Ouch: The state budget director, Blake Washington, just made a mockery of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s claims to face a fiscal crisis by pointing out that New York City’s social-service outlays have exploded 50% since the pandemic.
The rest of the state has cut those costs by about a quarter, Washington notes; the city clearly needs to “refine” these outlays, even install some “guardrails” against bloat.
Count this as Gov. Kathy Hochul’s answer to Mamdani’s threat to raise property taxes if she doesn’t give him the income-tax hikes he wants to balance his bloated $127 billion budget plan.
Washington’s warning is polite enough: The outlay explosion came before this mayor took office, driven first by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s increases to “safety net” welfare spending and then by the city’s response under Mayor Eric Adams to the Biden-era migrant crisis.
Most likely, some “one shot” spending during the pandemic became permanent while no one was looking, too.
State data shows that since 2019, the city Department of Social Services budget ballooned by 40% to $14.2 billion, while the Department of Homeless Services budget more than doubled to the $4.4 billion in Mamdani’s FY 2027 budget proposal — and expansion of the city’s safety net saw public assistance (welfare) caseloads soar 89%.
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How much of it is just waste, how much is “nonprofit profiteering” and how much is outright fraud?
The city lacks the fiscal controls to even guess — which is probably what Washington means in calling for “guardrails.”
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If Mamdani continues to play blackmail games with the gov, she might just order an investigation into where City Hall is sending all this taxpayer money.
At the least, the mayor’s new DSS commissioner, Erin Dalton, is going to have to through the agency’s books with a fine-tooth comb.
And with the migrant crisis plainly driving much of the problem, Mamdani should surely rescind his orders that would prolong it as far as the eye can see — and also pull back on those ads urging migrants to sign up for more help.
Adams was able to balance his budgets with regular use of PEGs (for Program to Eliminate the Gap), ordering every agency to find efficiencies — even as this social-welfare spending exploded; Mamdani has no excuse for not ordering more PEGs if he thinks he’s in a crisis.
Forget about how his tax hikes would slam ordinary New Yorkers; it’s the mayor’s duty to undo excess spending his predecessors imposed to help pay for his own “vision.”