Xavier Becerra was a surprise pick to be Joe Biden’s health secretary — cinching the job in December 2020 as other candidates dropped out.
The California Democrat was so unfamiliar to the incoming president that Biden badly mispronounced his name at an introductory news conference.
Now, Becerra is nearing another unlikely achievement: becoming the leader of the nation’s most populous state. Polls show him as the leading candidate ahead of Tuesday’s crowded California gubernatorial primary, following the decline and withdrawal of better-known opponents. The top two vote-getters from either party will advance to the general election.
About two months ago, he was polling at 5 percent, behind five other candidates, according to a survey by the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.
“On first blush, people probably were looking elsewhere,” Becerra said in an interview Saturday, acknowledging the parallels with his rise in the Biden administration.
The former California attorney general and congressman has campaigned in part on his time in Biden’s Cabinet, saying it distinguishes him from the field and prepared him to lead. He has touted efforts to lower drug prices, improve mental health services and expand maternal health care as examples of what he would do if elected governor.
Today is the one-year anniversary of the Medicare drug price negotiations I led at HHS. I’m the only candidate in this race for Governor with hands-on experience lowering prescription drug prices. pic.twitter.com/DYuUJgDK67
— Xavier Becerra (@XavierBecerra) August 16, 2025
The message didn’t break through — until his rivals suddenly faded. Former congressman Eric Swalwell (D-California) led the race before his political career imploded in April amid allegations of sexual misconduct, which he denies, and prompted his exit from the race and Congress. Former congresswoman Katie Porter (D-California), who led some polls in 2025, has been dogged by viral videos that raised questions about her management and temperament. Another rival Democrat, billionaire Tom Steyer, has performed well in polls but has been unable to harness a consistent lead, despite heavy spending.
If Becerra finishes among the top-two vote-getters with Republican favorite Steve Hilton, he is likely to be the favorite in the general election, given the state’s heavy Democratic tilt.
Becerra has not been accused of bad behavior. His allies brag about him being boring, arguing that it has made him a safe choice for voters seeking stability.
But his swift ascent in the governor’s race has triggered rebukes from fellow former Biden officials — many of whom have not been named in news reports — who say Becerra was a mediocre member of the president’s Cabinet. Some have pointed to his relatively low profile as the nation wrestled with the coronavirus pandemic, noting that White House officials grew frustrated with him. Others highlighted the Department of Health and Human Services’ role in caring for unaccompanied migrant children, blaming Becerra for not doing more to ensure suitable facilities and services.
“A lot of people in the Biden administration are talking about this because they realized that he was not an effective HHS secretary,” Xochitl Hinojosa, who served as a Justice Department official under Biden, said earlier this month on CNN.
Becerra’s rivals amplified the critiques. Steyer unleashed ads quoting Hinojosa, who did not respond to questions from The Washington Post. Others have used the criticism to bolster their own attacks.
“There is a direct line between his failed leadership and Donald Trump being in the White House‚” San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan — who has been polling around 4 percent in the race, according to a poll released Friday by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies — said in a debate earlier this month, criticizing Becerra’s work on immigration.
Becerra wasn’t surprised to face critiques from past colleagues, given the magnitude of the decisions, he said Saturday.
“Sometimes we called it right, sometimes we called it not quite as right,” he said. “You’re always going to be subject to some criticism on major challenges.”
Several top Biden officials — including the president’s former chief of staff — have praised Becerra, saying he is being wrongly blamed for decisions out of his control.
Neera Tanden, Biden’s domestic policy adviser, said Becerra inherited immigration policies that were hammered out before he joined the administration. She pointed to his work to protect access to health coverage, respond to natural disasters and other high-priority issues.
“He got some very hard things done,” Tanden said. “Not every leader did that.”
Ashish Jha, who served as Biden’s White House coronavirus coordinator, said it was unfair to criticize Becerra for playing a more limited role during the pandemic. Biden decided in 2020 to have the White House effectively lead the coronavirus response, not HHS, given the extreme importance of the issue.
