Eric Adams’s Austerity Program Comes for Pre-K, Cops, and Libraries

On Thursday, Mayor Eric Adams announced sweeping cuts to the City's budget, as part of a long-awaited budget adjustment known as a Program to Eliminate the Gap (PEG). The cuts, which were announced in typical haphazard fashion, total 5 percent of City spending across the board, and would slash crucial City programs and services already hobbled by the mayor’s previous austerity measures. The punishing cuts include reduced summer programming for young people, cuts to universal pre-K (as part of a $1 billion cut to the Department of Education), and the shrinking of the NYPD to its lowest staffing levels since the 1980s (while still, somehow, increasing its budget to its highest level ever). As part of the budget cuts, the city's libraries announced that all but one branch would discontinue Sunday service starting on November 26.

When announcing these new changes, Mayor Adams gave a list of reasons he needed to balance out City spending. His list included dwindling federal COVID relief money and slowing tax revenue growth, but Adams also once again wielded a xenophobic edge while making the cuts, singling out the influx of asylum seekers to New York City. "Migrant costs are going up," Adams said in a statement, complaining that "no city should be left to handle a national humanitarian crisis largely on its own, and without the significant and timely support we need from Washington, D.C., today’s budget will be only the beginning.”

(Nevermind the millions that both the state and federal government have already given to the city, both of which now express reservations over whether the money is going to migrants, or rather into the black hole of Adams-connected contractors who have grown rich off of the mayor's chaotic handling of migrants). 

In a joint statement, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and Council finance committee chair Justin Brannan blamed the Adams's administration's reliance on contracts with private companies in providing services for asylum seekers. “We urge the administration to shift as many contracts as possible to nonprofit organizations with more expertise and commitment to the long-term public interest of the city,” they wrote, urging the administration to seek exemptions from the budget cuts and address "city agency performance issues."

City Comptroller Brad Lander also pointed out that regardless of whether the Adams administration has handled sheltering migrants in the most cost-efficient and effective manner, that it still only makes up just a third of the city's projected budget gap. 

It takes true moral courage to blame your own job performance as the most powerful person in New York on New York's most vulnerable population, people who who are, on your watch, living under deplorable, inhumane, and piss-soaked conditions. At the same time, things like new revenue sources (like a tax on New Yorkers willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for their own private spaghetti club), are dismissed out of hand. 

Future generations will read about this kind of leadership in the history books. Just not on Sundays.

Future generations will read about these links, and oh boy, we're starting off with a doozy:

• George Santos will not seek re-election to Congress, after a House ethics investigation revealed that he spent campaign donations inappropriately, including on ONLYFANS! Merry Christmas.
• New York charities are sending combat gear to violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
• The Adams admin is not taking action to expand rental voucher eligibility among New Yorkers facing eviction, even though the City Council overrode his veto on the matter.
• Carbone is going the private social club route with a new spot in Hudson Yards. Finally, a chance to enjoy pasta away from the unwashed masses, in the company of only the glitziest spicy rigatoni enjoyers!
• A judge has lifted a gag order on Donald Trump and his lawyers.
• Oh wow, a former chief FDNY says he faced pressure to issue approval to a new Turkish consulate building, with an attorney for the former chief saying he felt he would be fired if he didn't comply. That's so weird! I wonder who would pressure him like that, and how shiny that person's head might be.
• Anywho, over eight years, Eric Adams attended 80 events celebrating Turkey.
• Prices on hotels are going up in the city as the holidays approach.
• Ray's, the astroturfed "dive bar" downtown, just opened an outpost in Greenpoint.
• A 72 year old woman was killed in a hit-and-run in Bay Ridge.
• Free our guy (not actually):