NYC Budget Watch:
FY27 Budget

Executive Summary

On May 12, 2026, Mayor Mamdani released the FY27 Executive Budget, proposing a balanced budget of $124.7 billion ($2.3 billion less than the Preliminary Budget). The plan closes a $5.4 billion gap through a combination of agency savings, state assistance, deferred costs, and previously announced savings initiatives.

The mayor had sought to address inequities in the resourcing of New Yorkers by proposing a large package of taxes in the Preliminary Budget that would fully fund city government; but while the State has provided some relief, including $567 million in new taxes on wealthy New Yorkers, the majority of State-granted cost savings simply push out mandated spending into future years. The budget gap is set to reach $6.6 billion by FY28, relying on $1.2 billion in reserves, with costs mounting in the outyears. These estimates likely far underestimate true costs, relying on the City pushing out mandates and counting future savings that may never actualize.

The Executive Budget reflects the City’s effort to maintain core public services amid growing fiscal pressure. Federal funding reductions, rising costs, and economic uncertainty continue to strain the City’s finances. While the State has provided additional support, much of the relief comes through delayed mandates and deferred costs rather than recurring revenue.

The result is a budget that minimizes deep programmatic cuts by counting on future savings but underbudgets costs for housing, healthcare, and education. The City’s choices reflect a decision to fund public services first but leave New Yorkers vulnerable to upcoming federal cuts.

These fiscal pressures come at a time when far too many New Yorkers are already struggling with the cost of living. For the 62 percent of New Yorkers who do not have the resources they need to meet the cost of living in our city and save for the future, federal actions affecting health care, food assistance, housing, and other necessary supports will increase demand for local services while reducing resources available to meet those needs.

As budget negotiations continue, advocates play an important role in ensuring that resources remain available to support New Yorkers facing rising costs and growing economic uncertainty.

In the following budget analysis, we examine how the FY27 Executive Budget affects New Yorkers’ economic security across housing, healthcare, child care, transportation, food, labor and wages, and economic mobility and protections. We find that, while the budget protects many critical services, additional investment is required to ensure all New Yorkers have the resources they need to thrive.

New York City’s Fiscal State

While the City has closed the budget gap for fiscal year 2027, its fiscal future remains uncertain.

Despite strong tax revenue collection over the past year, economic instability is increasing. Federal cuts to the social safety net have reduced support for life-sustaining goods and services like healthcare, food, housing, and child care, while tariffs and global conflicts continue to raise the cost of everyday goods. At the same time, economic growth has slowed, jobs are concentrated in low-wage sectors, and signs of financial strain—including volatility in the financial markets, rising credit delinquencies and growing demand for public services—are becoming more visible.

These shifts have a direct impact on the City’s fiscal health. Less federal funding is going into the City’s coffers, while more state and local spending is required to fill the gaps.

With the current funding structure, the Executive Budget largely maintains existing funding levels. Because the State Budget was passed 57 days late, the City’s Executive Budget relies on preliminary projections that have since been revised. As a result, more than $500 million¹ in FY27 state funding is not reflected in the City’s projections. Even with this added support, however, significant funding gaps remain. The State did not provide sufficient funding to address shortfalls in several critical areas, including child-care vouchers, food assistance, and cash assistance.

These funding gaps leave the City more exposed to economic risk. Projections rely on the City maintaining historic revenue growth. Already, the City’s preliminary tax forecast for FY27 needed to be revised downward, albeit very marginally (-$25 million in FY26 and -$50 million in FY27). If it were unable to realize forecasted growth in the next fiscal year, the City would not only need to make cuts to programs, it could also have its credit rating downgraded, causing long-term costs associated with maintaining public spaces and building housing and other facilities to rise.

In the past, the City has balanced its long-term fiscal risks by cutting public services, placing the burden on low- and middle-income earners. In this budget, the City attempts a different approach by restructuring existing costs and spreading pension payments through a process called “re-amortization.” This process allows it to free up $2.3 billion in annual savings from restructuring pension payments.

