San Fran has a massive deficit. Homeless, illegal aliens, drug dealers all over the place. Large and small firms fleeing the city. Students fleeing the school district. Restaurants, with decades in the city are closing. Parking is almost impossible and very expensive. Many streets are car free, including the main street in town, Market Street. To get around you need to use the side streets.
Yet, they are using the City Attorney to fight Trump—in a losing battle. Most every agreement the City has with the Feds include a section saying they will not disobey Federal law. Sanctuary City? You are disobeying Federal law. DEI? You are disobeying Federal law. The city is going to be losing lots of Federal funds. But it is their choice. In the future all agreements will have strong clause against violating Federal laws. They did this to themselves.
SF City Attorney takes lead in fighting Trump — but faces funding questions
By Adam Shanks, SF Examiner, 2/26/25 https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/politics/city-attorney-david-chiu-leads-charge-in-sf-fight-vs-trump/article_74253b4e-f3a7-11ef-8fad-d7f862bd4a57.html
In San Francisco’s fight against President Donald Trump, the City Attorney’s Office — not the mayor — has taken the lead.
But with The City facing a huge budget deficit and potential state funding hanging in the balance, whether and how it will be able to continue the effort is anyone’s guess.
In combating Trump’s barrage of executive orders and actions that have the potential to withdraw federal funding or harm LGBTQ people and members of other groups, City Attorney David Chiu and his team have already been active. His office has filed briefs and signed onto several lawsuits against the new presidential administration.
“We have been working around the clock to stand up to Trump’s illegal actions and protect our city’s policies and residents,” Chiu told The Examiner in a statement. “To keep up this pace, we need additional resources to increase our capacity.”
The City had hoped it would get state funding to support its work, but that dream appears to have fizzled, at least for now.
In a special session called by Gov. Gavin Newsom in November, two days after Trump won the presidential election, state legislators appropriated $25 million to fund California’s legal efforts against the new president.
Newsom’s action anticipated the barrage of executive orders the new president started signing immediately after taking office last month. Those orders, doing everything from ordering a freeze in federal funding to attempting to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the nation, have raised the hackles of state and local leaders.
During the special session, state Sen. Scott Wiener sponsored a bill that would have provided an additional $10 million to city attorneys and county counsels in California to combat Trump administration policies that affected them. But the measure couldn’t garner enough support to pass, leaving The City on its own to fund its legal battles against the president.
Wiener, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, hasn’t dropped the proposal.
“As we’re seeing in just the first month of the Trump Administration, our own San Francisco City Attorney’s Office is playing a crucial role in defending our values and upholding the law,” Wiener said.
“We will try again, as part of the regular budget process, to provide support for our city attorneys and county counsels,” he said in a statement.
Chiu was quick to voice support for Wiener’s proposal when the latter unveiled it in November. In a statement to The Examiner, he echoed Wiener’s hope that the legislature will include the additional funding when it approves the state budget later this year.
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The funds would be welcome in the City Attorney’s Office. With San Francisco facing a mammoth budget deficit of about $876 million in its next fiscal year, there’s likely little wiggle room to spend more on sending attorneys into courtrooms to take on Trump.
But Chiu said he sees fighting the new president’s policies as a necessity, in part because not fighting them could also be costly. The federal government’s attempts to pull funding from San Francisco pose a financial risk, he said.
“The threat Trump poses to the rule of law is existential, and protecting our federal funding is crucial to seeing San Francisco through painful budgetary times,” he said.
While many state attorneys general —including California’s Rob Bonta — are also suing to stop the new administration’s policies, that doesn’t mean cities can just defer to them, Chiu said. Cities have their own role to play in subverting the Trump plans they believe to be illegal, and their efforts don’t necessarily duplicate those of the states, he said.
The administration is threatening to withhold billions of dollars in funding that doesn’t pass through the states, but is sent directly to cities and counties, he said.
“Local jurisdictions have a unique perspective and are best situated to provide facts and articulate harms to our communities, Chiu said.
The administration’s “unlawful actions would devastate our cities and counties,” he said.
Under Chiu, The City last month was among the first in the country to sue to block Trump’s executive order that sought to revoke birthright citizenship. That right, enshrined in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, ensures that — with few exceptions — individuals born in the United States are citizens.
Chiu’s office also signed on to a lawsuit filed early this month by Doctors for America over the Trump administration’s erasure of public health data used by researchers, including those in The City’s Department of Public Health. Federal health agencies removed the data in response to Trump’s executive order targeting transgender people. That order demanded an end to what he called “gender ideology,” including by requiring agencies to “use the term ‘sex’ and not ‘gender’ in all applicable Federal policies and documents.”
Most recently, The City joined dozens of other local governments in filing a friend-of-the-court brief in a lawsuit over the Trump administration’s decision to freeze funding for the National Institutes of Health. That dispute is of paramount importance to UCSF, whose research efforts were backed with $789 million in NIH grants in 2023 alone.
The legal actions by Chiu’s office are reminiscent of those The City undertook during Trump’s first term in office. In 2017, San Francisco sued Trump and successfully blocked his administration from pulling funding from sanctuary cities. Now, it’s fighting the same fight in court once again.
While the City Attorney’s Office — and to some extent, Wiener — have taken the leading role in taking on Trump on behalf of The City. Mayor Daniel Lurie declined to even mention the president’s name when responding to Trump’s Presidio Trust proposal and has taken pains to not draw the president’s attention.
As bad as Los Angeles has been, at least I can say it’s not San Francisco. No city in the country, if not the world, does the Lavender Mafia hold as much sway as San Francisco. In fact, it seems all but against the law to NOT be LGBTQ+ in San Francisco proper, and the Bay Area as a whole is Blue enough to make Los Angeles look like Red state America, which is why I could NEVER live in the Bay Area. I like gals too much for their tastes, and I KNOW no demographic is as much a scourge on society as the LGBTQ+ crowd. This article is proof that San Francisco has a long and tragic history of electing Lefties that is finally catching up, but City Hall doesn’t want to do anything about it.