Some 250 people gathered inside North Light Court at San Francisco City Hall on May 12 to deliver about 1,500 postcards to Mayor Daniel Lurie, urging him to restore $100 million in proposed cuts to the upcoming City budget, including LGBTQ+, HIV and homeless services, among others.
The cards were strung together and held by members of the People’s Budget Coalition, who chanted and marched in procession up the stairs to the doors of Lurie’s office, where one of his staff stood by to receive the band of deliverers.
The cards bore handwritten messages from community members who had attended seven town halls organized by the People’s Budget Coalition, a collective of 150 community-based organizations, nonprofits, labor unions and assorted advocacy groups.
Among these missives was one from Paul Aguilar. A member of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation’s HIV Advocacy Network read off Aguilar’s message on his behalf.
“I was told at 25 years old that I had five years,” Aguilar had written. “This year, I will be 63. This would have never happened without San Francisco’s HIV care and prevention network. It’s because of these programs and services that I am still here today, celebrating my 63rd birthday.”
June is also Pride Month in San Francisco, and it’s when the mayor’s office traditionally announces its proposed City budget. Then, City government spends the rest of the month wrestling with budgetary details in public meetings, hearing from people who live and work in the city, negotiating with City officials, and presenting the mayor with a final fiscal plan for the next two years.
For Anya Worley-Ziegmann, a coordinator for the coalition, the action got the campaign to preserve safety net services and avert layoffs off to a strong start. Worley-Ziegmann’s coalition is asking Lurie to preserve funding and generate new revenue. “It was amazing,” they said in an Instagram video. “It was fantastic. It was one of the biggest actions we’ve ever had ahead of June ever. The bottom line is no cuts.”
An equity analysis from the People’s Budget Coalition finds that LGBTQ+ people risk losing $6 million in funding for critical programs in Lurie’s proposed service cuts, while transgender and gender-nonconforming people could lose $2 million, and those who use HIV/AIDS services $5.4 million. These cuts represent a 23% reduction in trans-specific services and almost 20% in HIV services.
This year, a projected deficit of $1.5 billion—the equivalent of the budget’s General Fund—is prompting Lurie to ask most departments for cuts. But the People’s Budget Coalition is asking Lurie not only to restore funding but to increase funding in order to sustain these vital services.
How the pie is sliced
Since April, the coalition has been raising the alarm in its town hall meetings focused on specific communities, including residents in four supervisorial districts, immigrants and their families, women and members of the LGBTQ+ community. The April 29 town hall at the San Francisco LGBT Center drew at least 50 people to the center’s Rainbow Room.
Worley-Ziegmann began this meeting, as they did with others, with a Martin Luther King Jr. quote on budgets being moral documents. For a fun exercise, they called on audience members to approach the stage and create their own hypothetical city budgets. From large glass jars, the volunteers randomly drew ping-pong balls symbolizing the five categories that comprise the budget: community health, human welfare, culture and recreation, public works and administration, and public protection. Each volunteer weighted some categories, such as community health and human welfare, over others.
Worley then contrasted the budgets from the exercise with the actual budget. Public protection—meaning police and sheriff’s deputies—leads all other categories, accounting for 36% of the budget. Law enforcement’s slice of the pie is comparable to community health and human welfare’s combined.
Another slide with a pie chart representing the coalition’s preferred budget shows human welfare at almost double of its current level and public protection receiving just one-third.
“The elephant in the room is where actually the money is going,” Worley-Zeigmann told the audience. “The people are always gaslighted about how much goes to public protection.”
LGBTQ+ health
San Francisco’s potential loss of public funding can be traced to federal government cuts under Donald Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Act. The cutting of public health monies, especially for HIV services, leaves members of several intersecting communities at risk, Ande Stone of the HIV Advocacy Network said at the town hall.
Stone pointed out that although HIV and sexually transmitted infection rates might be waning in San Francisco, HIV prevention points and health access points would bear the brunt of cuts. That would impact Latine, Black, Asian-Pacific Islander people, as well as youth, queer and trans folk, and people who use drugs, he added.
