The city of New York is projected to spend nearly $11 billion on the 125,000 new arrivals who have shown up since early this year. Because of that, Mayor Eric Adams ordered a $5% cut across the board, affecting police, fire, sanitation, and education.
But that's just the first round. Another 5% cut is slated for January. Unlike the September round of cuts, this next round won't include cops, firemen, or garbage collectors. This is a problem because the city budget will still be $2 billion short of being in balance.
On Saturday, Adams passed the hat at a ritzy luncheon held at the Harvard Club where New York's rich and powerful were in attendance. He told the city's well-heeled, “This is a moment where it’s an all hands on deck moment." Adams was begging for the rich to make up the shortfall in programs like the Police Athletic League and the Boys and Girls Clubs.
But it's going to take a lot more than the super-rich donating cash to after-school basketball leagues to cover the deficit.
Adams decided that the best course of action was to blame Biden and Washington, D.C., for his troubles.
“DC has abandoned us, and they need to be paying their cost to this national problem,” Adams said during a town hall in Brooklyn.
The battle with Washington has put Adams on the outs with the White House and President Joe Biden, with whom he hasn’t spoken to in nearly a year. But Adams has been unapologetic, saying the president needs to do more to help the nation’s largest city.
“I tell people all the time when they stop me on the subway system, ‘Don’t yell at me, yell at DC,’” Adams said. “We deserve better as a city.”
In September, Adams called for a citywide hiring freeze due to spending on the crisis. The city has already dropped about $1.5 billion on the migrant surge for the fiscal year that runs through June 30, and it expects to spend about $11 billion over the next two fiscal years, according to his recent budget plan.
It's still not going to be enough. Recognizing the political realities, Adams is going to cut spending on the migrants themselves.
That additional initiative, which The News first reported last week was forthcoming, will require the administration to slash projected spending on sheltering and providing services for migrants by 20% in the current 2024 fiscal year, which started this past July 1 and runs through June 30, 2024, Jiha wrote. According to its own projections, the administration is on track to spend $4.7 billion on migrant crisis response in the 2024 fiscal year, meaning the mayor’s team will need to shave that price-tag by $940 million to comply with the 20% savings directive.
I actually feel sorry for Jacques Jiha, Adams’ budget director. He's ordered agencies to submit more cuts as part of a Program to Eliminate the Gap (PEG) by December 8. And even that won't be enough. Jiha is going to have to find a way to pull a rabbit out of the hat again next year.
Jiha wrote that the same PEG will also require a 20% spending reduction on migrant crisis costs in fiscal year 2025, which runs from July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025. With the administration projecting to spend $5.9 billion on migrant crisis response in fiscal year 2025, that translates to another $1.18 billion cut, for a total trim of roughly $2.12 billion by mid-2025.
If you think all of this is boring and unimportant, you're half right. New York is never going to be allowed to make the kinds of cuts to police, fire, and sanitation. Hence, Democrats in Washington, including Joe Biden, are preparing to ride to the rescue and not just to New York. Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. are all in line to have their budgets made well by us, the American taxpayer.
The hell of it is that Biden could have saved all of us a ton of money just by getting a handle on the border. Alas, he didn't prove up to the task, and now we're being asked to foot the bill for a crisis that didn't have to happen.
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