Mayor Zohran Mamdani is making a show of cutting the budget, with videos of him looking for millions under sofa cushions.
He’s pretending he’s leaving no stone unturned to close a $5.4 billion budget gap.
Don’t buy it. These are token gestures meant to suggest the city has cut all it can, giving Albany cover to justify what he hopes comes next: Mamdani’s tax hikes on high earners and employers.
Sure, cutting low-value government spending deserves some credit, but the problem is that Mamdani’s savings are mostly speculative or trivial.
Even the largest cut so far, $100 million from removing ineligible health-care dependents, would only materialize if auditors find such dependents.
And even if he reaps all the $1.7 billion in savings that he’s seeking, it would still leave that $5.4 billion hole untouched.
In other words, his budget assumes those savings are real, even though they may never materialize, leaving not a $5.4 billion but a $7.1 billion gap.
Meanwhile, he’d be spending on things like a three-year, $1.86 billion, no-bid deal with the hotel industry to provide homeless shelters, including for migrants, who now have no time limit on their stay.
He somehow found another $260 million for a new “Mayor’s Office of Community Safety,” an office with just two staffers.
Hellbound and Down 