Jessica MacLeod Is Leaving San Francisco City Hall After One Year. What Does It Mean for Lurie’s Reform Agenda?

The departure of San Francisco’s first chief of strategy and performance raises a bigger question than who will replace her: can City Hall turn a new culture of data, accountability and measurable results into lasting institutional change?

Jessica MacLeod is leaving San Francisco City Hall after just one year as Mayor Daniel Lurie’s chief of strategy and performance, ending a tenure that was supposed to help fundamentally change how the city government measures success.

MacLeod will step down effective September 30, according to a resignation letter sent to Lurie.

She did not give a reason for her departure.

Her exit makes her the third senior official in Lurie’s administration to leave a top leadership role since the mayor took office and reorganized his approach to managing City Hall.

The timing matters.

MacLeod was not simply another member of the mayor’s staff. Lurie created her position in 2025 specifically to tackle one of San Francisco government’s oldest problems: a sprawling bureaucracy that can make it difficult to determine whether billions of dollars in public spending are actually producing better outcomes.

Her departure therefore raises an uncomfortable question for City Hall:

Can San Francisco institutionalize reform when the people hired to drive it are changing so quickly?

A job created to make City Hall deliver

When MacLeod joined the administration in September 2025, she became San Francisco’s first chief of strategy and performance.

The position was designed around a relatively straightforward idea: government should be judged by what residents experience, not simply by whether agencies complete processes or spend their budgets.

MacLeod was expected to work across departments, establish measurable goals, improve the use of data and reduce bureaucratic obstacles.

At the time, Lurie described her role as part of his effort to build a more accountable, data-driven government focused on public safety, homelessness, neighborhood cleanliness and economic recovery.

That was an ambitious assignment in a city with roughly 33,000 municipal employees and a bureaucracy that has long been criticized as fragmented and difficult to manage.

MacLeod arrived with unusually relevant experience.

She had served as San Rafael’s director of digital services and open government and had more than 15 years of experience working at the intersection of technology and government operations. She also co-founded U.S. Digital Response, an organization that mobilized technology expertise to help governments respond to the COVID-19 crisis.

What did she accomplish?

MacLeod’s departure does not necessarily mean the experiment failed.

In her resignation letter, she argued that the administration had built an infrastructure for measuring performance and improving government operations.

Among the initiatives she highlighted were cross-departmental teams focused on specific problems, expanded use of data to test new approaches and work with the City Administrator’s Office to modernize technology practices.

She also pointed to improvements in several areas, including reductions in homeless encampments and complaints involving public drug use and overflowing trash cans in some neighborhoods.

Mayor Lurie credited MacLeod with creating infrastructure that his administration needed to make better-informed decisions and become more transparent about how city services are performing.

Public Works Director Carla Short similarly described her as a thoughtful partner who delivered measurable benefits.

But there is an important distinction between creating a performance-management system and proving that it works over the long term.

San Francisco’s biggest problems of homelessness, public drug use, street cleanliness, permitting, housing, public safety and economic recovery are not problems that can be solved in one year.

The real test will be whether the systems MacLeod helped create continue after she leaves.

The bigger concern for Lurie

For Mayor Lurie, the departure presents a management challenge.

His administration has made government reform a central part of its identity. Rather than simply announcing policies, Lurie has emphasized execution, accountability and visible results.

MacLeod’s position was essentially designed to provide the operating system for that philosophy.

If her work continues without disruption, her departure could ultimately look like a normal leadership transition: she established the framework, and the next person takes it forward.

If the position is substantially changed or its influence diminishes, however, critics could interpret the move differently. More as evidence that the administration is struggling to maintain the machinery needed to turn its promises into sustained results.

That distinction will become increasingly important as Lurie moves deeper into his term.

The timing is particularly significant

MacLeod’s exit comes as San Francisco faces difficult fiscal and operational choices.

The city is dealing with budget pressures while simultaneously trying to improve core services.

That makes the concept behind MacLeod’s office of using performance data to determine what works and where money should go potentially more important, not less.

Her resignation letter suggested that the next phase of the work could use the budget process to drive structural reform.

That could be one of the most consequential parts of her legacy.

San Francisco does not necessarily need another collection of ambitious initiatives. It needs a way to determine which programs are working, which aren’t, and what should happen to public money as a result.

What San Franciscans should watch next

The most important question now isn’t simply who replaces Jessica MacLeod.

It is whether her replacement has enough authority to make departments change.

San Francisco’s government is divided among powerful departments, commissions, elected officials and administrative structures.

A strategy office can establish goals and measure performance, but measurement only matters if someone has the authority to act on what the numbers reveal.

That means the next chief will need more than analytical skills.

They will need political credibility, access to department leadership and the ability to push agencies to change how they operate.

Otherwise, performance measurement risks becoming another layer of City Hall bureaucracy, the very problem MacLeod was hired to help reduce.

A test of whether reform can outlive one person

There is another way to look at MacLeod’s departure.

The strongest reforms are supposed to become institutional rather than personal.

If the systems she helped build continue operating after September 30, the transition could actually demonstrate that Lurie’s government-reform strategy has matured beyond individual personalities.

If they disappear with her, the administration will have a much bigger problem.

For San Francisco residents, that distinction matters.

They don’t particularly care which official designed a performance dashboard or which department created a new cross-agency team.

They care whether the streets are cleaner, whether public safety improves, whether homelessness declines, whether city services become easier to navigate and whether their tax dollars produce results.

That was the premise behind MacLeod’s job when Lurie created it last year.

Now, her departure becomes the first major test of whether that premise has taken root inside City Hall.

“The real test will be whether the systems MacLeod helped create continue after she leaves.”

SF Radar Take

MacLeod’s one-year tenure is too short to judge the entire reform effort, but her departure highlights a fundamental challenge for the Lurie administration: changing San Francisco’s culture of government requires more than hiring talented reformers.

It requires embedding their methods into the institution.

If Lurie can do that, MacLeod’s departure may ultimately be viewed as the end of a successful first phase.

If he cannot, San Franciscans may reasonably wonder whether City Hall is changing, or simply cycling through new people promising to change it.