Rippling has received generous tax breaks from California’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Kathy Hochul, both champions of expanded paid family leave policies
The Democratic Party’s top payroll vendor, the human resources software company Rippling, has cultivated a “borderline barbaric” internal culture that penalizes employees who take the paid family or medical leave to which they’re entitled, according to lawsuits and complaints from several former employees.
The allegations against Rippling came as it rose through the ranks of Democratic vendors thanks in part to generous tax breaks from Democratic Govs. Gavin Newsom (Calif.) and Kathy Hochul (N.Y.). Both Newsom and Hochul have made paid parental leave a cornerstone of their respective political platforms, and both have helped Rippling ramp up its operations in their states.
Newsom granted Rippling $12.7 million in tax breaks in 2023 to support its San Francisco headquarters. Hochul followed suit when she awarded the company $7 million in tax breaks in 2024 and 2025 to help the firm build its New York City offices. The funding has helped Rippling to become an integral part of the Democratic Party’s operational ecosystem. ActBlue and the DNC have processed $23.3 million in payroll expenditures through Rippling so far in the 2026 midterm election cycle.
Rippling has faced troubles for several years, preceding the company’s relationship with the Democratic Party. Federal Election Commission records show the DNC and ActBlue began working with Rippling in the second quarter of 2025, around the same time Rippling’s billionaire cofounder, Prasanna Sankar, was accused of rape and sexual abuse by his estranged wife. Sankar left Rippling in 2020 and now lives in India. He criticized an Indian bill that would criminalize marital rape in the country, a measure he said in December would bring about “more fake rape” cases.
“Fake rape and abuse allegations are a cancer on marriage and long term relationships,” Sankar posted on X, a response to comments from white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes explaining why he avoids romantic relationships with women.
Rippling’s other cofounder and current CEO, Parker Conrad, was forced out of his previous post as CEO of Zenefits, another HR company he cofounded, in 2017 for widespread insurance law violations which resulted in a $1.2 million fine from New York regulators and a $7 million fine from the California Department of Insurance in “one of the largest penalties for licensing violations ever assessed in the department’s history.”
Rippling’s success has come at a cost for its employees, according to lawsuits and complaints. Rippling’s leadership engaged in “conduct that is base, vile, and contemptible under any reasonable standard of human decency,” according to one former employee, David Behar, who filed a lawsuit in February alleging Rippling terminated his employment “immediately after he exercised his fundamental statutory right to bond with his newborn child.” The lawsuit is ongoing.
Former Rippling engineering manager Fu Zhou alleged in a March 2025 lawsuit that she was fired after taking medical leave to undergo IVF treatments. Zhou said her replacement, a man, was subsequently terminated “shortly after expressing his own intention to take family leave.” Court records show the case was sent to arbitration. The outcome of the case is unknown because it was pushed into arbitration.
“Rippling has a pattern of bias against employees exercising their rights to take family or medical leave,” Zhou alleged.
Prior to publication, the Washington Free Beacon received a 7-page letter from Tom Clare, partner at the leading defamation firm Clare Locke, which represented Matt Lauer amid his #MeToo battles and former Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler amid revelations of her close friendship with the sexual deviant Jeffrey Epstein. Clare also represented Harvard University and its former president, Claudine Gay, threatening the New York Post with a defamation lawsuit as it sought to publish a report alleging—accurately—that she had plagiarized numerous passages in her academic work. The Free Beacon and City Journal’s Christopher Rufo broke that story, which ultimately led to Gay’s resignation.
Clare, who had time to pen a lengthy legal letter making vague legal threats—and marked “Confidential—Not For Publication Or Attribution,” a condition to which the Free Beacon did not agree—said the Free Beacon had not provided sufficient time for Rippling to comment and demanded that the Free Beacon “identify all its sources,” a fundamental violation of journalistic principle.
Clare said Rippling cannot comment on pending litigation, but added that “it should speak volumes that the cases are ongoing” and that the firm “has not once settled a claim for violation of family and medical leave laws, nor has it ever been found liable of such a violation by a court or jury.”
Hochul, who is seeking her second term as New York governor in 2026, extolled the virtues of paid parental leave as she awarded taxpayer funds to Rippling. “No one should have to choose between a paycheck and caring for their newborn child,” Hochul said in 2023 as she rolled out an expansion to paid parental leave benefits to most of the state’s workforce. Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential contender, has also advocated for expanding paid family leave benefits, saying the policy is necessary for new parents to bond with their child without having to worry about paying their bills.
Hochul appeared to distance herself from Rippling in a statement her office provided to the Free Beacon.
“The decision to support job growth through performance-based tax credits doesn’t give anyone a free pass,” a spokeswoman for Hochul told the Free Beacon. “Businesses that are choosing to grow in New York State must follow the laws here. Thanks to Governor Hochul, New York has some of the strongest worker protections in the country, including nation-leading safeguards for people seeking reproductive and family planning care, and that applies to every employer—no exceptions.”
Newsom did not return a request for comment.
Rippling has faced several other lawsuits from former employees accusing the firm of illegally withholding wages. The firm “had a consistent policy of failing to pay wages and/or overtime,” according to a class action lawsuit filed in February 2025 by a former Rippling employee who said the firm required its workers to “perform work ‘off the clock’ without compensation.” The lawsuit also stated that Rippling routinely withheld paid sick leave from its employees. Court records show the case will be moved to arbitration.
Several other Rippling employees have taken to Glassdoor to rail against the company’s parental leave policies, with one former worker reporting in January 2023 that the firm’s refusal to provide paid leave for employees with less than a year of service is “borderline barbaric in today’s workplace culture.”
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