The Mamdani administration, for the first time, identified actual spending cuts in an effort to balance the budget.

But it’s a small fraction of the cuts needed and would still leave the city with a nearly $5.4 billion budget deficit.

What You Need To Know

The Mamdani administration identified $1.7 billion in potential cuts

A fraction — more than $200 million — was publicly identified as approved cuts

Even with the cuts, the city still has to close a $5.4 billion budget gap

“We are in the process of going through those reports, and we’ve shared publicly a number of the recommendations they put forward that we’ve already approved,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at an affordable housing event in Brooklyn.

Mamdani had tasked agency leaders to pick chief savings officers to identify ways to spend less. They found $1.7 billion in potential savings.

But his budget team only publicly identified more than $200 million worth of cuts that had been approved. Even if all cuts were approved, the city’s budget gap of $5.4 billion would remain.

“That $1.7 billion in savings is already built into how we get down to the $5.4 billion, and we’re confident in being able to deliver exactly that,” Mamdani said.

While Mamdani was in Brooklyn to discuss building affordable housing at a faster pace, his budget chief, Sherif Soliman, was deep in the numbers at a City Council budget hearing.

“At least 200 million has been identified as viable savings we can book,” he told the Council. “And the process continues.”

The biggest savings approved — $100 million cut by kicking ineligible dependants off public employee health plans. The savings cover the rest of fiscal year 2026 and into fiscal year 2027, which starts in July.

City Hall spokeswoman Dora Pekec told NY1 that the approved cuts that were announced were a sample of the savings, but didn’t say exactly how much money has been approved to cut in total.

Meanwhile, there was a cool reception from Council Speaker Julie Menin on the mayor’s budget-balancing efforts by getting Albany lawmakers to raise taxes and send more money to the city.

Menin said the mayor’s threat to raise property taxes was “a nonstarter for us” and noted that the reserve fund “has never been raided before.”

Soliman replied, “This was out of necessity for what was an inherited significant budget challenge.”