Looking at these items, most savings here come from deferral rather than elimination of costs. While this reflects the desire to prioritize funding that goes directly to New Yorkers, the City will need additional revenue in future years or be forced to cut critical programming. The City’s revenue projections are already stretched, with forecasts relying on minimal inflation (2.4%) in the next fiscal year, even as geopolitical instability continues to drive prices higher.

Revenue Trends

The Executive Budget revises the City’s revenue estimate downward from $127 billion to $124.7 billion, relying primarily on savings and payment restructuring ($3.4 billion) rather than revenue² ($895 million) to achieve a balanced budget. As detailed in the Preliminary Budget Watch, the mayor initially identified two proposals for raising necessary revenue: raising state taxes on high earners and the most profitable corporations or raising city property taxes. Through negotiations with the governor, the City won an estimated $568 million in new recurring tax revenues, including a long-sought pied-à-terre tax on the second homes of wealthy non-resident New Yorkers, and a tax increase on certain businesses earning over $1 million.

These taxes are a meaningful step not only for building fiscal capacity, but also for rebalancing our tax code towards equity.

While the City was able to maintain its overall expenditure level this year and its own revenues are expected to increase year-to-year due to projected financial market growth, federal cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and other social safety net programs are creating structural gaps that the State and the City are unlikely to be able to fill at current revenue rates.

Below, we break down how these revenue shifts increase risks to economic security, particularly for low- and middle-income New Yorkers.

Federal Policy Creates Fiscal Precarity for New Yorkers

The fiscal impacts resulting from an onslaught of federal policy changes over the past year and a half are only now beginning to go into effect and, as expected, are hitting low-income earners the hardest.

On Monday, June 1, 2026, 43,500 New Yorkers received notices that they had lost their SNAP benefits due to new federal work requirements, and this July, 450,000 New Yorkers are set to lose zero-cost Essential Plan health insurance previously covered by the federal government. Further coverage losses are expected later this year as additional requirements take effect.

In October, Medicaid will no longer be available to most non-US citizens without permanent residency, as new definitions of “qualified immigrant” go into effect. In December, Medicaid will begin imposing new work requirements which are expected to push anywhere between 500,000 and 1.2 million New York State residents off of Medicaid. In the new year, refugees, asylees, immigrants with Temporary Protected Status, and DACA recipients will become ineligible for marketplace coverage under the American Care Act (ACA). In total, over a million New Yorkers may lose health coverage – the single highest cost for families with children in New York City.

Without state support, New York City will not be able to prevent healthcare losses through its budget. Not only is the City’s Medicaid spending legally capped, it also faces constraints due to large revenue losses, with the City anticipating $3 billion less in federal grant funding over the current fiscal year (-26.5%).

These grant losses come on top of long-term federal funding trends, which declined nearly 20 percent in inflation-adjusted terms from FY11 to FY25 and impact all categories of city funding.

Federal cuts have the largest impact on community-based programs and programs for housing, health, and education.

Without additional investments, access to affordable services may become more limited for many New Yorkers.

State Funding Leaves Gaps

State funding fails to make up for federal losses at both the state and city level. Although the State relieved the City of an additional $4 billion in FY27 commitments on top of $1.1 billion announced at the Preliminary Budget, state grant levels are projected to remain below current-year appropriations. The bulk of state relief takes the form of deferred mandates, with FY27 savings of $1.64 billion for delaying pension payments and an additional $500 million for delaying small class size requirements. Direct aid ($352 million) and new tax revenues ($568 million) make up a smaller portion at a collective $920 million.

The State had to make its own trade-offs to begin dealing with the cascading effects of federal budget cuts. While the final state budget included additional funding that benefits the City, a large chunk of support bypasses the city budget. For example, state healthcare funding will go directly to healthcare administrators, while housing tax reform will benefit landlords and developers. At the same time, the budget failed to increase funding that directly protects or expands people’s ability to meet their daily needs, including access to public benefits or increasing human service wage rates. Before accounting for the additional funding (over $500 million) provided after the City’s Executive Budget was released, the City projected that it would receive less state support in FY27 than it did in FY26.

