How DSA Solved Our Budget Crisis
DSA’s membership stepped up to the challenge to bring us the near term financial health we lacked. Now we must come together to organize and consolidate our gains so we can move from stability to growth–not set off an unnecessary labor struggle against our own workers.
After months of heated negotiations, DSA has solved its 2024 budget crisis. As this crisis has quickly transitioned into a labor battle, it has become easy for even the most attuned members to miss a marker of serious progress: DSA is no longer in a financial crisis!
This may sound like an odd statement given the heated debate continuing on over the budget. So let us define what the budget crisis actually was:
What was the budget crisis?
The budget crisis stemmed from our fundamental financial problem: DSA was poised to spend 2 million dollars more this year than we were projected to make.
But this in itself was not the crisis, it was the cause of the crisis. The crisis was the result: that without major change, this would have caused DSA to effectively run out of money in a handful of months.
The NPC was able to come together in January 2024 to unanimously cut about 1 million dollars in spending, nearly half of which came from a freeze on hiring new positions that had been planned. After this, negotiations became more difficult, as the NPC began debating individual items to cut one at a time rather than agree on an overall deficit target to meet.
At this point, it was clear we needed a more holistic picture of how to protect our financial and organizational health.
We introduced a Consensus Budget process plan to change this. While its most binding mechanism was removed, it was nevertheless still highly effective in enabling the NPC to make strategic spending cuts (most of which can be easily restored as we grow further).
We called for equal attention to income increases as part of our strategy, moving beyond the previous conversation which had only focused on cuts.
For the latter, we called for a “March of Solidarity,” meant to highlight how much we could fix the budget not by cutting, but by raising. Solidarity Dues Phonebanks were highly underutilized. We pledged 100 Groundwork shifts, which if they kept pace with the average would raise over $1000 per person per hour. But the point was less to mobilize Groundwork members, than to throw down the gauntlet and get all of DSA more engaged. And when we bet on DSA, it worked – phonebanks went from previous weekly averages of around 6 to 12 attendees to 59 and 59 attendees in a single week, with almost two thirds of those attendees not Groundwork members.
We then learned just two weeks ago that thanks to the Solidarity Dues fundraising through the winter, with a large spike in new monthly dues commitments to the tune of $35,000 per month, DSA had already raised ~$420,000 more annual income for the upcoming year than predicted, cutting down our deficit by as much. Monthly dues payers are DSA’s most reliable and stable dues category, which makes it possible to project annual income from new monthly dues signups with a high degree of confidence.
To be clear, this has nothing to do with our March efforts—it’s all new dues that had already happened through January, but just not been reported yet due to the lag in our budget reporting (which we have since introduced a resolution to improve). Even in this period of not enough attention and resources dedicated to for Solidarity Dues Phonebanking, DSA still raised nearly half a million dollars for this year, fundamentally shifting the entire situation.
During this process, the NPC voted to pass a proposal to initiate layoffs, targeting 12 total. Through this proposal, the NPC finally codified its official budget targets, which are to cut about $610,000 in 2024, and $1,183,043 in 2025. Regardless of whether we agree that these targets are the right ones, they are what we passed, so we can treat them as our organizational goal.
The NPC then passed a 2024 budget with a deficit of $690,000 in their monthly meeting on March 17, which was only about 60,000 away from our our goal. Further adjustments mean our deficit is now estimated, today, at around $581,000, below the goal from “Resolution to Achieve Fiscal Sustainability,” and almost the same as our own quarterly budget proposal’s goal of $500,000–and we achieved this goal with no layoffs.
The rationale for layoffs was that it was the best way to put DSA in a position in which, with no additional income, we would be out of danger of hitting the 4 month reserves freeze, which could trigger an emergency shutdown of core parts of our organization. As of today, March 26, our current budget has pushed that date to July 2025, over a year away. And remember, DSA has created this much larger runway off of calculations that do not yet include any new solidarity dues income from February or March, in which we boosted phonebanks to record levels, and took the first steps of launch a national fundraising campaign.
Every additional dollar pushed this spending freeze back, freeing members and leaders alike to organize to take advantage of a time when we are more in the national spotlight than we have been in years, to grow DSA to the next level *right now* — instead of throwing this chance away to instead debate how to downsize, based on fears of what could happen in 18 months. We have a runway, and a plan that is finally just beginning to take off.
Given this, we are glad to hear several NPC members state that we no longer need to lay off 12 people. But given that the DSA Staff Union has authorized a strike if layoffs continue to proceed without economic justification, we feel this is the time to bring the heat down, for all of DSA’s sake. We just pulled ourselves out of a budget crisis–why dive into a labor crisis that is no longer necessary to meet anyone’s goals? Why downsize our organizing capacity, when so many members across the country are benefiting from DSA workers’ support to level up their member-led organizing efforts?
No More Triage
Were we still in a budget crisis, we would have to weigh these bad options. But “we could run out of money in 2 months” is a crisis. “We are not yet sure how to pay for convention in 17 months” is not. “We made our own workers go on strike “ is a crisis. “We’re going to try the first comprehensive fundraising campaign DSA has ever engaged in, designed by the brand new Fundraising Committee, comprised of members who have collectively raised millions in the past” is not — so why act like it, and take away valuable energy that we should be putting into the kind of world-changing work that the vast majority of DSA members are here to do?
Yes, there is work to do to get to the sustainable DSA we all want, and it’s not all solidarity dues. We haven’t run a real new member recruitment drive since 2021, and our last recommitment drive in 2022 was successful, despite organizing gaps we are in a much better position to collectively fill now. We could conceivably max out on our goal for new solidarity dues signups through the spring — which could still drive up annual income in 2025 by half a million dollars. Then we could rev up the recruitment machine in the fall — during a critical presidential general election period, when we can reliably expect that more politically disillusioned people will be receptive to a mass socialist organization than have been in years — and build a stronger foundation of new monthly dues-paying members. Worried about convention costs? Time-bound events could be the ideal answer to the question of how to be a great motivator to lean on larger-ticket, one-time donors in a way that protects against undue influences .
We still have a chance to return to a fully organizing-focused DSA. We can end these crises right now. If the NPC truly must meet its stated 2025 deficit goal as soon as possible, let’s set a 3 month fundraising and recruitment goal, cut $150,000 of planned spending on free food for members at events like the union recommended, and reach it. To plunge our organization into an unneeded labor crisis that could destroy our standing with not just members and the broader left, but the millions of staunchly pro-union working class people we seek to recruit to DSA, is a far greater gamble than to let members cook on the incredible fundraising that we have already proven we can do, at the exact mathematical rates needed to hit our targets.
Though we have disagreed on much, we believe all sides of this argument have the same fear: fear of a world without DSA. But as our members prove over and over again, our power to not only change the world but to change DSA itself, we must not let that fear lead us to believe we must downsize the socialist movement at the exact time workers across the country are crying out for something just like DSA.
We have said to bet on DSA. But perhaps this is the wrong word. To bet on DSA is not a gamble. So instead, believe in DSA. Believe in each other, and believe in our ability to work together across differences in ways that make us all stronger. Believe we can meet ambitious goals based on clear and rigorous material analysis of our situation, and then prove it in practice as scientific socialists, as we demonstrate our progress at each step. As Frances G put it on a recent call, the decisions DSA’s highest elected leadership body takes can change the course of history. Let’s work together to make the right one.
