Facing uncertainty from Albany, Mayor Adams orders another round of budget cuts
April 4, 2023, 3:04 p.m.
The 4% cut comes one day after the City Council called on the mayor to increase spending.
Mayor Eric Adams is once again ordering New York City agencies to cut their budgets in the coming years, marking one of several belt-tightening measures under Adams that have drawn criticism for their impact on critical services from public schools to libraries.
The latest round of cuts, first reported by the Daily News, come one day after the City Council issued a rebuke of the mayor’s nearly $103 billion proposed budget for failing to invest in key programs for the most vulnerable New Yorkers.
Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and Councilmember Justin Brannan, who chairs the finance committee, described the mayor’s plan in a statement as “a demonstration in excess that risks taking the city down a harmful, destabilizing path.”
Most city agencies must submit to 4% cuts in fiscal year 2024 and future years, according to a letter from Jacques Jiha, the city's budget director, that sent to agency heads on Tuesday.
The two exceptions — the city's education department and CUNY — will be subject to a 3% cut “to minimize disruption to schools and classrooms,” Jiha wrote.
Agency heads were further instructed to avoid layoffs and “avoid meaningfully impacting services where possible.”
The city is facing several financial headwinds that include the ongoing migrant crisis and having to negotiate new contracts with nearly all of the municipal unions. The outcome of the pending state budget may also require the city to take on significant costs, from funding the MTA to Medicaid.
“While we continue to have positive conversations with our partners in Albany, we face a perfect storm of factors,” Jonah Allon, the mayor’s spokesperson, said in a statement. “At the same time, we are facing a slowdown in city tax revenue growth and what is predicted by financial experts to be a weakening of the nation’s economy.”
Tuesday’s order marks the third cut made under the so-called Program to Eliminate the Gap, a commonly used budgetary tool.
Adams called for a 3% spending reduction when he took office last January. Then in September, he called for 3% cuts in the current fiscal year and 4.75% cuts between fiscal years 2024 and 2026.
Following that, city agencies were asked to save money by sharply reducing the number of vacant civilian positions.
City agencies are being asked to report on their progress with meeting their cost-cutting mandates, though not all agencies have met their benchmarks yet, according to Allon.
Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, a fiscal watchdog group, praised Adams for making another cut, calling the action “timely, if not overdue.”
He estimates that the city faces a budget shortfall of more than $6 billion in 2027.
City Comptroller Brad Lander joined the Council in pushing back on the mayor’s approach, calling the cuts “a blunt approach that cuts arbitrarily rather than plans strategically for the future.”
Invoking the city’s ongoing staffing crisis, he added, “These broad cuts will hit agencies that already faced large and arbitrary headcount reductions imposed by City Hall earlier this year.”