The State provided meaningful funding increases for education and child care, adding $1.2 billion for early childhood education and care. In addition, the State revised the School Aid formula to provide additional aid ($168 million) for English Language Learner students and children in temporary housing.

In short, the state budget provided institutional support to education, healthcare, and housing development, but left the City, workers, and public benefit systems at risk.

What the Budget Means for Human Services & Economic Security

In the context of federal and state losses and insufficient new tax revenue, the City faces unsavory trade-offs to balance its budget.

To meet the City’s balanced budget mandate, the mayor had already announced an initial savings target of $1.77 billion in January, with $1.47 billion in programmatic savings and $300 million in vacancy reductions executed in the Executive Budget. When new tax revenues came in below projections, the City was forced to find additional savings by restructuring the debt payment schedule on pension funds, unlocking $1.64 billion more in FY27 savings.

These savings measures will have a deep impact on the workings of New York City government, but their impact on economic security remains to be seen. Nearly all of the savings rely on realizing future “government efficiencies.” Of the $1.47 billion in programmatic savings, $519 million is attributed to cost containment of CityFHEPS, the City’s housing voucher program, and another $149 million is attributed to cost containment of “Due Process” or “Carter” cases, in which students with an Individualized Education Program (IEP) are provided funding for private special education. A further $500 million comes from the state agreement to delay mandated timelines for reducing classroom sizes. Together, these savings amount to $1.17 billion in future savings.

While these “future efficiencies” prevent programmatic cuts, the savings will only be meaningful if they can be achieved. Otherwise, any “future efficiencies” amount to a continuation of long-standing underbudgeting practices that the current administration has itself criticized, given both the importance and chronic historical underbudgeting of these services. This challenge is compounded by the fact that the City must achieve these efficiencies with a chronically understaffed workforce while eliminating over 1,500 staffing vacancies to save an additional $300 million. While the vacancy reductions included in the Executive Budget allow agencies to do more targeted capacity reductions than the Adams administration’s two-for-one hiring freeze, they impact already-understaffed agencies like the City Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) (-6.2% cut to positions) that need more staff, not less, to carry out their mandates effectively.

While the full impact of the Executive Budget cannot yet be ascertained given the reliance on future savings and vacancy cuts, the City will see around $300 million in immediate cuts to “baselined” funding—funding that is assumed to remain steady year-to-year—as well as notable cuts to current spending levels. While reductions to baselined spending are minimal, coming from a mixture of contract and licensing reform, program termination, and some revised spending estimates, the budget does not meet actual current costs, leaving agency operations underbudgeted.

These changes, if not corrected in the Adopted Budget, present serious risks to New Yorkers’ economic security.

Below, FPWA breaks down specific changes to city capacity in terms of New Yorkers’ costs and resources, translating “city savings program” into an understanding of economic security.

Impact on Human Services Administration
The City includes funding for public benefits, but cuts funding for contractors and payment administration.

While the Executive Budget protects public benefits, the amount of funding provided for contractors is likely insufficient to cover increased demand, rising costs, and a legacy of underfunding that has hurt human service delivery.

Compounding funding gaps, the City fails to provide funding to help address the administrative issues that delay payments to the contracted providers who make up nearly 20 percent of the City’s budget. The Mayor’s Office of Contract Services faces an 18.7 percent ($9.2 million) funding reduction in the Executive Budget even as 90 percent of non-profit contracts were reported to have been registered for payment late in 2025, and nearly 40 percent (1,387 contracts) of human services contracts were registered more than a year late.

While the City has allocated $40 million to increase the contract rate for child-care providers, this increase preserves the underfunding that keeps human services workers well below the $70,334 that a single adult needs to meet their cost of living, let alone what is needed to raise a family. The median wage of a “core” human service worker in New York City is only $53,600. Deeper investments are needed to ensure human service organizations have the resources to support communities, and that human service workers have the wages needed to meet New York City’s True Cost of Living.

Impact on Housing
The City underbudgets housing agencies—particularly rental subsidies—that are not made up by state aid and investments in tenant protections and incentives for development.

