For the first time since he took office last year, Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday raised the specter of cutting municipal services in response to what his budget director described as worsening economic conditions.
The message, delivered in a letter from the budget director, Jacques Jiha, directed the leaders of nearly every city agency, including the Police Department, to cut their budgets by 4 percent for the coming fiscal year, which begins in July. Only the Department of Education and the City University of New York will be subject to smaller cuts of 3 percent.
The letter gave agency heads 10 days to detail how they would achieve the cuts, an unusually short period of time. And in contrast to his previous efforts at cutting spending, Mr. Jiha allowed more explicitly for the possibility that services would be cut.
Agency leaders, he wrote, “should avoid meaningfully impacting services where possible.”
The budget cuts called for on Tuesday are the third round of reductions that Mr. Adams has asked his commissioners to carry out, and they are among the largest cuts he has demanded. Although the delivery of municipal services in many areas of the city has suffered over the past year and a half, Mr. Jiha has never more clearly acknowledged the possibility of service cuts to achieve budgetary aims.
“Mayor Adams has repeatedly said that we cannot sugarcoat the reality of the fiscal and economic challenges we are facing,” Jonah Allon, a spokesman for the mayor, said. Mr. Allon said that more cuts were necessary because of “a perfect storm of factors” that included mounting costs connected to an influx of migrants from the southern border and the expense of labor contracts.
In addition, he said, the city is facing slowing growth in its tax revenue amid what experts believe is a weakening of the U.S. economy.
“Ignoring these realities would be irresponsible and would cost New Yorkers more in the end,” Mr. Allon said.
Mr. Adams’s unusually large and swift cost-cutting demands come at a particularly fraught time. Many New Yorkers have already experienced a significant decline in some services, according to the administration’s own statistics. The declines have affected some of the city’s most vulnerable residents, including those who are struggling to afford housing and get enough food.
The mayor and Mr. Jiha are also at odds with their governing partners on the City Council, which has a more optimistic view of the city’s financial outlook. On Monday, the Council released its response to the mayor’s preliminary $102.7 billion budget proposal for next fiscal year. The Council identified an additional $2.7 billion in funding it said the mayor had failed to account for and called for $1.3 billion in new investments.
The mayor’s latest budgetary gambit comes during New York State’s highly contested and delayed budget negotiations and as city officials continue to negotiate with many labor unions over new contracts.
“City Hall’s response to uncertainty from Albany is a blunt approach that cuts arbitrarily rather than plans strategically for the future,” said Brad Lander, New York City’s comptroller.
Few people dispute that the city’s financial situation is uncertain, although there is disagreement over the severity of the problem and the best way to address it.
In his letter, which The New York Daily News reported earlier, Mr. Jiha estimated the cost of settling the city’s labor contracts at more than $16 billion through the 2027 fiscal year. He estimated that the price of providing services to the arriving migrants would be $4.3 billion through the next fiscal year.
In a joint statement, Adrienne Adams, the Council speaker, and Justin Brannan, the Council’s finance chairman, warned that Mr. Adams risked “taking the city down a harmful, destabilizing path” and questioned the city’s estimate for migrant-related costs.
"The administration continues to rhetorically convey ever-changing costs for supporting asylum seekers, despite never providing the Council with any substantive response to our repeated requests for evidence of these costs,” Ms. Adams and Mr. Brannan wrote.
The Adams administration released the budget-cut letter the same day New Yorkers confronted the historic spectacle of a former president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, surrendering at a Manhattan courthouse to be arraigned on criminal charges.
Asked whether the timing of the letter on the day of Mr. Trump’s court appearance was coincidental, a mayoral spokesman said city officials did not plan internal letters around Mr. Trump’s schedule.