While campaigning under the banner of democratic socialism for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani made a plethora of pithy promises of “free stuff” for millions of New York City residents. Yet a little less than five months into his term, Mamdani is already stressing that his socialist agenda for the Big Apple may not come to fruition sans a massive bailout from Albany.
New York City faces a budget crisis of “historic magnitude,” Mamdani admitted April 28. To be precise, New York City faces a deficit of at least $2.2 billion in Fiscal Year 2026 and a projected deficit of $10.4 billion in FY 2027.
The fiscal situation is so dire that Mamdani announced he is “extending the executive budget deadline from this coming Friday until May 12th because a crisis of this scale cannot be solved without state action.”
Mamdani said he and his administration “share a commitment to finding inefficiencies and savings,” but that rings mostly hollow. To date, miraculously, Mamdani and his administration have found almost nothing worth cutting in New York City’s gargantuan, bloated budget.
What’s more, Mamdani has already exacerbated the budget crisis with his reckless expansion of the city’s “free” childcare program.
On February 17, Mamdani released his Fiscal Year 2027 Preliminary Budget, which includes $14 billion in new spending.
Expectedly, Mamdani’s preliminary budget is infused with socialist spending priorities, like $11.9 million for “new Street Health Outreach & Wellness (SHOW) mobile units,” $43.3 million “to advance affordability efforts,” “more than tripling baseline funding for HRA’s Community Food Connection program with an addition of $54 million,” and $662 million “to modernize and preserve more than 3,200 affordable housing.”
Mamdani want to spend $3.27 billion on “green schools.” His government-run grocery store carries a $30 million price tag.
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Obviously, Mamdani is not trying to tighten the budget belt.
Therefore, when he says that New York City “cannot close this deficit with savings alone” and the only answer is “new revenue,” he loses credibility with the commonsense crowd.
It could not be more obvious that New York City has an acute spending problem.
“In June 2025, New York City adopted a budget of over $115,000,000,000 (or $115 billion), larger than the budgets of nearly every US state,” according to the NYC Budget Office.
For sheer comparison, in 2025, the entire state of Florida’s budget was $115.6 billion. Florida is a big state with 24 million people. The Big Apple is a mere city with about 8.5 million people.
The new talking point is that New York City needs a “structural reset” with Albany concerning its funding relationship.
Mamdani believes raising taxes on all New Yorkers, even those who have fled the Big Apple, is the only solution. He emphasized that we cannot “absolve Albany of the need to continue to partner with the city to deliver that balanced budget.”
But here’s the problem. Albany is broke, too!
In February 2026, the New York State Comptroller warned that “the trajectory of projected State spending is estimated to increase at a rate faster than expected revenues, creating cumulative outyear budget gaps estimated by the Division of Budget to total $27.5 billion through SFY 2030 while reserves remain stagnant.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul is aware of the looming state shortfall. Many months ago, she stated sternly that New Yorkers would not be soaked with more taxes to support the Big Apple’s socialist economic suicide mission.
However, Hochul has also agreed to Albany’s subsidization of New York City’s massive “free” childcare program expansion. Hochul is caught between a rock and a hard place. She can’t channel her inner Gerald Ford and tell New York City to “drop dead,” but she also can’t say no to the rising tide of socialism that has swept across urban enclaves like New York City.
Going forward, it will be intriguing to watch how “socialist” cities like Seattle and New York City play with their leftist allies at the state level. Do the two sides need each other?
If relations between municipal socialists and statewide elected leaders in blue states sour in the years to come, don’t be surprised if you start hearing calls for federal bailouts of bankrupt socialist cities. That worst-case scenario can still be avoided as long as governors and state legislatures do not let the problem fester with short-sighted cash infusions.
Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.org) is editorial director at The Heartland Institute.
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