay Area Rapid Transit system by raising the bridge tolls. But for the past two years, Democrats have blocked a proposal to give BART’s inspector general the independence to hold the system accountable for how it spends the money it has.

And even though we spend more than $6 billion a year on mental health services, the state has very little information about which programs work and which don’t. Yet the Newsom administration quietly opposes legislation to collect data and measure results. Bills to do so were filed in 2021 and 2022, but did not move forward.

There are glimmers of hope for more effective approaches. For example, bills from Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and Representative Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) would promote affordable housing without pandering to the unions, and they appear to have a good chance of success. Senator Susan Talamantes Eggman (D-Stockton) is once again pushing for legislation that will allow for real intervention to get people with mental illnesses and addictions off the streets, and this time it just might pass.

Meanwhile, the Joint Legislative Audit Committee approved independent performance audits of the long-troubled wage theft enforcement program, as well as our abysmal performance on homelessness. We can only hope that those studies lead to meaningful changes.

But that’s just a start. We need much more principled leadership if California progressives are serious about creating a government and society that is a compassionate and sustainable national model, not a cautionary tale of failed hopes and promises.

Steve Glazer is a Democratic state senator representing the Bay Area’s 7th Senate District, which includes most of Contra Costa County and part of Alameda County.