Scott is a nationally renowned, progressive leader on tackling the housing crisis. He has challenged longstanding orthodoxies and establishment thinking to help create a new vision for housing. For the past decade, he’s taken on California’s broken housing status quo and passed groundbreaking laws that have fundamentally transformed the process of building homes in California and inspired a national movement to make it easier and faster to build new homes and apartment buildings in all communities, and lower costs for families. Fighting entrenched powers wasn’t easy, but ten years later tens of thousands of affordable homes have been expedited under Scott’s laws — including over 3,000 in San Francisco. Scott’s work is saving families money and getting thousands of people permanently off the streets — and he’s just getting started.
Scott has lived with a chronic health condition for the past 36 years and has navigated our broken, disjointed health care system. And, as a young gay man growing up, Scott lived through a literal mass die-off of gay men, trans people, and others from HIV/AIDS, as the federal government sat back and did nothing to stop the dying.
These experiences gave Scott a deep passion for health care access and made him a champion for that access — willing to do combat with corporate health care giants and break glass when necessary. Healthcare is a human right, and every person deserves access to affordable healthcare. That’s why Scott passed the biggest expansion of mental healthcare in California history, forcing giant insurance companies to cover mental health and addiction treatment the same way they cover physical health conditions. As Senate Budget Chair, Scott helped defend MediCal coverage, including for undocumented Californians, as the federal government took a wrecking ball to the program, and he helped protect funding for reproductive health care, HIV care, and other critical needs. Scott has consistently championed single-payer health care, and, working with a broad labor/community coalition, he passed legislation advancing single payer health care in California.
The cost of healthcare is just as important as access to it through insurance coverage. That’s why Scott took on giant mega-corporations known as pharmacy benefit managers or PBMs to stop them from jacking up the cost of medication to pad their profits. Scott also passed California’s first price cap for insulin, helping ensure the four million Californians living with diabetes don’t have to choose between taking their medication and putting food on the table.Scott will never stop fighting to expand health care access and lower costs.
With the LGBTQ community facing a vicious and brutal assault from the Trump Administration, we need a leader who will fight relentlessly to protect and expand our rights. Scott is that fighter, and he has fought so hard for LGBTQ people that he has put his own personal safety at risk, experiencing repeated personal attacks by Marjorie Taylor Green, Ted Cruz, Elon Musk, Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump Jr., and others, in addition to a tidal wave of death threats and physical harassment by anti-LGBTQ bigots.
As a gay man who came of age as a teenager during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis in 1987, Scott knows our community has seen dark days before. The devastation of HIV/AIDS inspired him to volunteer for an HIV crisis hotline as a college student in North Carolina, and he advocated for transgender people as a student at Harvard Law School in the 1990s. When he moved to San Francisco, he was part of the core group of people who built San Francisco’s LGBT Community Center. When gay men were getting raped in the Castro, Scott stepped up and helped create a community safety organization to keep people safe.
In the Senate, Scott has fought to erase discriminatory laws that harmed LGBTQ youth, transgender women, and people living with HIV. He authored nation-leading laws to make PrEP available from a pharmacist without a physician prescription (similar to the birth control pill), establish the nation’s strongest legal protections for LGBTQ seniors in nursing homes and other long-term care, collect voluntary health data to fight health disparities in the LGBTQ community, repeal discriminatory felonies targeting people living with HIV, and end discrimination against LGBTQ people on California’s broken sex offender registry.
Scott has relentlessly defended LGBTQ people against the vicious attacks Trump and his MAGA cronies have unleashed. He authored the nation’s first LGBTQ refuge law, and expanded privacy protections to prevent harassment and targeting against transgender and nonbinary people. As Senate Budget Chair, he secured $15 million in state funds to cover gender affirming healthcare that Trump is attempting to cut from Medicaid.
