New York City’s budget has swelled to nearly $130 billion, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s promised belt-tightening is nowhere to be found.
Mamdani announced Thursday that the city budget rose by more than $3 billion to $129.2 billion, according to City Hall’s mid-year financial update, the New York Post reported. The modified plan sits $3.3 billion above the $125.8 billion budget adopted for fiscal year 2027 back in June.
City Hall said the jump is a mix of new spending: $1.15 billion from city coffers, $1.48 billion from the federal government and a $635 million injection from the state. Mamdani’s first budget had already climbed more than $10 billion above the approved spending plan in Eric Adams’s final year as mayor.
At the start of his tenure, Mamdani ordered every city agency to find 2.5% in savings across the board. Thursday’s update included just $429 million in cuts for the fiscal year, a paltry 0.33% of the revised spending plan.
The administration still has not released a comprehensive savings plan showing how agencies will reach the 2.5% target. It has rejected dozens of records requests for the details, despite the mayor declaring the plans would be made public.
The Department of Education is expected to spend more than $400 million more than previously budgeted. The mayor had vowed to trim $13 billion in spending on outside contractors, but the only saving the DOE found was $19 million in “less than anticipated” spending on school safety officers.
Even the mayor’s own office went the wrong way. It found $2.5 million in savings while its overall budget was expected to grow by $3 million.
Mamdani still praised the plan as reflecting “fiscal responsibility and public excellence.”
“We are investing in the essential services New Yorkers rely on to protect their health, safety and well-being, while pursuing an aggressive savings plan to put our city on stronger financial footing so that our city can deliver for generations to come,” he said.
Budget watchdogs were not buying it.
“This is an update, not a plan to stabilize the budget,” said Andrew Rein of the nonprofit Citizens Budget Commission.
“Disappointingly, four months after the Mayor directed agencies to find savings, what’s included is a small fraction of the target,” Rein added. “Only a quarter of those are actions that increase government efficiency, which is where the focus should be to save money and preserve services.”
The mayor does have one thing working in his favor: Wall Street. The modified plan shows nearly $1 billion in unexpected tax revenue from a booming financial sector since June alone.
The cushion does not cover the gap ahead. The city still faces a $6.2 billion budget shortfall next year and roughly $9 billion in each of the two years after that. The socialist mayor is leaning on the profits of the market to cover spending he promised to rein in, and the bill keeps growing.
Source: nypost.com
