Lies and Deception in San Francisco

The Defeat of the People’s Budget Campaign

Em Smith

Last year in San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie began a sustained attack on the city budget. He proposed eliminating roughly 1,400 city positions, including 100 direct layoffs; cutting $185 million from city grants for housing, mental health, and other services; and slashing more than $100 million from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.

Lurie’s budget cuts provoked a fightback from unions, community groups, and workers. Over the next two months, hundreds of people packed public hearings, rallied at City Hall, dropped banners, and disrupted meetings. On June 17, 2025, more than 100 union members and supporters shut down a Board of Supervisors meeting (SF’s version of city council) for nearly two hours. Eleven were arrested.

Despite these protests, nearly all of the budget cuts went through. The all-Democrat Board of Supervisors voted 10-1 to pass the mayor’s budget.

The Democrats’ appetite wasn’t satisfied. This year, Lurie came back for more. He proposed $300 million in additional cuts over the next two years: 130 more layoffs, 400 jobs phased out through retirements, and $40 million in cuts from public health, including closure of multiple public health clinics. 

Once again, the city’s $865-million Police Department was spared from the cuts. In fact, just two months before budget negotiations began, the mayor signed a new police contract handing $100 million in raises to the SFPD, who are among the highest-paid cops in the country.

For the last two years, the mass anger against the budget cuts in San Francisco has been channeled into the “People’s Budget Coalition” — a group of 150 organizations led by SF Rising, a Democrat-aligned nonprofit organization. 

To give a sense of the SF Rising’s strategy: in 2024, the organization endorsed Connie Chan and Myrna Melgar for the Board of Supervisors. In their endorsement article, SF Rising called Chan “a leader for working-class communities” and said “we can’t wait to see what she will accomplish in her next four years.” 

They didn’t have to wait long. When 2025 came, both Chan and Melgar voted for Lurie’s austerity budget, slashing $100 million from housing services and cutting 1,000 jobs. After such a rotten vote, surely SF Rising rescinded their endorsement? Nope! Instead, they rewarded Chan by endorsing her campaign for Congress.

Every step of the way, the People’s Budget Coalition operated as a popular front with the “progressives” in the Democratic Party. The unions, like SEIU Local 1021, with over 54,000 public-sector workers, did the same.

The People’s Budget Coalition describes its own action as a way to “influence budget decisions.” Before Lurie even released the budget, the leaders of SEIU 1021 and IFPTE Local 21 were publicly describing meetings with his administration as an effort to “partner” on the city’s budget challenges.

These two unions have enormous power. Yet there was no serious effort to organize mass action through workplaces or mobilize the rank-and-file to threaten the normal functioning of the city. Instead, the union bureaucrats followed the SF Rising strategy of sucking up to the budget chair, Connie Chan.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) stayed one step to the left, hoping to preserve their credibility. They understood that Connie Chan was toxic. So instead of tying their fortunes to Connie Chan, they tied themselves to a different Democrat, Jackie Fielder.

Fielder was the only vote against Lurie’s austerity budget in 2025. She’s a member of DSA and was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2024. But like most DSA members, Fielder ran as a Democrat. And like most DSA Democrats, she has tied herself to the Democratic Party in a thousand ways, including by endorsing — you guessed it — Connie Chan.

So DSA ties themselves to Jackie Fielder, and Jackie Fielder ties herself to Connie Chan. Connie Chan (along with Mamdani and AOC) tie themselves to Hakeem Jeffries and the power brokers of the Democratic Party, AKA the billionaires and Wall Street. This is the human centipede of “socialist” politics inside the Democratic Party.

In the end, DSA and the People’s Budget Coalition declared “victory” in the 2026 budget fight. The main coalition even claimed that “We Won a People’s Budget!”

The reality: out of more than $100 million in proposed cuts, the campaign was able to reverse only $28 million. One of the biggest attacks is the closure of three city-run health clinics. The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously for this austerity budget, including the DSA “socialist” Jackie Fielder.

The opportunistic approach of DSA has helped Connie Chan launder her image. In an Instagram post, the People’s Budget Coalition thanked Chan “for supporting a PEOPLE’S BUDGET.” Socialists have a responsibility to expose these lies. Instead, DSA is helping Chan fool workers into thinking she’s on their side.

The only way that workers can wage an effective fight against these budget cuts is with an independent approach. The goal is not to help City Hall negotiate a better austerity budget. It is to force City Hall to back down, to expose the capitalist politicians for any cut to programs that benefit workers, and to build our own organizations that can challenge the power of the capitalist parties. To do that, the socialist movement needs to break from the Democratic Party, including the “progressive” — and yes, even the “socialist” — Democrats.