by Lukas Illa
San Francisco community based-organizations enter another city budget cycle with great uncertainty of whether their core programs will exist in four months time. With Mayor Daniel Lurie’s Austerity First budget (my words, not his), San Francisco is once again electing to siphon funding for working-class communities of color to pad law enforcement agencies’ already bloated budgets.
The People’s Budget Coalition has tracked a combination of $62 million expected cuts to the Department of Public Health (DPH), including $20 million from City worker layoffs. These cuts would also eviscerate vital community work done by dozens of long-standing San Francisco nonprofits. In January, DPH announced $17 million in cuts to community organizations, with a subsequent $25 million to be announced April 20th. Services that provide health testing and support to sex workers, harm reduction training and related services, and programs aiding the transgender community are now at risk.
Community Development and Job Training Cuts
Additionally, the Mayor’s Office for Housing and Community Development has also systematically decimated grants awarded to the same organizations that operate drop-ins and low-barrier, walk-in centers that serve as the backbone for job training, case management, legal representation and other community support services. This work—often targeted by the executive office for cuts in bad budget years (or otherwise)—is the most fundamental to building trust between disenfranchised communities and City services.
The Mayor’s $15 million in cuts come as the federal government has imposed harsh and convoluted work requirements upon low-income and homeless people who receive benefits and food stamps. If our Mayor guts the only places where households can find work opportunities, these families, adults, and youth will lose the only means they have to feed themselves and pay for necessities.
Mayor’s Office Memo on Mid-Year Cuts to DPH
On February 27, 2026, the Mayor’s Office sent DPH a memo concerning additional mid-year cuts, targeting harm reduction services for defunding. In the memo, the executive office wrote, “Contracts for harm reduction services that do not promote assertive pathways to treatment for drug addiction, serious mental illness, or urgent medical needs, or that have negative collateral impacts on our communities—e.g. exposure of children to public drug use, including via proximity to schools or playgrounds—should be eliminated or restructured.” The nebulous qualification of “negative collateral impacts on our communities” being an impetus for a program’s complete elimination or restructuring is a thinly veiled dog whistle for criminalization of visible homelessness and drug use. The metric, which is inarticulate, relies on a given neighborhood’s consternation of witnessing the City’s failure to provide housing and treatment to its most vulnerable residents. It serves to punish harm reductionists and their clients by appealing to the fears of a small collection of outspoken neighbors.
Advocates and health care professionals have long called for the City to invest and actualize Treatment on Demand. Instead, as his own memo’s language indicates, the Mayor is more concerned with the optics of visible drug use and poverty. With his budget authority, what better opportunity to defund non-profits that dare to speak out against his pseudoscientific approach to public health and give that money to more friendly, corporate, and conservative non-profits, like Salvation Army?
The Mayor’s budgetary and ideological approach to public health can be best summarized by his establishment of the Rapid Enforcement, Support, Evaluation, and Triage (RESET) Center. Essentially a drunk tank, the RESET Center is a 25-chair “sobering center,” targeting anyone profiled by law enforcement as being publicly intoxicated—all with a whopping $14 million price tag! A leaked memo from the City Attorney’s Office to the Board of Supervisors prior to its approval warned of the legal liability posed by the RESET Center, as it fails to meet state requirements as a detention facility.
In short, the Mayor will continue to fund failed approaches to public health and homeless response by investing millions in criminalization while declawing evidence-based solutions, all to politically profit from temporarily displacing people he deems undesirable. Let’s go, San Francisco!