In the Executive Budget, planned FY27 spending on subsidized housing remains far below current expense levels. While the budget relies on savings expected from administrative efficiencies to close that gap, overall lower funding levels put at risk low-income New Yorkers’ access to affordable housing at a time when demand is extremely high.

The budget projects notable decreases from current levels across key housing programs, including rental subsidy programs (-$261.5 million, -27.1%), NYCHA (-$131.5 million, -25%), and HPD Development (-$56.3 million, -41.6%).

While the budget increases funding for the City’s housing voucher program, CityFHEPS, ($181.1 million, 10.4%), the Executive Budget reduced the scale of additional investments planned in the Preliminary Budget (-$519 million, 10.9%). Even at those proposed higher levels, investments would fail to cover the City Council-mandated expansion of the CityFHEPS, which was intended to ensure the program covers families at risk of eviction without a 90-day shelter requirement and expand income eligibility for the program. The City states that CityFHEPS savings will be found through “cost containment” measures, including negotiating rent reasonableness, but this approach may stall, as the program has faced difficulty getting landlords to take vouchers.

These concerning trends are shaped by state and federal policy, with long-term disinvestment in affordable housing over decades creating the need for the CityFHEPS program in the first place as a replacement for waning Section 8 vouchers. Now, the federal government has added to the local housing burden by slashing grants that support housing, including Section 8 (-$273.8 million, -31%) and Emergency Shelter Grant Programs (-$13.4 million, -100%). In response, the State FY27 budget included provisions to support the building and maintenance of affordable housing but failed to add funds to State voucher programs that help individuals afford housing today.

Although the City’s Executive Budget attempts to compensate for shortfalls in state and federal support, it does not adequately address the housing crisis. Increased funding for CityFHEPS remains insufficient, federally subsidized rental assistance programs continue to be under-resourced, and investments in affordable housing development and preservation lag far behind documented needs. While state policy changes aimed at encouraging housing production and maintenance may yield benefits over time, they are not a substitute for the immediate investments needed to support New Yorkers struggling today.

Mindful of its funding constraints, the City is directing funding towards its regulatory capacity to influence housing costs, including the $14.3 million allocated for right-to-council, which protects tenants. This supports the City’s broader, non-budgetary strategy to freeze the rent for rent-regulated tenants, currently being negotiated by the Rent Guidelines Board.

Yet meager increases to regulation, in context of the City’s wider housing crisis, will not offset larger agency losses. Housing costs are the largest cost for most New Yorkers and further losses to affordable housing will create more precarity in a city where 51.9 percent of tenants are already rent burdened and 1-in-7 public school children are homeless or in temporary housing.

Impact on Health
The City cannot prevent hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers from losing their health insurance. Rather than strengthening funding where possible, the City makes cuts to community-based assistance that will exacerbate losses to care.

Although the Executive Budget includes modest increases for health care services, it fails to protect New Yorkers from impending health care losses. The City’s total Medicaid expenditures are capped by law, limiting its ability to respond to federal cuts. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers stand to lose access to affordable healthcare or face rising costs. Compounding the loss of coverage for individuals and families, the City is set to lose hundreds of millions in federal grants that support the City’s medical system. In FY27, the City will experience a funding cliff, losing $246 million in FEMA COVID-19 funding and $57 million in asylum seeker-related state and federal aid.

With extensive fiscal pressure, the Executive Budget does not fully fund health agency needs. The City deeply underbudgets New York City Health + Hospitals (-$553.8 million, -24%), despite anticipated financial pressure on public hospitals and providers serving low-income communities. At the same time, while Department of Health and Mental Hygiene funding increased by 5 percent, it remains approximately 9 percent below current expense levels.

These funding reductions will impact city wages and services. The City budgets a $237 million decrease tied to a Health + Hospitals collective bargaining fund, which puts in danger the ability of frontline workers to negotiate wage increases at a time of rising costs.

Moreover, several public health programs saw reductions between the Preliminary and Executive Budgets, including cuts to B-HEARD mental health response services (-13.6 %), and Universal Home Visiting programs (-7.4%).

