Albany and City Hall are now staring at some wicked fiscal headwinds, a key watchdog reports — but it’s not like they weren’t warned.
The Citizens Budget Commission is flagging both the city and state’s massive budgets, slamming them as “unaffordable and unprepared” in light of federal funding cuts and a possible economic slowdown down the road.
With passage of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which aims to (slightly) curb the growth of federal outlays, including aid to New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul is directing state agencies to cut $750 million from their budgets.
When folks gripe, she’ll just point her finger at Trump. Convenient, no? But about reckless and dishonest as can be.
And she’ll still have to find another $3 billion — and that’s assuming no further cuts from Washington in the short term and an economy that remains robust.
Plus, the long-term structural gap, CBC says, is now a monstrous $22 billion.
It was all sadly predictable, but Hochul and state lawmakers nonetheless decided to blithely run up the tab — to a whopping quarter of a trillion dollars–plus — figuring they can blame the GOP when they have to make cuts or raise taxes.
Take health care: Lawmakers boosted spending on it by 17%, even as the Empire Center’s Bill Hammond predicted federal Medicaid cuts would shift over $3.3 billion in costs to the state.
In April, budget expert E.J. McMahon slapped Hochul and the Legislature for “whistling in the dark” instead of anticipating likely changes to the state’s “nearly out-of-control Medicaid program.”
Now the gov’s budget director won’t rule out raising taxes, even though Hochul vowed she wouldn’t.
The CBC instead urges to keep her promise and instead shred her $2 billion “inflation reduction checks” (i.e., reelection bribes), for starters.
The group also called out the city’s $116 billion spendapalooza and hit both Albany and City Hall for not squirreling away enough reserves.
Whoever become mayor in November, it noted, will have to fill a $6 billon to $8 billion budget gap in just 16 days of taking office.
It also ripped mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani’s planned tax hikes to cover his ludicrous plans for $10 billion in new outlays. He’d be setting a record for irresponsibility.
New Yorkers are now sure to be hit with some pain, whether it’s spending cuts or tax hikes.
The pols will try to shift blame, of course, but the public wouldn’t be in this mess if their leaders had acted like adults from the start.