Mayor Daniel Lurie just handed out 127 pink slips across 18 city departments, and honestly? It's about time someone started trimming the fat.

This is the first wave of what Lurie says will be 500 eliminated positions — a number that sounds dramatic until you remember that San Francisco employs roughly 35,000 people to serve a city of about 800,000. That's one city employee for every 23 residents. For context, most comparably sized cities operate with significantly leaner workforces.

Let's be clear: layoffs aren't something to celebrate. These are real people with real mortgages in one of the most expensive cities on Earth. But San Francisco has spent the last decade bloating its bureaucracy while basic services — clean streets, public safety, functioning transit — have visibly deteriorated. The city's budget has ballooned past $16 billion, a figure that would make some small countries blush, and yet residents still step over needles on their way to work.

The real question isn't whether 500 positions should be cut. It's whether 500 is enough.

San Francisco has a long and storied tradition of creating positions, departments, and commissions that exist primarily to justify their own existence. Every mayor promises reform. Most deliver a press conference and then quietly back down when the public employee unions start making phone calls.

To his credit, Lurie is actually following through — at least on round one. But 127 layoffs across 18 departments averages out to about seven positions per department. That's not a restructuring; that's a light trim.

We'll be watching to see if Lurie keeps his foot on the gas or if this first round turns out to be the last. San Francisco taxpayers deserve a government that's sized to serve them efficiently, not one that exists to perpetuate itself. The next 373 cuts will tell us whether this mayor is serious about fiscal discipline or just serious about good optics.