Earlier this month, Mayor Daniel Lurie released a two-year budget proposal that slashes $185 million in spending in an attempt to close San Francisco’s projected $800 million deficit. But behind the numbers lies a brutal truth: this budget abandons the city’s most vulnerable residents while protecting the powerful.
Three major cuts target labor standards enforcement, public works and homelessness services. Each one strikes at the heart of San Francisco’s working-class and immigrant communities. Taken together, they mark a city turning away from its productive base, and embracing a political realignment that privileges police and developers over regular residents.
According to a recent SF Standard analysis, the Workers Rights Community Collaborative — a coalition that defends low-wage workers — is slated to lose all city funding, likely forcing its closure.
This isn’t an isolated case.
Across the city, nonprofits often carry the burden of protecting the most vulnerable, filling gaps left by public agencies. Gutting them is an abandonment of civic duty, not a budgetary decision.
Lurie’s budget slashes $57 million from the Office of Economic and Workforce Development. With wage theft rampant and worker protections fraying, the signal to workers — especially immigrant and undocumented ones — is clear: you’re on your own.
The Department of Public Works also faces a $26 million cut. While officials cite the expiration of “one-time supplemental appropriations,” the consequences are long-lasting. Non-personnel spending alone will shrink by nearly $11 million — likely reducing trash removal, street cleaning, and infrastructure upkeep in already underserved neighborhoods.
But the largest blow falls on the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, which faces a staggering $103.7 million cut. Most of that comes from the evaporation of the “Our City, Our Home” fund — a revenue stream created by taxing big businesses under 2018’s Prop C. The rest comes from general fund reductions. These cuts land at a moment when fentanyl overdoses are spiking and arrests of unhoused residents are on the rise under Lurie’s leadership. Pulling back support now isn’t just short-sighted. It’s dangerous.
Equally revealing are the departments that aren’t losing funds. The police, fire department and sheriff’s office will all see increases of $22 million. San Francisco is prioritizing punishment over prevention.
This isn’t budget tightening. It’s political repositioning. Defunding services while ramping up criminalization is both a tactic and a statement.
While the Mayor’s Office is technically being cut by $24.6 million, most of that comes from postponed vacancy tax collections and delayed payments from market-rate developers. In short: deferred income, not meaningful sacrifice. Lurie isn’t cutting his own power. He’s protecting it.
This slashing of the social safety net — paired with bolstered law enforcement — fits neatly into a widespread political pattern.
Locally, the city is facing a $100 million lawsuit from ride-share giant Lyft, which argues it was improperly taxed. In court filings, the company claims its drivers are customers, not workers — a dystopian distortion that reframes exploitation as innovation.
This isn’t just a legal maneuver. It’s a warning sign of the infectious corporate logic that has captured policymaking, not just in San Francisco, but across the country.
Nationally, the picture is just as grim. A recent report by Nicolae Viorel Butler for Drop Site News details plans to gut the U.S. State Department, eliminate more than 3,400 domestic jobs, dissolve entire bureaus, and reorient the agency toward militarized operations abroad. Among the first offices slated for closure: the Office of Global Women’s Issues.
Lurie’s budget echoes that shift. It proposes eliminating all grant funding for the San Francisco Department on the Status of Women — a local mirror of federal retrenchment from gender equity and care infrastructure.
These decisions aren’t isolated. They’re part of a broader ideological current — one that flows from D.C. to Sacramento to City Hall — favoring carceral solutions, corporate appeasement, and the systematic dismantling of the public sector.
Cuts at the federal level tend to travel downhill — not only because of funding gaps, but because of shifting political winds. Lurie, for all his faults, has sharp instincts. He knows the era of market-driven safety nets and performative progressivism has lost favor with many of his wealthiest backers. So he makes his move — cutting support for the city’s most vulnerable, and redistributing power upward.
This budget is a far cry from fiscal responsibility. Slashing these services will cost the city millions more in the long run. In reality, it’s about choosing who gets to thrive and who gets left behind. This proposal makes it clear: Lurie has made his choice.