Mayor Eric Adams and President Biden’s relationship abruptly soured last year when Hizzoner railed against the administration in a closed-door meeting with White House aides about the disastrous migrant crisis.
“There’s no leadership here,” the mayor told several Biden admin advisors while in Washington DC last October to beg the feds for help dealing with the crisis, CNN reported Friday, citing multiple sources.
The mayor’s swipe at the Biden administration was the tipping point that led to a total breakdown between City Hall and the White House, the network’s sources claimed.
During last year’s private meeting in DC, Adams had demanded that the president step up and do more to help the Big Apple cope with the tens of thousands of asylum seekers pouring into the city.
But those present — including Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain, Homeland Security Adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall and Intergovernmental Affairs Director Julie Chávez Rodríguez — insisted the administration was doing all it could in the absence of congressional action, sources said.
In the ten months since, the souring of Adams and Biden’s political partnership has visibly spilled into the public eye.
The mayor has publicly ripped Biden and his administration more than two dozen times over his handling of the out-of-control border crisis, insisting that a lack of federal aid will eventually “decimate” the city.
As recently as Thursday, Adams took to the streets in Lower Manhattan to demand the feds also fast-track work permits for thousands of migrants — declaring that “New York City deserves better.”
It came after Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas last week scoffed at the notion the federal government was to blame for the Big Apple’s ordeal, arguing the city’s and state’s own “structural” and “operational” issues caused the mess.
In letters fired off to Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul, the Biden admin official promised vague “recommendations” from his team “as soon as possible’’ to help fix the city’s ongoing problems trying to find space to house asylum seekers.
“Of course, their relationship is a mess,” a source told The Post of Biden and Adams’ soured partnership. “The politics are completely misaligned on the problem.”
“The Adams administration doesn’t have the luxury of politics, they have to deal with the immediate crisis because New Yorkers are demanding that they do.”
More than 107,000 asylum seekers have poured into the Big Apple since last spring, City Hall’s latest figures show. Roughly 59,400 of them are currently being put up in one of the 200 or so city-run migrant shelters.
Currently, it sets the city back an average of $383 a night to provide shelter, food and other care for a migrant household, according to City Hall. The daily tab for the operation already runs to $9.8 million — $3.6 billion annually, provided the numbers don’t keep increasing, Adams has previously warned.