Overall, continued underbudgeting and anticipated federal funding losses threaten access to care and will disproportionately impact low-income New Yorkers, immigrants, older adults, and individuals with significant health needs.

Impact on Child Care & K-12 Education
While the City provides large investments in universal pre-kindergarten, it fails to fully fund child-care vouchers, putting at risk access to affordable care.

The Executive Budget expands investments in child care, pre-kindergarten, and public education, but leaves key programs vulnerable to funding shortfalls. Utilizing state assistance for child care and pre-kindergarten in FY27, the City plans to increase spending on the City’s universal pre-K by more than $450 million and takes steps towards universal 2-K. The budget also provides a long-overdue rate increase for contracted child-care providers, allocating $40 million to raise funding by 2 percent for community-based organizations and 5 percent for family child-care providers.

These gains to child care, however, are offset by federal funding losses. The elimination of New York’s $78 million Head Start grant and cuts to the Child Care and Development Block Grant have already forced the City to pause child-care voucher enrollment, and the Executive Budget reduces voucher funding by a further $100 million in FY27. The losses to child-care funding offset the City’s additional investments in universal pre-k programming, leaving care for children under five underbudgeted by roughly $450 million. The State’s additional $475 million allocation for child-care vouchers provides an opportunity to close much of that gap. Together, these choices reflect the City’s preference for expanding public options over subsidizing private care.

The same underlying struggles are evident at the K–12 level. Changes to the state school funding formula reduced annual aid to New York City by $314 million, and while new funding weights for students experiencing homelessness and English Language Learners partially offset those losses ($168 million), schools are still left with less than before.

Federal education cuts deepen those pressures, eroding resources meant to advance equity and putting programs like Summer Rising at risk.

Against this backdrop, the City is counting on savings that may be hard to deliver. The budget assumes a 9.5 percent reduction in “Due Process” or “Carter” spending by shifting away from the City’s current practice of rarely contesting private special education placements and toward a more selective approach, a move that may face strong pushback from parents and require additional administrative support. Similarly, the State’s two-year delay of the class-size reduction mandate preserves $300 million this cycle but kicks the problem down the road while deferring improvements that may provide educators more capacity to meet students’ needs.

Overall, while the City is making meaningful efforts to expand access to affordable 2-K in underserved communities, broader funding losses to both the early childhood and K–12 systems have forced trade-offs whose executability remain uncertain.

Impact on Transportation
The City’s budget fails to expand the Fair Fares program and includes funds for a limited free bus pilot.

While the City Executive Budget expands funding for transportation, it falls short of making transportation affordable. The City’s funding for the Department of Transportation (DOT) increased by $60.1 million (3.8%). Notably, the City restored full funding for the current Fair Fares program, which provides reduced transit fares to low-income New Yorkers. The Executive budget adds $25 million to the Fair Fares program that had not been baselined in the City’s Preliminary Budget, bringing the total investment to $120.6 million.

However, the City’s funding does not include $125 million to expand Fair Fares eligibility and enrollment. Without this additional funding, the program is unable to ensure automatic enrollment or expand to include households earning up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level, which is still below the True Cost of Living in New York.

Impact on Food Security
While the Executive Budget adds funding for SNAP, food pantries, and grocery delivery, funding gaps remain, particularly for older adults.

The Executive Budget fails to fund needed increases for food assistance, driven in part by federal cuts to SNAP that threaten access to food. The City does make some food investments—increasing its contributions for the SNAP program itself and providing capital funding to build the first City-run grocery store in Harlem—but does not fully fund programs that address increasing food access issues. Although the Executive Budget adds funding ($53.6 million) to the City’s food pantry program, Community Food Connection, funding still falls below the $100 million needed to meet food assistance demands.

Although the Executive Budget restored funding to the City’s food pantry program, Community Food Connection ($53.6 million), and Groceries-to-Go ($10 million), funding still falls below what will be needed to meet food assistance demands. Community Food Connection needs at least $100 million to meet rising hunger, particularly as more New Yorkers become ineligible for SNAP.