“When Trump is defunding healthcare and attacking our communities, we need San Francisco leaders to stand with us,” Stone said. “Our City leaders, instead of protecting us, are digging the knife even deeper with local cuts to the same programs being cut at the federal level.”
Harm reduction and substance use treatment programs are vulnerable, Stone later said in an interview with Street Sheet.
“Our communities have always stepped up in moments of crisis,” Stone said. “This shouldn’t be on our community alone.”
SF as a trans sanctuary?
As director of a local government outfit called the Office of Trangender Initiatives, Honey Mahogany runs an agency whose priorities include advocacy, proposing policies and putting them into effect, and a project to end homelessness among trans people. She told the town hall audience that her agency also collects data on sexual orientation and gender identity among San Franciscans, but it’s also working to keep funding for services and preserve trans rights.
A 2023 study by the office estimates that 3% to 4% of adults in San Francisco identify as trans, though Mahogany said she believes the true number is twice as many.
Transgender Initiative data also shows that queer and gender-diverse people access City services at 10 to 20 times the rate of the general population, with 9% of the homeless population in 2024 identifying as trans or gender-diverse, more than double the rate in 2022.
San Francisco declared itself a sanctuary city for trans people in a 2024 resolution, but Trump’s America has turned transgender identity into a flashpoint in a culture war. Since 2021, when Trump began his second term, 767 anti-trans bills were introduced in state legislatures.Thirty-four of those have passed, including restrictions on gender-affirming healthcare and bans on military benefits for trans veterans. Mass migration of trans folk from their home states led the Lemkin Institute to issue its third “red flag” warning for trans genocide on the U.S. in March.
As pushback against this climate of transphobia, Mahogany said her office is exploring adding teeth to the sanctuary resolution by making it a legally binding ordinance and reinstituting a gender inclusion policy requirement for all City employees. It’s also seeking to preserve $12 million in trans services.
Impact on trans community
Among these services impacted include the Miss Major Alexander L. Lee TGIJP Black Trans Cultural Center funded by the Mayor’s Office on Housing and Community Development. The removal of $350,000 from TGIJP’s job training and economic development program would leave 30 low-income, tansgender and gender-nonconforming people without employment services. The program also offers emergency housing, healthcare and other critical services.
Without these services, TGIJP CEO Janetta Johnson said, the lives of TGIJP’s clients would be jeopardized.
“Transgender people deserve to live in safety in this city,” Johnson said. “It’s egregious that these cuts target some of the most vulnerable and marginalized communities in San Francisco for even less support than we receive already. This budget degrades public safety by slashing the programs that prevent homelessness and increase the stability, safety and health of our city. These cuts are also the fiscally irresponsible choice—these crucial programs are cheaper than emergency services that are required without them.”
Alternatives to service cuts
As dire as the forecast might be, advocates say that there’s still a few ways out of cutting City services—particularly by replenishing federal dollars from Trump’s budget.
At press time, San Francisco voters can decide whether to approve the Overpaid CEO Tax, which appears on the June 2 primary ballot as Proposition D. If it passes, companies that pay their executives at 100 times the rate of median employees must pay an increased rate on gross receipts. It could replenish up to $300 million in the General Fund, but for it to take effect, Prop. D must pass, then garner more votes than a competing measure, Prop. C. Also, if passed, the tax kicks in 10 days after the Board of Supervisors certifies the votes.
The City could also draw down some of its federal and state risk reserves to reduce damage to healthcare services. The City reports its current balance as $453 million.
The City could also free up $96 million by adjusting its business tax litigation reserve. Through legal settlements in the last fiscal year with corporations such as Airbnb, Microsoft and General Motors, the City added $100 million to its General Fund. But it did so under a formula that presumes 100% of total liability. Historically, the City Controller would hold just 75%, and reverting to that formula would add that $96 million to the General Fund.
Also, the City Controller could do the same for property tax appeals of both residential and commercial properties. If the Controller’s Office kept just 75% of liabilities, the City would save $108 million.
