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LA POLITICS - In November, CD4 Councilmember Nithya Raman will face Mayor Karen Bass in the mayoral election. It will undoubtedly be a fascinating battle. On the one hand, Raman is a DSA member with an impressive academic pedigree (Harvard, MIT) whose sole experience as an elected official is the six years she’s spent representing her district. Bass, on the other hand, is a product of California’s State University system who began her career as a physician’s assistant before pivoting to politics two decades ago, serving in both California’s State Assembly and the House of Representatives.
Their upcoming campaigns will likely play out as a referendum on Bass’s tenure as mayor -- Raman says she’s frustrated with the direction the city has taken, while Bass claims to have made real progress in resolving the city’s problems. But judgement and accountability also matter and nowhere are these qualities more evident than in one’s choice of personnel. Both candidates have made critical hiring choices that raise serious questions.
Raman’s Bad Choice
In 2019, at the beginning of her first campaign, Nithya Raman hired a fellow DSA member, comedian and writer Josh Androsky, as her Communications Director. It was Androsky’s first professional foray into politics. Together, the two of them made many charming and funny podcast appearances. They were an unlikely couple – Raman had previously headed Times Up Entertainment, an advocacy group for women in entertainment founded in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Androsky, on the other hand, had garnered nationwide feminist outrage in 2017 when he tweeted a photo of himself kneeling at Bill Cosby’s star on the Hollywood Walk of fame with the caption, "Hey libs try taking THIS statue down.” DSA-LA subsequently issued a statement condemning the tweet and announcing Androsky’s resignation.
Just before the 2020 election, Raman issued a statement that she supported Israel’s right to exist, and accepted the support of Democrats for Israel Los Angeles, a progressive organization. This resulted in her fellow DSA members calling her a “cynical, unprincipled politician pretending to be our comrade strictly for her own gain”. Shortly thereafter, Raman won election to the City Council, the first DSA member to do so, defeating a well-funded incumbent in what the LA Times termed a “political earthquake”.
Androsky’s star also rose, and his newly formed political consulting firm (Bright Futures, LLC) garnered the business of several DSA-endorsed candidates for City Council, including Mike Bonin, Erin Darling and Hugo Soto-Martinez. In 2022, after Soto-Martinez was elected CD13 Councilmember, he announced that Androsky, who had no prior government experience, would be his Chief of Staff.
On October 7, 2023, Palestinian militant groups launched an attack on Israel, killing almost 1200 civilians in what President Biden and others termed the greatest single day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. Comedian Amy Schumer penned a heartfelt Instagram post about her experience with anti-Semitism on Instagram which mentioned her uncle, a Holocaust survivor.
Androsky discussed her post in an October 27th Twitter exchange with a Marxist podcaster called TrueAnon. “Amy Schumer is particularly sensitive to Jewish deaths due to her experience in the Holocaust,” True Anon wrote. “The Nazis named a concentration camp after her. It was called Da Cow”. Androsky responded, “This is cute or whatever..but you know it was actually Cowschwitz.” The tweets went viral and drew widespread outrage. Mayor Bass issued a statement calling the exchange “dangerous and reprehensible”. By 11pm that night, Soto-Martinez had accepted Androsky’s resignation “effective immediately”.
The obvious question for Raman is, considering how Androsky’s political career ended, does she now regret giving him his professional start? And a follow-up: Is Raman now willing to entertain the possibility that the DSA’s staunch opposition to a Jewish state – where 45% of the world’s Jews now reside -- might reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic?
Bass’s Bad Choice
On January 23, 2023, five weeks after she was sworn in, Mayor Bass announced that she had hired Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum to be the new CEO of LAHSA. According to Supervisor Janice Hahn, Adams Kellum’s new position – at a salary twice that of her predecessor – represented a pushing of the “reset button on how we are addressing homelessness”. In fact, for those who’d been following the city’s chaotic and unproductive approach to the crisis, Adams Kellum’s hiring seemed to represent more of the same. She’d been CEO of the St. Joseph Center in Venice for the previous 15 years, during which time the number of homeless in Venice Beach rose from 175 to over 2,000 while St. Joseph’s Center’s revenue had nearly quadrupled.
Adams Kellum’s 28-month tenure at LAHSA was singularly catastrophic. The results of a county audit released in late 2024 revealed the agency’s absurdly lax accounting standards. Tens of millions of dollars had been advanced to various nonprofits without any formal agreements about repayment. Adams Kellum blamed her predecessors, although St. Joseph Center had been one of the beneficiaries of this lax policy.
In February 2025, LAist’s Nick Gerda reported that Adams Kellum had signed multiple contracts between LAHSA and the nonprofit for which her husband served as a senior official, a clear violation of state conflict of interest laws. Adams Kellum’s staff stated that she’d “inadvertently signed off on the $2.1 million contract and it would never happen again” (it did).
In late March 2025, another, court-ordered audit showed “The city doesn’t know how much it is paying, and for what…There is nearly zero financial oversight or accountability by the city and county, of LAHSA, or by LAHSA of the service providers with whom it contracts.”
Perhaps the most damning incident during Adams Kellum’s brief tenure was a whistleblower complaint against her filed in March 2025 by two former, high-ranking LAHSA employees. LAHSA settled the suit for $800,000, and their attorneys repeatedly refused – illegally -- to release public records of the cases to the press. When they finally did, their motivation for doing so was apparent. According to the complaints, Adams Kellum had fired experienced staff and hired her inexperienced friends at inflated salaries. These loyalists then both withheld and skewed LAHSA’s data to make the Mayor’s signature program, Inside Safe, appear more successful than it was.
On April 4,2025, after the County voted to strip LAHSA of its funding, citing a need for “a more centralized, effective, data-driven strategy” which put outcomes ahead of process, Dr. Adams Kellum resigned her position. Nevertheless, Mayor Bass has touted as one of her greatest successes the results of the two annual homelessness counts held during Adams Kellum’s tenure, both of which indicated slight declines.
In June, 2026 the US Department of Housing and Urban Development sent a letter to Adams Kellum’s successor informing her that HUD would no longer be directing funding to Los Angeles’s Continuum of Care, citing evidence of LAHSA’s financial mismanagement, including the failed audits and Adams Kellum’s signing contracts committing $2 million in federal funds to her husband’s employer.
The question for Mayor Bass is whether she regrets her choice of Dr. Adams Kellum – a longtime operative within a now undeniably corrupt system – to be the “reset” LAHSA needed. Follow up question: in light of both LAHSA and Adams Kellum’s spectacular failings, can she really be certain that their numbers are accurate?
Both Mr. Androsky and Dr. Adams Kellum have moved on. Androsky has returned to the entertainment business, and Adams Kellum is a Department Associate at Harvard University, in their School of Public Health. But the questions surrounding their troubled tenures remain, and voters in the upcoming Mayoral election deserve answers.
(Angela McGregor is a Los Angeles journalist who spent six years covering city politics and local government for the Westside Current, following earlier reporting on the Venice Neighborhood Council for the Venice Update. She writes on municipal politics, governance, housing, homelessness, and public policy in Los Angeles.)
