Acting Chair of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors Terra Lawson-Remer Monday asked the county to send a notice to more than one million residents who may be impacted by potential funding cuts to federal programs.
She will present a policy at the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday to instruct the county Chief Administrative Officer to develop a notification strategy to send a "notice of funding at risk" to all federally funded program beneficiaries, which should include contact information for the White House and the Department of Government Efficiency.
DOGE, headed by the billionaire SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk at the behest of President Donald Trump to find and eliminate waste in government, has spent the last few weeks slashing budgets across the federal government, leaving many employees out of work or facing an uncertainty.
But the impact on those who rely on Medi-Cal, Social Security and other federally-funded programs could also be significant, Lawson-Remer said.
"This is how service disruptions are handled for everyday and emergency situations alike," she said. "The impacted person is notified by the service provider of the change ahead of time.
"Clearly this is how our government must also inform its constituents. While the scale of these proposed cuts to services may be unprecedented, our government's response and responsibility to provide notice should be obvious."
Lawson-Remer explained that just as utility providers provide notice of service interruptions, childcare centers warn parents when they are unable to provide services, and doctor's offices call to tell patients when an appointment must be rescheduled, the government must also follow this same commonsense protocol when services are at risk of termination.
The DOGE website has an "Agency Efficiency Leaderboard," featuring the agencies where the most money has purportedly been cut. However, the graphic offers virtually no transparency as to how much and where purported savings have come from. The Department of Education is first on the list.
A total of 1.2 million people in San Diego County receive support from at least one federally-funded assistance program:
— 50,000 San Diegans currently receive job training and financial assistance benefits;
— 400,000 San Diegans receive food assistance benefits; and
— Nearly 900,000 people in San Diego County receive healthcare coverage through Medi-Cal.
"More than one in three people living in our county rely on federally funded programs to meet their basic needs," Lawson-Remer said. "Healthcare, housing, food security and jobs programs are all at imminent risk of termination by the Trump administration's shocking budget cut proposals.
"I'm calling for common sense communication from the county to the beneficiaries of these programs, and I'm calling for it to happen quickly."
If approved Tuesday, the CAO will be asked to report back with county notification strategy options within 30 days.
