New York City has a taxpayer-funded right to shelter for all homeless people, including illegal aliens. As a result, New York City is being flooded by illegal aliens who live in hotels and shelters at city expense, costing the city billions of dollars. New York City’s moderate Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, isn’t responsible for this “right to shelter,” which he has sought to reform, and is distressed by the flood of migrants. But he can’t change most of the left-wing city policies that have made housing scarce and driven up the cost of sheltering illegal aliens and the homeless, although he has proposed modest reforms. Elections won’t fix the left-wing policies that have spawned this enormous expense: Most New York City voters won’t vote for Republicans who would be willing to repeal some of the city’s bad policies — less than 10% of them voted in the most recent city council elections, and they reelect almost all of the left-wing parasites on their city council, even as city services deteriorate.
Now, the pay for all the illegal aliens’ housing, New York City is having to cut spending on everything else, including education spending needed to cope with a state mandate to cut class sizes, which will result in New York City hiring unqualified teachers to get student-teacher ratios down.
Mayor Eric Adams’ administration announced yesterday that the city is imposing $4 billion in budget cuts over the next year and a half that will cancel the hiring of new police officers, slash the education budget by $1 billion and close libraries on Sundays. City officials note that this is all the result of the migrant crisis and that without additional federal aid, additional cuts will have to be imposed. “This is the most painful exercise I’ve ever done in my professional life,” Adams said. These cuts go into effect immediately. “That will mean disruptions to the services you all rely on,” Adams said in a pre-recorded video. 5 percent budget cuts will occur at every city agency, and similar 5 percent cuts are expected to happen again two more times next year if the flood of migrants continues. For the first time in this century, the New York City Police Department will have fewer than 30,000 employees, and they will also be postponing the next 5 classes of officers.
“This is truly a disaster for every New Yorker who cares about safe streets,” PBA President Patrick Hendry said. “Cops are already stretched to our breaking point, and these cuts will return us to staffing levels we haven’t seen since the crime epidemic of the ‘80s and ‘90s. We cannot go back there. We need every level of government to work together to find a way to support police officers and protect New York City’s thirty years of public safety progress.”
City Council Finance Chair Justin Brannan agreed that this is not the time to make cuts to public safety. “If you talk to most people on the street, they want to see more cops not less,” Brannan said. The city has taken in more than 142,000 migrants since Spring 2022.
Other major cuts include:
- At the Fire Department: Any civilian vacancies will be eliminated, as well as light duty firefighter positions, and overtime will be canceled.
- At the Education Department: $547 million will be trimmed this fiscal year and another $600 million in 2025. The Summer Rising summer program for middle school students is being slashed – the Friday program will be abolished for middle school participants and the summer camp day will be shortened and end two hours earlier. Also, thousands of slots for prekindergarten will be cut.
- Libraries are having their funding cut significantly and most branches will close on Sundays.
“We also will be reducing spending on library materials, programming, and building maintenance and repairs,” NYC library officials stated. “Without sufficient funding, we cannot sustain our current levels of service, and any further cuts to the Libraries’ budgets will, unfortunately, result in deeper service impacts.”
