Trump Administration Cuts Target Local San Franciscans
You’ve seen Jaws, right? I was terrified of the ocean afterwards, and I grew up in Missouri. Well, life in America today feels like summer on Amity Island. If you agree, consider this your sharkfin in the water. The Trump administration is circling his most hated populations, already eating away at the margins with every intention of working inward. This is not a drill. The future they desire is swimming our way. When it’s over, and only sharks are left, none of us will be around to watch them eat each other.
If the ‘system’ part of systematic violence is a little fuzzy, it will soon become painfully clear. The Trump administration is weaponizing budgetary cuts to directly affect San Franciscans. His path to delegitimizing those who oppose him involves clearing out their structural support networks. How do you bring a population to its knees? You cut off their resources. San Francisco’s Health & Human Services (SFHHS) Department is among many such offices to be shuttered in Trump’s latest governmental gutting.
A cruel April Fool’s joke
On the morning of April 1, dozens of government employees including senior-level FDA officials found their keycards had been disabled. These defunct badges served to deliver the message: you no longer work here. That gesture, reminiscent of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, reflects the ongoing ill-advised culling and privatization of essential public health services. Trump offered no explanation for slashing resources for citizens made vulnerable by an economy he now controls. The terminations came without warning.
Hundreds of once-federal employees may find themselves in a crisis like those of their former clients. “The [HHS] Department began with about 82,000 employees this year, and with around 10,000 voluntary departures since Trump took office, today’s layoffs are expected to bring the employee rolls at HHS down to around 62,000.” (SFist) That’s 20,000 salaries cut—no doubt the White House’s objective (and for remaining employees, a heavily increased workload, probably without proportionate compensation).
Per the San Francisco Chronicle, the HSS-San Francisco branch will close “soon,” date TBA, and the 318 employees will either be laid off or relocated. It joins other trimmed limbs from Seattle, Chicago, Boston, and New York City. Coincidentally, Washington, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York all supported Kamala Harris in 2024. The SFist likewise speculates that, “The closing of the San Francisco office seems particularly arbitrary and part of Trump’s continued attack on the city itself.”
Dismantling public healthcare is systemic discrimination
Closing the HSS-San Francisco office has consequences far beyond joblessness. It puts thousands of already vulnerable clients at risk of losing access to essential state-run healthcare. The SF-HHS previously managed “Medicare, Medicaid, and health services for Native Americans, as well as HIV/AIDS programs for Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, six American territories and around 160 federally-recognized tribes.” As a San Francisco resident on Medi-Cal, this feels like a personal attack (and as a Native American, I have news for you: it is).
Program Specialist for the Office of Administration for Children & Families Steven Weiner saw it coming. “It’s miserable. It’s awful. It has been awful for weeks—this threat, this lingering cruelty of ‘you’re going to be let go any day.’ It was total chaos. We’re not political pawns,” he told ABC7. “We work for the poorest of the poor. This decision doesn’t just lack heart—it makes no sense.”
Of course it doesn’t make sense. Terminating over 60,000 positions in the federal health sector came from the worm-addled brain of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
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The living corpse of Nancy Pelosi was propped up for comment. “Make no mistake: the reported plans to restructure HHS and close the San Francisco regional office would directly harm our most vulnerable communities and make America sicker,” Pelosi said. Notice how she uses the conditional tense, “would,” even though the deal is done? Speaker Pelosi told KQED that she and other members of Congress were “examining all possible avenues to fight back against these irresponsible cuts,” calling the decision by Trump “shortsighted.” Her assistant then retrieved her jaw from the carpet and tried in vain to reattach it.
The SF-HSS had more company at first. Initially, the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building was also being considered as part of Trump’s nationwide federal building liquidation effort. The list of 440 “non-core” structures was quietly taken down just hours after it was made public. (SFist) A new list appeared on March 25, although it had been markedly reduced to a mere eight buildings.
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