Total Federal Funding by Agency, Fiscal Years 2010, 2020, and 2021.
New Report:
New York City Faces Human Services Fiscal Cliff in Wake of Covid-19 Relief Funding
By Andrew Perry, FPWA’s Senior Fiscal Policy Analyst
About:
A new report from FPWA calls attention to the looming federal fiscal cliff facing New York City’s human services. While emergency federal relief brought an enormous influx of funding to New York City’s human services agencies, outside the small number of programs that received sizeable Covid-19 relief funds, baseline federal funding to other major programs is eroding. As Covid-19 relief funding begins to expire, this fiscal cliff, together with New York’s slower economic recovery, is likely to put considerable strain on low-income New Yorkers for years to come, unless policymakers act to reverse looming cuts.
Key findings:
The city’s eight human services agencies took in $5.3 billion in federal funding in fiscal year 2021, a 22.7 percent increase from the prior year.
Just two programs—epidemiological capacity and emergency shelter grants—more than account for the total federal funding increase across human services.
Without Covid-19 relief funding for the six programs that received the highest sums, total federal grants these to human services agencies would have fallen by 5.7 percent from last year.
Funding for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, formerly the city’s largest federally backed human services program, fell 9.0 percent in the last year and 19.4 over the last three years to the lowest level since fiscal year 2011.
Launched in 2019, FPWA’s Federal Funds Tracker (FFT) monitors federal funding to New York City’s human services agencies. By providing comprehensive data on the flow of federal funding to the City over time, the FFT is a useful tool to analyze the impact of federal funding to New York City at a time of rapidly shifting and uncertain national politics and policymaking. It is used by policymakers, advocates, and FPWA’s 170+ member agencies.
Questions?
For more information on the FFT, including more granular information on individual federal grant programs, please contact Andrew Perry, FPWA’s Senior Fiscal Policy Analyst.