NYC Council passes $116B budget amid potential hits from Trump's ‘Big Beautiful Bill'

Yahoo

01-07-2025

NEW YORK — The City Council approved the upcoming fiscal year's budget Monday in an unanimous vote, as the city faces funding threats and the likelihood of intensified immigration enforcement from President Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill.'
The election-year budget, at $115.9 billion, is the city's largest ever and was touted by councilmembers Monday as a way to 'Trump-proof' the city.
'This budget finally includes some things that we've been fighting for four years now, to make sure that New Yorkers are OK,' Speaker Adrienne Adams said at a press conference ahead of the vote.
The NYC budget passage came as lawmakers in Washington, D.C., Monday debated Trump's proposed budget, which would increase spending on the president's immigration agenda, give tax breaks to wealthy households and corporations and make heavy cuts to health care and nutrition programs.
'We also made sure that, once again, we have been fiscally responsible to our communities, to our city, and making sure that we are Trump-proofing this city to the best of our ability,' Adams said.
The city budget includes increased funding for immigration legal services, coming as Trump acts on his hard-line deportation agenda.
'On a day when Senate Republicans are passing a horrific budget bill that adds 10,000 ICE officers to the federal government, further criminalizing immigrants across America, we in New York City are protecting our immigrant communities," Councilmember Shekar Krishnan said at the meeting Monday afternoon.
While budget negotiations hit a sticking point over programs for immigrant legal services, the budget allocates $74.7 million for immigration programs.
Mayor Eric Adams and the Council have frequently been at odds during budget negotiations in years past. This year, coming in an election year as the mayor seeks a second term, went by more smoothly.
Although the two sides of City Hall clashed on some topics, with legal services for recent immigrants a sticking point, the budget has added funding for many areas the mayor has cut in prior years, including libraries and child care.
'This is, in my opinion, the easiest budget we had to pass, because we knew what we expected from each other and what we needed to deliver, and we were able to accomplish that,' Adams said at the announcement of a handshake deal on the budget on Friday evening.
Budget watchdogs have warned the city is overspending instead of setting aside money for the city's reserves to protect from potential headwinds out of Washington, D.C.
'Instead of putting aside $3 billion to soften the first blows of federal cuts and protect against a future recession, the budget increases spending more than twice the rate of inflation and leaves future budget gaps of more than $9 billion, after accounting for underbudgeted expenses,' Citizens Budget Commission President Andrew Rein said in a statement Friday.
But Council Finance Chair Justin Brannan pointed out that the city's reserves are at a record-high $8.45 billion, and said that, because of the Trump administration's threats to further destabilize vulnerable populations, it made sense to allocate more money to them now.
'We made a conscious decision that right now it is more important to pour money into the communities that need most,' Brannan said. 'We can't run the city on reserves.'
______