The Executive Budget does not provide sufficient investment to combat older adult hunger in our city. It does not include $60 million to fund congregate meals at Older Adult Centers, or $27 million to expand home-delivered meals to seven days a week. With rising costs and shrinking funding, these services will be unable to meet the needs of older New Yorkers.

The City should draw on funding sources, including council discretionary funding, to ensure other initiatives are funding at the Adopted Budget, including Council Discretionary Initiatives like the Food Pantry Initiative ($8.26 million), Access to Healthy Food and Nutritional Education ($2.134 million), and the Food Access and Benefits Initiative ($1.5 million).

Impact on Labor and Wages
The City underbudgets upcoming labor negotiations.

The Executive Budget continues to hold firm on its bargaining position for upcoming city labor negotiations, set to begin this summer.

Like the Preliminary Budget, the Executive Budget plans for a 1.25 percent increase in city employee wages. At the same time, the Executive Budget reduces funding to the Health + Hospital Corporation Collective Bargaining Fund (-$237 M, -20.3%). While this is the typical bargaining position in the Executive Budget, this is far below what is needed to keep up with the cost of living.

The City’s positioning, and the end agreement that comes from negotiations, will influence both workforce retention and the long-term delivery of public services. Further, it sets an example for labor power amidst a changing economy.

This is particularly true as sectors with a significant number of City-contracted workers have grown, such as the home health aide sector. Under current labor agreements, the City undermines living wage rates by relying on underpaid human services contractors who earn 25 to 30 percent less than their similarly situated counterparts in city agencies. By exacerbating pay disparities, the City downwardly influences wages, keeping workers in economic insecurity and undermining the City’s ability to meet services demands.

The City has the opportunity, and the obligation, to redefine this paradigm, but it faces obstacles. In particular, the City is influenced by state actions and all workers are impacted by the State’s decisions around wages and benefits.

The FY27 State Budget failed to address inequity between public and private contractor benefits. While it did take steps to reinforce New York’s pension benefits through Tier 6 negotiations—reducing pension contributions, lowering retirement age, and increasing incentives for state employees hired after 2012—it failed to pass workforce parity for child-care workers and included only an inadequate 2.7 percent cost-of-living increase for State-contracted human service workers.

To ensure a comprehensive and equitable approach to labor negotiations, the City will have to reinforce its fiscal position throughout the year. With inflation anticipated to climb as high as 4.2 percent amid geopolitical instability tied to federal actions, the City would require at least $2 billion more per year, once negotiations are finalized, than currently budgeted to keep pace with rising costs. Factoring in human service worker salary parity, which the Center for New York City Affairs estimates would cost an additional $965 million to $1.35 billion annually (once phased in), and the Executive Budget may be underbudgeting future labor costs by $3 billion.

The City’s budget must prepare for these needed increases in order to ensure that labor negotiations can act as a tool for advancing economic security and strengthening public services, rather than simply containing costs. Doing so will require budgeting for wage increases that reflect the cost of living, adequately funding collective bargaining reserves, and investing in wage parity for contracted workers whose labor is essential to the delivery of public services.

Impact on Economic Mobility
Insufficient funding for community colleges and cuts for small business funding threaten opportunity.

As the economy contracts, the City’s budget fails to fund programs that promote the economic mobility of low- and middle-income New Yorkers. The Executive Budget plans large cuts to programs that are pipelines to higher wages, including Community Colleges (-$71.6 M, -4.5%), Small Business Services (-$143.5 M, -38.8%), and credentialing programs like Advance and Earn (-$8.7 M, -100%). The Office of Financial Empowerment also sees cuts over its FY26 Adopted levels, as the agency has not fully utilized its current year funding.

The cuts to the City’s community colleges are particularly concerning. The City University of New York’s (CUNY) community colleges are an engine for economic mobility, particularly for Black and Brown New Yorkers, who make up 76 percent of enrollees in a student body that is 60 percent first-generation college students. Community colleges offer a path to higher earnings without the crushing debt that can accompany a four-year degree. A CUNY associate degree alone yields, on average, 67 percent higher earnings than those of prime-age New Yorkers with only a high school degree. The reach of these colleges extends beyond degree-seeking students, to classes and programming supporting adult continuing education as well as high school class supplements. Cuts to CUNY not only destabilize the opportunity for economic mobility for degree seekers but put at risk those same opportunities for those who benefit at every age and stage of their education.

