It’s a perennial complaint: San Francisco’s government is just too damn big. 

That concern has come to the forefront in recent weeks after Mayor Daniel Lurie proposed layoffs in an effort to resolve a historic budget deficit. 

Salaries and employee benefits account for the largest chunk of city spending: 43% of the current budget. A recent analysis found that San Francisco has the most public employees in core functions of any U.S. metropolis, even after detangling its unusual status as both a city and county.

Our workforce wasn’t always such a behemoth. The Standard analyzed City Hall’s growth over the past 20 years, revealing that it has far outpaced San Francisco’s population.

In 2005, the city employed 26,900 people, according to the Department of Human Resources. Twenty years later, it had 34,800, a 29% increase. During that time, the city’s population grew by 8%, from 780,000 in 2005 to 842,000 in 2025, according to the California Department of Finance. 

The mayor’s push to cut around 100 jobs would represent a thin slice of the city’s ballooning bureaucracy — just 0.29% of City Hall’s workforce. Lurie’s office, which also proposed slashing 1,000 unfilled roles, says the mayor is not focused on the number of employees but on prudent spending practices. 

“It is really about, ‘How do we not spend money we don’t have?’” Sophia Kittler, the mayor’s budget director, said.

The Standard contacted three dozen city departments to discuss why they have grown over the past two decades. Four major themes emerged: voter-approved ballot measures, new state and federal laws, and expanded city responsibilities and projects; additionally, as these factors swelled the ranks, more support personnel were needed to bolster the larger workforce.

Successful ballot propositions have forced the city to beef up its staffing. 

Take the Our City, Our Home initiative, which passed with 61% of the vote in 2018. The measure, also called Proposition C, imposed taxes on businesses to raise money for homelessness services. But raking in all that money requires more staff to administer it. From 2020 to 2025, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing nearly doubled in size, from 124 to 232 workers; a spokesperson attributed this in part to Prop. C. The additional personnel were needed to acquire city-owned housing sites and oversee grants, among other responsibilities. 

Or consider the library system. In 2022, San Franciscans overwhelmingly voted to mandate that city libraries be open systemwide at least 1,400 hours per week. Today, San Francisco remains the only big city in California with all its library sites open seven days a week. To keep the lights on, library staffing grew by 23% from 2005 to 2025.

It isn’t just local lawmaking that has inflated San Francisco’s government. State and federal legislation also play a role in dictating City Hall’s size. 

Just look at the Department of Public Health. A driver of its addition of around 1,800 employees in the past 20 years — the most of any city department — was the federal Affordable Care Act. Obamacare vastly expanded the number of people eligible for Medi-Cal, whose healthcare is provided by the department. Since 2013, the number of San Franciscans enrolled in Medi-Cal has grown by more than 100,000, forcing the health department to add staff. 

“As the primary safety-net health care system for the city, SFDPH has become the primary health home and has provided care to many of these new Medi-Cal recipients,” the department wrote in a statement.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg regarding staffing up to comply with outside regulations and programs. The Public Utilities Commission has brought on more staff due to new state water regulations, the city attorney’s office expanded to deal with updates to California’s conservatorship laws, and the Environment Department swelled as it absorbed Obama-era stimulus funding and California Energy Commission grants.

Many departments said they’re simply doing more to serve San Franciscans today than they were in years past.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency grew its staff by 11% in the past decade to improve service on city buses and trains, according to spokesperson Erica Kato. “Prior to 2019, we under-invested in transit maintenance, training, and supervision,” Kato said. “Muni reliability suffered.” 

Other government agencies have simply taken on more responsibilities. 

The Department of Emergency Management, which has grown by 44% to 308 employees since 2005, became a sponsor for a regional security program, created a coordinated street response division, and is receiving 15.5% more 911 calls than it did in fiscal 2011-12, the earliest available data.

The Fire Department has also been impacted by that 911 surge; it has staffed up to handle a near doubling of emergency services calls in the past 20 years, according to Chief of Staff Adrienne Sims.

The Recreation and Parks Department has also shouldered more responsibility as it has grown 11% to 952 workers from 856 two decades ago. During that period, the department added more parks to its purview, which required more staff to maintain. The department said the public has also asked for more staff to address vandalism and after-hours calls. That required hiring more park rangers: from 12 in 2005 to 55 today. 

As the workforce grows, so do the responsibilities of supporting agencies like the Ethics Department, which oversees financial disclosures and ethics enforcement of city employees. The department has 26 employees, representing a 160% increase since 2005. 

The same goes for the Human Resources Department, which has grown by 53% (89 employees) since 2005. 

“Once you introduce new legislation, once you add a new department, once you add staff to a particular program, it is very difficult to take those pieces away,” said Nicole Neditch, a governance and economy policy director at the SF-based think tank SPUR. “We are just constantly growing. And not necessarily subtracting.”