Austin Beutner, a Los Angeles civic and business leader who guided the city’s public school system through the coronavirus pandemic, announced on Monday that he is joining the 2026 race for mayor, posing the first serious challenge to the re-election of Mayor Karen Bass.
The entry of Mr. Beutner, 65, comes as Los Angeles has reeled under a yearlong cascade of troubles, including wildfires that exacerbated a daunting budget shortfall, as well as immigration crackdowns and National Guard deployments by the Trump administration.
But Mr. Beutner’s interest also underscores the political vulnerability of Ms. Bass, whose approval ratings plummeted this year after it emerged that she had been out of the country in January when wildfires ignited in Pacific Palisades, one of the city’s wealthiest enclaves. Only recently has the mayor’s popularity begun to rebound, a product of her public resistance to federal immigration raids.
In Mr. Beutner, Ms. Bass will face a former supporter whose appeal in Los Angeles, an overwhelmingly Democratic city, could reach beyond that of her opponent in 2022, Rick Caruso, a billionaire developer and a former Republican.
“I voted for Karen Bass last time — we all had hopes,” Mr. Beutner, a longtime donor and a supporter of liberal candidates and causes, said in an interview last week. “She did good work in the Legislature, good work in Congress. But the job of a mayor is a different job, and L.A. is adrift. Ultimately, that’s a function of leadership.”
In a video accompanying his announcement that included footage of immigration agents, Mr. Beutner said Los Angeles was “under attack,” and assailed the Trump administration’s “assault on our values and our neighbors.”
“Targeting people solely based on the color of their skin is unacceptable and un-American,” he said.
But Mr. Beutner added that his campaign would mainly focus on quality-of-life issues — housing affordability, emergency response times, public safety, trash fees — as well as on improving economic opportunities for the city’s 4 million residents. Los Angeles, he said, has become “less affordable, less safe and a more difficult place to live.”
His platform echoes that of San Francisco’s mayor, Daniel Lurie, who was similarly active civically and philanthropically in his city before entering the mayor’s race there on a pledge to govern with a relentless focus on local issues.
In a statement, Ms. Bass’s campaign spokesman, Douglas Herman, said that Ms. Bass’s administration “has proven it can deliver,” and had made significant inroads on homelessness and crime, which were the city’s top concerns in 2022, when she was elected. Rates of homelessness have fallen for two consecutive years in the city, he noted, and homicides are at their lowest level in six decades.
“Let’s move past divisive attacks and talk about accomplishments,” he said.
Mr. Beutner could face an uphill battle in Los Angeles, even with Ms. Bass’s political challenges.
Mr. Caruso’s defeat in 2022 — after a campaign in which he spent more than $100 million of his own money — was widely regarded as a sign that the appetite in multicultural Los Angeles for a wealthy and white male fixer remains a question mark. Mr. Beutner is known in philanthropic and business circles and is familiar to hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles parents from his time at the school district, but, compared with the mayor, who was on former President Biden’s vice-presidential short list, he is a virtual unknown.
A former Wall Street investment banker, Mr. Beutner served in former President Bill Clinton’s administration before partnering with Mr. Clinton’s deputy treasury secretary, Roger Altman, to found the investment bank Evercore Partners in the 1990s. He stepped down from Evercore in 2008 after he was severely injured in the Santa Monica Mountains in a mountain biking accident.
After his recovery, Mr. Beutner, a New York-born father of four adult children, became a philanthropic fixture in Los Angeles and increasingly active in the city’s civic life.
In 2010, as the city emerged from the Great Recession, he accepted a $1 annual salary to become its first deputy mayor, overseeing the Port of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles International Airport, the Department of Water and Power, and 10 other city agencies as second in command to the then-mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa.
In 2013, as The Los Angeles Times struggled financially, he and a coalition of other city leaders tried to buy it. In 2014, when that bid failed, Mr. Beutner agreed to become the paper’s publisher at the behest of a large shareholder in its parent company, Tribune Publishing in Chicago.
He was ousted about a year later after refusing to make cuts in the newsroom, and after Tribune executives accused him of collaborating with Eli Broad, the now-deceased billionaire and Los Angeles power broker, in another attempt to wrest the paper from Tribune.
Shortly afterward, as the Los Angeles Unified School District faced a fiscal crisis, Mr. Beutner advised the district and then agreed in 2018 to step into the top job for three years after the superintendent was diagnosed with cancer.
Two years later, as the pandemic ravaged the city, he leveraged emergency powers and contacts in the philanthropic and private sectors to provide more than 140 million meals to needy children and adults, as well as mass Covid testing and free vaccinations, part of one of the largest relief efforts in the country. He also was criticized for the district’s belated return to classrooms.
After he left in 2021, he launched a successful statewide initiative that now provides about $1 billion per year for arts education in public schools without raising taxes.
For the past year, he and his family have lived in a succession of rental houses as construction crews have worked to remediate fire damage to their home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood.
“The home my mother-in-law lived in burned down around the corner from the fire station,” he said. “It’ll be another six months or more before we’ll be able to get back in our home.”
Mr. Beutner said he was notrunning solely because of the fires, and that his own losses paled in comparison to those of most victims. He has long expressed interest in public office. Family commitments, for example, ended a brief mayoral bid after his 2010 City Hall stint.
But he said that the disaster of the January fires had shed new light for him on the many crises facing the city.
“I think the fires have been cathartic, in the sense of maybe forcing us to look at where we are in Los Angeles,” he said. “What does leadership look like? Are we getting things done?”
If the critique is familiar to many Angelenos, it might be because it has been leveled by Mr. Caruso. Since the fires, Mr. Caruso has been one of the mayor’s most vocal and persistent critics and has encouraged speculation that he might challenge her again.
So far, though, Mr. Caruso has refrained from making a commitment and has indicated that he is also considering a run for governor.
Shawn Hubler is The Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, reporting on the news, trends and personalities of Southern California.
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