Socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s efforts to cut his administration’s budget while calling for massive new spending has hit a rather embarrassing snag.
The socialist scion said he asked all government offices to come up with spending cuts that would add up to $1.7 billion savings for the annual budget of about $127 billion. He gave them a deadline of March 20.
The sum of the savings he reported was about $200 million — which comes to about one-tenth of 1% of the entire budget.
After the date came and went, the administration faced tough questions about how well it was meeting its targets.
Almost comically, he posted a video Wednesday touting a few of the meager savings by pretending to find money under cushions and behind paintings in the mayor’s mansion.
The sum of the savings he reported was about $200 million — which comes to about one-tenth of 1% of the entire budget.
The New York Post reported that city officials refused to release any information about the cuts but said to trust that they were hitting the targets.
Mamdani’s budget director, Sherif Soliman, was unable to answer many questions about the plan at a preliminary budget hearing with the city council on Wednesday. Instead he defended the controversial decision from City Hall to raid a rainy day fund as well as a retiree health benefit trust fund to balance the budget.
“We want to replenish reserves, and we want to grow reserves,” he told council members. “This was out of necessity for what was an inherited significant budget challenge that stems from under-budgeting.”
“We will continue to update as we identify more savings,” Soliman added.
He also blamed former Mayor Eric Adams (D) for the massive $5.4 billion deficit that needed to be filled by law. Mamdani also passed the buck onto Adams in a separate press conference Wednesday.
“While we all predicted that it would be a difficult fiscal situation that we would find in January, there are very few who believe that it would be at the scale that we have found,” the mayor said. “This is a fiscal crisis that has been entirely created within city government as opposed to one that can be blamed on external factors as we’ve seen in 2008.”
RELATED: Mamdani reverses controversial policy after 19 NYC residents die outdoors
Mamdani has demanded that the state pass new taxes on the wealthy to help him fulfill his promise for new massive social welfare spending, but even other state Democrats said they would oppose the effort.
The mayor then threatened to raise property taxes, but that effort was opposed by members of the city council and likely wouldn’t pass.
It has been 84 days since the socialist was sworn into office.
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