Cuts to Small Business Services threaten equity on a similarly wide scale. Concerningly, the budget cuts funding to the Mayor’s Office of Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprises (-$2.1 million, -100%), which has been unable to meet City goals to diversify procurement. As the City steps away from its procurement commitments, it also reduces funding for the City’s Small Business Loan Fund (-$3.6 million, -54.5%), exacerbating federal cuts to the Small Business Administration budget that eliminate programs for entrepreneurs, decrease lending, and increase costs for small business borrowers. At the same time, workforce development programming also faces cuts, with the Advance and Earn program and One Stop Career Centers that serve as employment centers seeing reductions.

These cuts come on top of long-term failures to ensure financial opportunity for all. The City must ensure the budget accelerates opportunities, rather than backs away from its commitments. On top of restoring needed funding, the City must leverage existing tools, like the City’s tax code, to redirect city tax benefits away from big corporations and towards small businesses and workers. In doing so, the City can take a critical step toward a more equitable economic future for all.

Enforcing New Yorker’s Economic Rights
The City cuts funding to enforcement agencies like the Commission on Human Rights that act as a bulwark against labor and human rights abuses.

New Yorkers’ economic security relies not just on increasing funding, but on protecting rights to safe and fair working conditions, preventing deceptive trade practices, and ensuring freedom from discrimination. Yet the enforcement of these core economic rights has long been under-resourced and is now under full assault by the Trump Administration. Rather than ramp up funding for agencies that ensure New Yorkers’ rights to economic justice, the Executive Budget cuts agency funding while increasing funding for police.

Funding cuts are set to affect the Department of Consumer & Worker Protection (-$70.9 million, -8.3%) and CCHR (-$2.3 million, -15%). The Department of Consumer & Worker Protection enforces worker rights and protects New Yorkers from marketplace abuse, while CCHR takes on a wide range of cases, enforcing laws banning discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations based on protected categories.

These agencies serve vital and complementary functions to protect New Yorkers’ access to housing and employment. Through enforcement of these rights, the City can also ensure that its own programs are effective in building economic security. For example, CCHR investigates and prosecutes cases in which landlords discriminate against tenants with housing vouchers, which will be vital as the City looks to increase the efficiency of the City’s voucher program.

Without proper and full funding of the City’s enforcement agencies, the budget endangers the economic security of all New Yorkers, but most especially that of low- and middle-income residents and New Yorkers of color.

Big Picture Takeaway

The FY27 Executive Budget reflects the increasingly difficult fiscal environment facing New York City. Federal funding reductions, rising costs, and continued economic uncertainty resulting from the federal administration’s actions continue to place increased pressure on city finances, even as demand for public services grows.

The Executive Budget largely preserves existing funding and avoids major programmatic cuts. However, it does so by relying heavily on deferred costs, future savings, and assumed economic growth and tax revenue, all of which create risk in future years. Several key areas—including housing and food assistance, health care and child-care access, education and economic advancement, and antidiscrimination protections—remain vulnerable to funding shortfalls and are not scaled to meet increasing need.

While the budget demonstrates the City’s commitment to ensuring essential services and growing access to early childhood education, maintaining these commitments and scaling them over time will require additional resources. As negotiations over this and future budgets continue, advocates and policymakers need to ensure that investments keep pace with rising costs and growing need so that all New Yorkers may have the opportunity to achieve economic security.

Going Forward

The City has room to restore some of these cuts with additional state aid provided in the State Budget, released after publication of the Executive Budget. After restoring child-care and housing reductions, the City must restore and expand funding for economic mobility and economic justice.

Footnotes:

1 Additional State Aid to New York City includes Foundation Aid changes ($168 million) and CCAP increases ($475 million) minus additional contributions from Tier 6 pension reform.

2 Revenue increases include increases from both existing and new tax sources, tax audit revenue, and additional state aid.