Mayor Daniel Lurie signed San Francisco's $16.9 billion budget on Thursday, formally closing a roughly $640 million deficit and putting into law the largest spending plan in city history — the final step after a June budget fight The Dissent covered when the numbers were still a negotiation.

The signing converts months of committee wrangling into binding law. To close a two-year structural gap, the adopted budget leans on about $300 million in recurring changes and $696.1 million in one-time funds — a mix that patches the deficit now but leaves the harder math for future years. What makes the final document newsworthy is not that a budget passed, but what it actually funds: a defensive posture built around an anticipated retreat of state and federal dollars, with reserves set aside for cuts that haven't landed yet.

San Francisco's budget is now law. Mayor Daniel Lurie signed the $16.9 billion spending plan Thursday at a senior community center, flanked by several members of the Board of Supervisors, according to NBC Bay Area. City officials described it as the largest budget San Francisco has ever adopted.

The topline masks the real story, which is how the city chose to close a hole it has been fighting all year. The adopted budget relies on roughly $300 million in recurring changes — the structural fixes that carry forward — and $696.1 million in one-time funds, according to the budget record aggregated by GrowSF that first surfaced the final figures. One-time money balances the books for a single year; it does not fix a structural deficit. City officials said the plan closes a two-year deficit and averts a scenario in which the shortfall would have ballooned toward $1 billion within five years.

This is the moment the numbers stopped being a proposal. In late June, The Dissent covered the Board of Supervisors wrapping its annual budget fight before sundown, restoring $28.5 million in cuts to nonprofits, seniors, and students. That was the negotiation. Thursday's signing is the law — and the adopted document reveals a city bracing for Washington and Sacramento to pull back.

The defensive crouch is written into the line items. The budget sets aside $100 million as a hedge against potential state and federal cuts to housing and homelessness programs — money reserved for reductions that have not yet been made. It commits $34 million to keep San Franciscans enrolled in Medi-Cal and CalFresh, both programs exposed to federal policy shifts, and $120 million for unhoused families, people living with HIV and AIDS, and LGBTQ+ community-based organizations.

The rest reads like a city trying to hold the line on basic services. There is $20 million to upgrade equipment for first responders and $71 million for street resurfacing, drug treatment, and mental health services, per NBC Bay Area's account of the signing.

"[The budget will] help protect services as federal funding declines," Lurie said, according to NBC Bay Area — a framing that casts the largest budget in city history less as expansion than as insulation. Supervisor Connie Chan, who chairs the budget committee, said the plan reflects San Francisco's values.

Chan's fingerprints on this budget are not new. In May, she drew notice for arguing that spending cuts should be off the table even as the city stared down a deficit then pegged near $600 million. The final number Lurie signed — a $640 million gap closed — suggests the hole only deepened between spring and summer, and that the city met it with a blend of permanent trims and one-time cash rather than the deeper structural cuts some had urged.

The unanswered question is what happens when the one-time money runs out. Nearly $700 million of this budget is balanced on funds that do not recur. If the anticipated federal and state cuts materialize, the $100 million reserve is a down payment, not a solution. San Francisco has bought itself a year of stability. The 2027-28 budget will test whether it bought anything more.