California governor Gavin Newsom has refused to endorse plans to pay slave descendants up to $1.2 million (£950,000) each.
The proposed payments, drawn up by the state’s Reparations Task Force, are intended to compensate black Californians for decades of injustice.
But the proposals could cost California, which has a current deficit of $22.5 billion, as much as $800 billion.
It would dwarf the state’s current annual budget of $296.9 billion.
Mr Newsom, a Democrat who is rumoured to have White House ambitions, indicated he would not support cash payments proposed by the task force he set up following the murder of George Floyd.
Dealing with the legacy of slavery was “about much more than cash payments” he told Fox News.
“Many of the recommendations put forward by the Task Force are critical action items we’ve already been hard at work addressing,” Mr Newsom added in a statement.
They included breaking down barriers to voting, bolstering resources to address hate, enacting sweeping law enforcement and justice reforms to build trust and safety, and strengthening economic mobility.
California was also investing billions to root out disparities and improve equity in housing, education, healthcare, and well beyond, he added.
The detailed plans, intended to provide compensation for mass incarceration and inequality in housing and health care, will be considered by the state’s legislature on July 1.
Payments under the scheme have been calculated in minute detail.
For example, compensation for over-policing and mass incarceration, as a result of the war on drugs, is estimated as being worth $2,352 a year.
This would mean an African-American resident in California from 1971 to 2020 stands to receive $115,260.
National scheme stalls in Congress
Taking in all the proposals the scheme works out at $1.2 million per person, based on an average life expectancy of 71 years.
A national scheme for reparations has stalled in Congress.
But local schemes are being considered across the country including in Massachusetts, Illinois and Shelby County, Tennessee.
Polling shows a racial divide in support for the scheme with 77 per cent of black people and only 18 per cent of white people supporting reparations, according to a Pew survey.
Around 2.5 million Californians, 6.5 per cent of the state’s total population, identify as black. But not all would qualify.
It would be limited to those who can prove they were an “African-American descendant of a chattel enslaved person or the descendant of a free black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century”.
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