I've written before that I'm skeptical of the idea that Democrats can become the party of abundance as Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have suggested they should. The idea behind abundance was simply that the left too often trips over their own feet when it comes to getting things done and, as a result, you have a party arguing for more government regulation and control even as the party can't seem to manage the things it's already controlling. At some point, people notice that nothing gets done and they start to wonder if expanding the scope of bureaucracy is really such a good idea.
Perhaps the poster-child for the need for an abundance agenda in the United States is California and within California the cautionary tale is probably San Francisco. The SF Chronicle has done a whole series of articles about $1.7 million toilets, closing businesses and permitting nightmares. (Don't miss the story about the guy who wanted to build a driveway to his new garage and spent a year getting a permit to remove a small tree.)
Last week the SF Standard published another classic about SF's inability to get anything done. Even when it makes sense and would improve the city's ability to operate efficiently, the entrenched interests make sure nothing changes in SF. This example involves how the city selects contractors.
...a bill written by Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman that would simplify how the city selects contractors. This should have been a no-brainer for supervisors looking to put easy policy wins on the scoreboard. Instead, it has become a classic kerfuffle over “San Francisco values” and a damning example of organized labor’s power to obstruct progress...
Mandelman’s legislation aims to rewrite contracting laws in myriad ways, notably by removing social-policy restrictions on “low-value” contracts — those paying out less than $230,000. That’s a good idea considering that the city administrator in 2024 found that of the total contracts issued over the previous five years, 59% were for less than $200,000 but accounted for just 2% of overall spending...
Reducing the amount of time spent on scrutinizing the “values” of small-time vendors seems like a reasonable fix — at least if you believe in cutting government bloat and lowering expenses for taxpayers. Mandelman took up the cause after a successful effort to repeal another batch of city restrictions on doing business with companies in states that had laws that were hostile to the LGBTQ+ community. The rationale was simple: Such policies drove up the city’s costs without changing the hearts, minds, or policies of other states.
Social police restrictions are things like whether or not a company offers domestic partner benefits and ensures it is relying on "sweat-free" labor conditions for companies that operate abroad. Verifying all of this eats up a lot of city hours, especially for these smaller contracts that are only 2% of city spending. But the unions decided they were against it.
Unfortunately for Mandelman, his elegant solution ran into an infuriating wall of labor obstructionism and political cowardice. This is because the legislation also tried to do away with one of the city’s many powerless volunteer bodies, the Sweatfree Procurement Advisory Group, which, for obscure reasons, organized labor has decided it needs to fight tooth and nail to protect. This in spite of the “advisory group’s” difficulty finding enough advisers to fill its 11 seats. (The group, which scrutinizes the far-flung textile industry, has five vacancies and is required to meet just once a year.)
Regardless, labor’s vehement opposition to axing the Sweatfree Procurement Advisory Group was enough to convince a majority of supervisors to hit the pause button on Mandelman’s latest bill...
Absent from this debate is Mayor Daniel Lurie, who ought to be supportive of legislation that makes government more efficient — and not just because it uses his favorite slogan in its title, the Open for Business Contract Streamlining Act of 2025. The mayor’s spokesman declined to comment on the bill.
More likely, Lurie is on a roll with labor, having given it a win by proposing few layoffs — and then accepting even fewer — in his recent budget. And he’s not looking to ruffle the unions’ feathers unnecessarily.
So that's how things really work in SF. Any effort to make things more efficient is seen as an effort to cut out some of the powerbrokers (the unions and activist groups) who use that inefficiency to their advantage. And because politicians can't afford to anger those same unions, few of them are willing to speak up about it. The result is a city that can't build a public toilet for under a million dollars, can't get a permit to remove a tree through the city in under a year and can't set city contracts without delving in to a company's domestic partner policies.
Simply put, you can't have abundance and efficiency under these circumstances. Getting there would require leadership willing to tell the left's special interest no once in a while. But in the era of cancel culture and easy to level accusations of various isms, that's just not possible.
