Faulty reasoning signals

• Framing Effect - 15%
• Availability Heuristic - 6.8%
• Fundamental Attribution Error - 6.1%

Article text

Spending on San Francisco elections, much of it by billionaires, has reached its apex in recent years. But the city’s ethics watchdogs, meant to regulate that money, are thinning out.

The San Francisco Ethics Commission has in recent years seen a steady decrease in staff, which receives corruption complaints and keeps officials and candidates compliant with local campaign finance laws.

Mayor Daniel Lurie, who vowed to support the commission and root out corruption during his 2024 campaign, is continuing that trend: This year, the commission is losing two staff members under Lurie’s proposed budget and expects to drop to 23 positions next year.

By 2027, the commission’s workforce will be 25 percent lower than at its peak of 31 staff members in 2023, according to a June report from Executive Director Patrick Ford. The city’s total workforce, many of whom will continue to file ethics reports with the commission, has dropped by less than 5 percent over the same period, the report noted.

“The commission has at least the same level of work to do, with drastically fewer staff,” Ford told Mission Local .

The city’s torrent of political cash isn’t waiting for his agency to catch up.

Total spending across all candidate and ballot measure campaigns went from $20 million in 2020 to $29 million in 2022, and then to $76 million in 2024, according to an analysis by Mission Local .

The Ethics Commission deemed 2024 a “record year” for total spending on the city’s mayoral and supervisor elections at $26.8 million—and that excluded ballot measures, which typically see much larger sums. That year, a notable cadre of ultra-wealthy venture capitalists and CEOs including Michael Bloomberg, Michael Moritz, William Oberndorf, Chris Larsen and Mayor Daniel Lurie, heir to the Levi Strauss & Co. fortune, pumped a combined $17 million into local races.

The amount of third-party spending from political action committees in San Francisco elections has also risen sharply, from $13 million in 2020 to $25 million in 2022 to $43 million in 2024, according to a Mission Local analysis.

Mayor Lurie has proposed cutting the Ethics Commission’s total operating budget from $7 million to $6 million this year. That forces the commission to cut two roles: a payroll clerk and a program administrator, the latter role currently vacant. An inability to fill that role would mean downsizing in-person ethics trainings and longer wait times for candidates and city employees seeking advice, Ford said in his report. He added that two out of five of the workers who help city officials comply with ethics rules have been cut in the last two budget cycles.

Mayor Lurie’s proposed cuts would make an already overburdened staff absorb more work, Ford said, making it harder to address ongoing campaign malfeasance.

The commission has handed out record fines in recent years. In 2024, it found mayoral contender Mark Farrell failed to report payments, misreported spending and didn’t properly log donations, in breach of state and local campaign finance laws — it fined him $108,000 . The commission also fined Neighbors for a Better San Francisco , a wealthy public pressure group and one of the highest spenders in local elections, $54,000 for several violations .

The city watchdogs are also expected to deliberate on whether Lurie violated city and state law by refusing to show records of his October 2025 call with President Donald Trump.

Ford said the cuts would also require the rollback of a program that helped public officials, like department heads and city commissioners, with filing state-mandated conflict-of-interest forms. He said that program led to over 99 percent compliance as of his June report. City officials routinely missed the required deadlines as of 2024, Mission Local previously reported.

The mayor’s office argues the commission’s budget is actually going up to $9 million, compared to $6 million last year. That increase comes from $3 million Lurie has proposed for the commission’s Election Campaign Fund, which is distributed to candidates and got zero dollars in the last cycle.

Commission staff, however, said the Election Campaign Fund doesn’t fund operations — it just provides public financing money to local candidates running for office. The organizational budget, they say, is going down.

“As Mayor Lurie makes government more accountable so it works for San Franciscans instead of insiders, we’re proud to have increased the Ethics Commission’s budget by 42% this year—especially after the last administration tried to defund the commission ,” Lurie spokesperson Charles Lutvak told Mission Local.

“Every candidate for office should be held to the same high legal and ethical standards, and we will continue working with the Board of Supervisors to ensure the Ethics Commission has the resources to enforce them.”

Lurie is expected to sign the budget, which includes the commission’s cuts, by Aug. 1.

“Why would we be reducing the commission’s staff when there’s far more money being poured into local campaigns, rather than less?” Paul Melbostad , who served on the Ethics Commission from 1995 to 2003 and helped establish public campaign financing for city candidates. “If there are fewer staff, then ethics complaints are investigated and presented to the commission well after they’re relevant to the given election, and the public loses confidence and thinks the process is worthless.”

Yet the commission has made strides in recent years. Last month, it reported resolving over 95 percent of enforcement cases within one year. That’s a far cry from the average 530 days it took to resolve a case in 2016.

Some city officials are wary. “We should all be concerned that the Ethics Commission is losing budget funding to sufficiently staff their operations,” District 9 Supervisor Jackie Fielder told Mission Local . “Their funding is critical to the protection of San Francisco voters from politicians looking to skirt the rules for their own benefit.”

Brandon Pho covers tech and power in San Francisco.

He has reported on communities up and down California since 2018.

Right before joining Mission Local, he sparked a California lawsuit against the federal government after obtaining and publishing the blueprints for a secret Bay Area ICE facility.

He likes the TV series ‘Columbo’ and lives under the panoptic surveillance of his two cats near Mission Dolores.

Keep San Francisco honest

Free local reporting that holds power to account , every weekday. Join 20,000 readers like you.

Already a subscriber? Sign in