“There’s this whole story of ‘Becerra wasn’t very good, and that’s why the coronavirus response was run out of the White House’ — I don’t think that was true,” said Jha. “Given the cards he was dealt, he did a pretty good job of balancing the complexities.”
Becerra’s allies say his public profile suffered because he ceded the spotlight to deputies, such as immunologist and government scientist Anthony S. Fauci, while working on important, somewhat less visible issues, like negotiating with drug companies to lower the price of prescription drugs.
Karen Skelton, a fellow Biden official who has known Becerra since they attended high school together, characterized him as practical and achievement-oriented.
“He’s not a big spender, and he’s not a big pretender, he’s just who he is, and he’s always been the same,” Skelton said, contrasting Becerra with President Donald Trump and other flamboyant politicians. “I’ll take that right now.”
Some of Becerra’s most high-profile colleagues, including Biden, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and current California Gov. Gavin Newsom, have declined to endorse Becerra or anyone else in the race.
Becerra, a 68-year-old Stanford University-educated lawyer, rose through California politics in the 1990s, serving briefly in the state legislature before winning election to the House to represent part of Los Angeles. He soon became chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and later joined House leadership. He turned down a post as U.S. trade representative in the Obama administration, eyeing a potential path to becoming House speaker.
But with Pelosi showing little sign of relinquishing control, Becerra left Congress in 2017 and was appointed California attorney general, serving as Kamala Harris’s replacement as she began her time in the Senate. The role made Becerra a national player during Trump’s first term, as he led lawsuits against the president’s policies. Some allies championed him to be U.S. attorney general under Biden, and Becerra told the transition team that he would have accepted, he said Saturday.
Biden instead offered him the Department of Health and Human Services, a sweeping agency that oversees drug approvals, hospital care, food safety and a plethora of other issues. Becerra had no previous health administration experience and conceded Saturday that he considered the post “lower on the totem poll” than attorney general.
Biden’s transition team had initially considered governors such as Rhode Island’s Gina Raimondo, as well as Vivek H. Murthy, a Biden adviser and former surgeon general — but the search grew complicated as candidates rebuffed the Biden team or were deemed poor fits.
Biden’s team also heard from advocates who wanted to see more Latinos in the Cabinet, helping secure Becerra’s selection.
Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff, praised Becerra and dismissed suggestions that he was a fallback.
“He was the only person President Biden offered the position of HHS secretary to,” Klain said in an interview. “So he was the first choice — he was the only choice.”
Becerra faced an extended confirmation battle in early 2021, with Republicans attacking his views on abortion and other health issues, before he was narrowly confirmed. He was sworn in March 19 — two months after other key members of Biden’s team had started work.
He stepped into a mess at the health agency, which was struggling to manage thousands of unaccompanied migrant children. A Washington Post story published March 20, 2021, detailed how Biden’s advisers had rolled back some of Trump’s harsh immigration policies, helping fuel a surge of migrants at the border and straining HHS’s capacity to manage and monitor the children who were remanded to the agency’s care.
Becerra initially did not have a thorough handle on the issues, said two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations, frustrating White House officials such as Susan Rice, who was then Biden’s top domestic policy adviser and had helped shape the new administration’s immigration agenda.
The New York Times would later detail HHS’s failure to track thousands of migrant children in stories that have been resurrected by Becerra’s opponents in the governor’s race.
Rice — who amplified some social media posts earlier this month mocking Becerra but has since appeared to remove them — did not respond to a request for comment. Becerra said Saturday that the two have not been in touch.
Some colleagues said that Becerra sometimes wrangled with colleagues when he felt passionate about an issue, such as ensuring that uninsured Americans would have access to coronavirus vaccines and supplies. David Kessler, who helped lead the Biden administration’s vaccine work, called him “principled,” “grounded” and “unflappable.”
In a Post interview in January 2025, as he prepared to leave office, Becerra acknowledged his agency’s challenges managing migrant children — saying that it had been a “front-page issue” — and that he had faced criticism from fellow Biden officials. But he said the issue receded from the news because HHS got it under control.
“As they say, talk is cheap. You can say what you want, it’s what you do,” Becerra said. “And we did.”
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