Scott is a national leader in fighting Trump’s vicious assault on our immigrant communities. When masked agents began disappearing people off the street in San Francisco, he passed first of its kind legislation to unmask them. In Congress, he will lead the charge to protect our immigrant neighbors and get ICE OUT OF CALIFORNIA!!!
Scott has also worked for years to ensure immigrants receive fair treatment in California. He authored legislation to prevent immigrants from being forced to disclose their immigration status in open court when it isn’t relevant, preventing the justice system from exploiting immigrants and targeting them. He also helped pass a law to prevent landlords from using immigration status as leverage against tenants in eviction disputes.
Since his first day in the Senate, Scott has won big fights and taken bold positions to confront the existential threat of climate change. He was named a TIME100 Climate Champion in 2023 after he took on the biggest corporations in the world — particularly the oil industry — and passed first-in-the-nation legislation to force them to publicly disclose their carbon emissions.
We need to transition to clean energy as quickly as possible, and Scott has been leading the way. He passed legislation to require cities to implement instantaneous app-based permitting for rooftop solar projects, and to streamline permitting for clean transportation projects such as light rail, rapid bus service, and bike and pedestrian safety projects. He passed a historic law to force California’s transportation department (Cal Trans) to prioritize bike and pedestrian safety improvements on state-owned roads (e.g., 19th Ave., Van Ness, Lombard, and Park Presidio). He passed the largest investment in battery storage in California history — helping to prevent blackouts and speed solar and wind adoption — and fought to ban fracking across the state. Scott has long advocated for public power in San Francisco and authored (sadly unsuccessful) legislation to convert PG&E into a public utility.
But first and foremost, Scott is a champion for public transportation and a 28+ year daily rider of Muni and regular rider of BART. As a member of the Board of Supervisors, Scott authored a charter amendment, which the voters passed, to ensure Muni funding increases as San Francisco grows. More recently, when these systems faced with financial collapse, Scott knew we had to do everything possible to protect them and stepped up to become the leading public transportation advocate in the Legislature. He played a key role securing billions of dollars in state funding to keep our trains and buses running on time, and authored a law to trigger a regional ballot measure that will provide transit across the Bay Area with a sustainable long-term source of funding.
Science is one of the central pillars of California’s success. Scientific research fuels so much innovation in our medical system, our biotech industry, our universities that make countless lives healthier and better. Trump is trying to burn our scientific research apparatus to the ground and California’s success with it, but Scott is standing up to build a new state science agency to defend our progress.
San Francisco is a world-class city, and our best days are yet to come. But current conditions on our streets have left people feeling unsafe and rightfully wanting better for our city. Scott has led the way by pushing for new ways to intervene and improve these conditions. He was an early champion of conservatorship reform, and helped pass groundbreaking legislation to compassionately help people in crisis get the care they need and prevent them from continuing to unravel in public.
Scott has also led the legislative effort to hold perpetrators accountable for car break-ins. He passed California’s law to close the “locked-door loophole,” a senseless requirement in California’s Penal Code that allowed some perpetrators to avoid accountability for car break-ins.
Scott worked with street vendors and community organizations to change state law to allow SFPD a greater role in tackling the sale of stolen goods that is disrupting San Francisco Streets and upending legitimate street vending. Our approach as a city will always prioritize treatment and recovery first, but the impact of this crisis on the surrounding community also requires a public safety response.
Systemic racism plagues our criminal justice system. Scott has been a consistent advocate for reimagining our criminal justice system, and he has fought time and again for progressive criminal justice reforms. Scott authored California’s laws ending mandatory minimum drug sentences and eliminating the most overused sentence enhancement, as well as laws to stop sending innocent people to prison. Scott has also consistently supported reforms to reduce police use of lethal force.
In the year 2025, Congress still has not passed a net neutrality law. Thanks to Scott, California has, and it’s the nation’s strongest. In Congress, Scott will fight for a fair and open internet that allows small enterprises to compete on an even playing field with Big Tech giants.
