Mayor of Los Angeles

The City Council voted to split the Housing and Homelessness Committee, which Raman has chaired since 2023, into a Housing Committee and a Homelessness and Health Committee. She chairs neither and cast the only vote against the change; Westside Current reported the vote as 13–1. The same package renamed two other committees and created two ad hoc ones.

Raman said in a campaign video the day before the vote that she had called for an audit of the city's homelessness programs and was removed as chair afterward, and that she "might be getting punished for running against Mayor Bass."

Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who proposed the restructuring and is a longtime ally of Bass, said it was meant to make the council functional and to position it to answer key questions on homelessness before the election, and that he would have acted in February, when Raman announced her candidacy, if it were retaliation. Bass's campaign said Raman canceled committee meetings for weeks, did not appear for votes, and did not deliver on housing.

Raman has also said Bass blocked a Controller's audit of the Inside Safe program. Controller Kenneth Mejia announced that audit in March 2024, and told LAist in October 2025 that his office "tried to provide a performance audit but we weren't able to get cooperation." Westside Current reported that, asked at a debate on May 5, 2026, whether she blocked it, Bass said she did, and gave her reason: "I don't believe that one elected official should audit another. It politicizes the entire process." She said the City Charter does not permit the Controller to audit other elected offices; city attorneys have read it the same way, while Mejia and a co-author of the charter language read it the other way. Per LAist, NBC Los Angeles and Westside Current.

At their first debate of the runoff, in Sherman Oaks, the two argued the same audit dispute above with harder numbers than either had cited before. Raman said Bass "has spent $400 million on Inside Safe, refused audits." Bass disputed the figure, saying the county reimburses part of the motel and hotel costs Raman is counting.

Both cited homelessness data that favored them. Raman pointed to a 49% drop in unsheltered homelessness in her own council district and pledged to audit homelessness spending if elected; Bass credited Inside Safe for that drop. Citywide, the count moved the other way: unsheltered homelessness rose 8% from January 2025 to January 2026, reversing a two-year, 17.5% decline.

The rest of the night retraced ground both have staked out before — housing (Bass opposed state density mandates and cited 42,000 units in the pipeline; Raman wants Sacramento to intervene), policing (Bass cited Raman's 2020 stance on police funding; Raman pointed to 2023 police raises squeezing other city budgets), and film-industry tax credits. Per LAist and NBC Los Angeles.