San Francisco Desperately Needs Its Own DOGE
DOGE, The Department of Government Efficiency, is no doubt president Trump’s most talked about second term initiative. Headed by Elon Musk, DOGE is uncovering tremendous amounts of waste, fraud and abuse, generating optimism among Americans and promoting openness in all levels of government. My dream is to see puppy DOGEs emerge in California on the state and local levels. The city of San Francisco is a prime candidates for a chainsaw-style audit.
San Francisco’s annual budget for fiscal year 2024-25 is 14.6 billion. For comparison, seventeen states have budgets smaller than the Golden Gate City. What justifies the lavish expenditure is not immediately clear — the population of the municipality is well under a million and the median household income hovers at about $140,000. If San Franciscans are in desperate need of social services, it’s those of a matchmaker — otherwise it’s a wealthy enclave. Our art connoisseurs are not traveling the world, buying up masterpieces. We have a few decent museums and a handful of theaters, but the art scene here doesn’t match the ambition.
The city justifies expenditures by evoking the ever-deepening substance abuse crisis, promising that it
[…]will focus on continuing to maintain and deliver investments focused on the City’s biggest challenges, to include public priorities such as clean and safe streets, restoring San Francisco’s Downtown and economy, homelessness and behavioral health, and strengthening coordination and efficiency of government.
While the money thrown at the program are extravagant — the 2018 Proposition C alone applied a business tax in the amount topping a quarter billion a year — the city has no history of successfully tackling mental health and addiction problem. Aside from periodic attempts at law enforcement, the city’s efforts have been counterproductive — giving cash handouts and providing no-strings attached living arrangements where the unhoused are free to use illicit drugs turned San Francisco into a user heaven.
Residents complain that instead of solving the situation the government maintains it at the highest tolerable level by keeping the junkies contained mostly to the Tenderloin area, removing fecal matter from sidewalks and so on. At the same time, it perpetuates the culture of substance abuse tolerance through harm reduction programs such as distributing drug paraphernalia and naloxone overdose reversal kits or the now closed open air supervised injection cite where users injected fentanyl in the plain view of non-profit employees. The organization behind the operation was HealthRIGHT 360 — and it receives city, state and federal money.
San Francisco is notorious at funding a lively non-profit scene — spending between a billion and two billion a year. 1,500 organizations employing over 100,000 people — more than 10% of its population, a higher portion than anywhere else in California — operate in the city.
To call them non-profits is a bit of a misnomer, considering that the top employees are generously compensated. Typically for the industry, the women in charge of HealthRIGHT 360 draw salaries upward of 300K. Nor are they non-governmental because a large portion of their income comes from the government. And while they form a powerful voting block, what they do for the city is far from certain.
Organizations and city government departments in charge of what is essentially drug scene maintenance operations are most visible because their clientele are an eyesore, but even they sometimes exist entirely under the radar. For instance, last spring, a local entrepreneur Adam Nathan purely by chance stumbled onto a venue called Hotel 587 where city employees operated something called The Managed Alcohol Program or MAP. MAP housed homeless alcoholics dispensing free drinks to them.
Other city-sponsored enterprises include free or reduced price citizenship and immigration services as well as healthcare and public assistance for foreign nationals. It goes without saying that no consideration is given to the culture of the people coming to this country settling in San Francisco. For instance, a few months ago, an Oakland coffee shop came under fire for offering aSweet Sinwar drink — and other genocidal menu items. The venue’s owner Abdulrahim Harara is a San Francisco-raised Gazan. The question of who aided the Harara family in settling in this very expensive metro is not at all trivial. Why should San Francisco tax payer foot the bill for bringing disruptive foreigners to our shores?
City Hall is known for cowering when some of its most ridiculous abuses are dragged into sunlight. For instance, race grievances in the geographic area that, while majority minority, is overwhelmingly affluent white and Asian, inevitably drew unwanted attention. After an outcry, the former Mayor London Breed nixed the idea to award each black San Franciscan 5 million dollars along with other perks and defunded The African American Reparations Advisory Committee.
Likewise, in 2022, the city announced the GIFT program, which stands for guaranteed income for trans people for which it selected 55 gender non-conforming individuals for no-strings attached cash rewards. The program has been cancelled after equal protection lawsuits were filed against the city.
During her first day on the job, the newly sworn in United States Attorney General Pam Bondi cut funding to sanctuary cities. Moreover, the Trump Administration severed cash flow to DEI programs which put many NGOs in jeopardy since they procured money for identity-based projects — like serving trans youth of color. With the gutting of the federal money, the pressure to reform is on the City.
Some citizens are feeling restless, too. On Valentine’s Day, three men in MAGA hats and DOGE T-shirts entered the San Francisco city hall claiming to be employees of the Trump Administration. They demanded to see records of fraud and abuse. The trio fled after government employees called the cops.
That stand aside, citizens deserve to know how San Francisco manages to piss through nearly 15 billion a year. Once waste, fraud and abuse are eliminated, the city — which incubated some of the worst ideas in California and the worst political class in the nation — can be whole again.
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