In December, San Francisco Mayor London Breed scrambled to cut costs across city departments in an attempt to close an exceptionally large budget deficit, which currently hovers around $800 million but could top $1 billion in a few years. In October, when the deficit was supposedly ‘only’ about $500 million, Breed sent a letter requesting city departments submit preliminary spend reduction proposals by the end of the month. “We need to ensure that every dollar our city departments spend, either directly, or through contracted parties, is done so responsibly and with accountability,” she wrote.

This is rich talk of fiscal responsibility from a mayor who's presided over record high city budgets from the start of her term in 2018 onward. The headline numbers of this spending spree are well known: a near-tripling of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s budget, massive increases in spending on addiction-related services, and tens of millions in pandemic-era bailout programs, to name a few. But less discussed is the way Breed has quietly greenlit huge funding increases to a handful of activist-staffed city departments, including the Human Rights Commission (HRC), the Department on the Status of Women (DOSW), and the Office of Transgender Initiatives (OTI).

In 2018, when Breed assumed office, the HRC, which “works in service of the City’s anti-discrimination laws to further racial solidarity, equity, and healing,” received $4.2 million. Today, it receives just over $19 million. Similarly, DOSW, whose mission is to ensure “equality for women, girls and nonbinary people” in San Francisco now receives $18 million, up from $8.4 million in 2018. And the budget of OTI, which “advocates for and uplifts the voices and needs of transgender, gender non-conforming, intersex, and 2-spirit (TGNCI2S) San Franciscans,” has increased from around $466,000 in 2018 to around $1 million.