When Mayor Karen Bass spoke about budget cuts during her State of the City address — before she even mentioned laying off city employees — she made clear that her own office would not be spared.
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It seemed like a solidarity-building pledge — like a captain going down with the ship.
“We reduced funding for the mayor’s office,” she said in the April 21 speech.
This is my third week covering City Hall for The Times. It’s my first budget season (my colleague David Zahniser has been covering L.A. city budgets since I was 6), and it’s a doozy. The city is facing a $1-billion shortfall caused in large part by rising personnel costs, soaring legal payouts and a slowdown in the local economy.
When I heard the mayor’s words, I made a reasonable assumption — that the operating budget for her office would decrease from the year before.
I was incorrect.
When the mayor released her proposed budget later that day, I turned to the section for her office, only to find, to my confusion, that it had grown — from $10.1 million in fiscal year 2024-2025 to $10.7 million in 2025-2026. The office was also spared from having to lay off a single member of its 94-person team, even while Bass was proposing 1,650 layoffs elsewhere in city government.
So by what logic could the mayor’s office still have reduced its funding?
Zach Seidl, deputy mayor of communications, said the city administrative officer’s recalculation of the coming fiscal year’s budget actually showed a $1.2-million decrease. Employees in the mayor’s office are not getting regularly scheduled cost-of-living raises. The first, coming in June, would have been a 4% increase. The next, in December, would have been another 2% increase. And the final one in June 2026 would have been another 4%.
Seidl said that while the proposed budget for the mayor’s office is higher than last year, it is reduced from where it could have been if the raises had gone into effect. He called this a 10% cut to the office.
Some outside of the mayor’s office were less convinced by the what-goes-up-has-gone-down explanation.
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