Fall 2024 was a semester defined by leadership overhaul, explosive senate discussions, and various projects and resolutions for the Undergraduate Student Government. President Brianna Sánchez doesn’t “believe more things could go wrong” in a term, but said her administration will leave USG better than when they began.

On April 23, 2024, USG swore in its 144th senate class with Bryan Fernández as president and Sánchez as vice president. Fernández and Sánchez ran on a platform of “achievable programs,” including collaborating with recognized student organizations and programming assemblies, increasing transparency and continuing existing programs such as Wellness Week and medical supply vending machines.

After starting a senator short — only 11 candidates ran for 12 seats — the senate would lose another three members for various reasons, including the removal of Diana Carpio, the former speaker of the senate. Carpio said at the time that she thought the removal was “more for personal reasons than professional.”

Two days after Carpio’s removal, Fernández resigned, writing in a statement that he needed to focus on “personal matters.” Sánchez was next in line for the role. Typically, the speaker of the senate would become vice president after the president leaves office, but since Carpio had been removed, the senate needed to fill two seats in the executive branch.

“Most of them were for reasons outside of our control,” Sánchez said in a Feb. 4 interview with the Daily Trojan, addressing claims that the leadership changes were coordinated. “I don’t really think there’s anything we regret. I just think there’s misconceptions out there. But best believe, if I was on the other side, I think I’d go down that rabbit hole too.”

After a turbulent semester in office, Sánchez said she feels USG’s current operational model is unsustainable. She said USG traditionally pilots major projects before pitching them to the University for permanent implementation and funding. However, Sánchez said the organization can’t fund large projects while its budget has remained around $2.5 million for years despite inflation and an increase in the organization’s size. She also said the University can’t fund additional projects without adding student fees.

“Students feel frustrated with USG, promising all these great things and nothing — it doesn’t happen,” Sánchez said. “There’s other ways of promoting student life other than projects, and that’s through supporting and uplifting offices that already exist and provide amazing resources to students.”

Over the summer, senators passed a bill that allowed them to respond to audience members during open forum — the discussion period at the start of every senate meeting — which led to multiple intense exchanges.

The Sept. 17 meeting’s open forum spanned over two hours, with representatives from more than 10 recognized student organizations airing complaints about the delayed RSO recognition process.

The RSO recognition process was complicated by short staffing in the USG professional staff; three had resigned by the start of the semester, and the department was under a hiring freeze. Sánchez said the backlog led to a five-week delay in hosting USG events at the beginning of the fall semester.

Senator Patrick Nguyen — who co-wrote the bill to change open forum rules — said it helped the senate be “more agile” in fixing problems.

“We actually are able to give advice and feedback and our insights,” Nguyen said. “Having that actual discussion in real time has been really helpful to actually solving the problem.”

In a late August open forum period, Black Student Assembly co-executive director Cameron Bassett said he hadn’t met the BSA’s assigned senator in three years — a similar concern expressed by a BSA advocacy liaison two years ago in a letter to the editor.

Both Bassett and the letter to the editor said senators had transactional relationships with programming assemblies and only interacted with them during elections, which Sánchez acknowledged in her interview. Sánchez also said the branches are “more connected” this year and senators have more consistently attended programming events after reforms to programming assembly guidelines.

Issues surrounding this relationship re-emerged in October after a bill to recognize October as Disability Awareness Month passed unanimously.

Gwendolyn Smith, the co-director of the Student Assembly for Accessibility, said she felt disabled voices were an “afterthought” because SAA wasn’t included in the bill’s drafting process.

Smith said October is typically recognized as Disability Employment Awareness Month, while Izzy Del Gaudio, the chair of the accessibility committee and a co-author of the bill, said the goal of the bill was to create a month recognizing disabled students at USC, not to align with the national month.

USG’s efforts to engage with the community are now visible from Cafe Dulce’s storefront. After almost a year of development, a mural painted by a local artist stretches across three of the cafe’s windows. The mural depicts hallmarks of the South Central community: a fruit cart, Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the likeness of John Alexander Somerville, an entrepreneur, activist and the first Black graduate of USC’s School of Dentistry in 1907.

“We think [the artist] did a great job and excelled at portraying the community,” vice president Dane Sprague said. “It’s also our concern, the wellness and the relationship that the people surrounding us have with our students.”

Sánchez said one of USG’s greatest accomplishments this year was the incorporation of the Undocumented Trojan Success Assembly, which began its trial period in the fall semester and is now a permanent programming assembly with $5,000 allocated for the spring semester.

Sánchez said she hopes to utilize excess money from previous years to support students who are feeling “anxiety and fear” after the inauguration of President Donald Trump in January. She said the money could fund immigration filing fees for students, which she said have been exhausted nearly twice as fast as a typical year.

Initiatives like the campus access feedback form, sustainability graduation requirement resolution and the return shuttle from Los Angeles International Airport after winter break took data collection to demonstrate their importance to the administration, Sánchez said. If USG fully shifts towards advocacy rather than project-based work, she said its efforts would be more effective.

Nguyen said USG’s reputation is “tarnished” due to the “volatility” of the fall semester but said the organization hopes to rebuild its reputation through successful projects.

“As an organization, the value is there. There [are] so many projects that we’re working on; we are meeting with the administration and we are identifying the problems quickly,” Nguyen said. “It’s just been difficult with all the things that’ve been going on. But I think the projects that we have been working on are able to be completed this semester, and that’s one of our goals.”

Correction: A previous version of this article improperly attributed a photograph. The article was updated Feb. 14 at 2:36 p.m. to reflect the correct attribution. The Daily Trojan regrets this error.