Herb Morgan, a Republican, is running for California State Controller in the November 2026 general election against Democratic incumbent Malia Cohen. A San Diego-based investment professional, Morgan founded Efficient Market Advisors, one of the nation’s earliest exchange-traded-fund investment advisory firms, growing it to roughly $1.5 billion in assets before its acquisition by Cantor Fitzgerald in 2017, where he then served about a decade as Chief Investment Officer of its managed ETF portfolios division. He has served on the San Diego City Employees’ Retirement System board, twice elected its chair by fellow members, focused on financial reporting and governance.
Morgan has built his campaign around a self-produced “Radical Transparency” platform, using the state’s public FI$Cal financial database, covering roughly 122 million records and about $2 trillion in financial activity, to make state spending searchable to the public. He has released an independent analysis estimating $312 to $425 billion in potential fraud, waste, and improper payments across state programs including unemployment insurance, Medi-Cal, CalFresh, and homelessness spending over five years, and has proposed a blockchain-based public ledger for real-time state financial tracking. His estimates are his own analysis rather than findings from an official state audit.
