City Council leaders are proposing that the city make targeted investments in vaccine programs and disease surveillance efforts that stand to be decimated by President Donald Trump’s budget cuts.
Speaker Adrienne Adams, Finance Chair Justin Brannan and Governmental Operations Chair Lincoln Restler released a plan Wednesday to invest $10 million into public health programs, including vaccination hubs, infectious disease tracking platforms and food safety inspections. The plan – which the lawmakers characterized as “Trump-proofing” – seeks to partially fund programs particularly vulnerable to federal funding losses.
The city’s public health budget has faced serious threats from federal cuts. In March, the Trump administration abruptly cancelled more than $100 million in grants to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene used to support disease surveillance and vaccination programs before a federal judge in Rhode Island temporarily blocked the cuts.
Councilmembers’ proposed investment would make up for a fraction of those grant terminations. The lawmakers are seeking to allocate $8 million in the city budget to convert 80 neighborhood health clinics into hubs that expand access to vaccines. The plan also seeks to spend $1 million to create a citywide infectious disease dashboard and an additional $1 million to hire restaurant inspectors to prevent foodborne illnesses such as listeria and salmonella. While the plan pushes for a combined $10 million investment in public health, it also proposes a $5 million allocation to bolster public safety and climate efforts, allocating $2.5 million to the police department’s counterterrorism bureau and $2.5 million to natural disaster preparedness and weather forecasts.
The plan was released ahead of a Council oversight hearing on Wednesday that aimed to assess the impact of federal cuts on the city budget. The Council invited the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget and representatives from eight city agencies, including the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, to testify about their preparations for federal budget cuts, but the administration did not show. On Tuesday evening, First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro called the speaker’s office and declined to make the members of the administration available to testify, Brannan and Restler told reporters before Wednesday’s hearing, chalking up the rejection to Mayor Eric Adams’ hesitancy to stand up to the Trump administration.
“That’s not just disrespectful, it’s a slap in the face to New Yorkers,” Brannan, who represents Brooklyn neighborhoods including Bay Ridge, said of the administration’s move to decline testifying. The administration did not provide written testimony ahead of the hearing, according to Restler.
“While the City Council wants to throw up their hands and hold orchestrated hearings about potential federal funding cuts, New Yorkers can rest assured that we are actually focused on the substantive work to make sure they receive all the services they deserve,” said Kayla Mamelak Altus, a spokeswoman for the mayor.
“When a reduction in funds has indeed taken place, our administration has filed lawsuits, submitted affidavits, lobbied the federal government, and done more to ensure our city gets the critical funding we need, and our written testimony provides extensive detail on all that work,” she added. There are several reasons why the city did not send representatives to testify about its plans to backfill or prepare for federal cuts, but one of the primary reasons is that officials are in active negotiations with the federal government to prevent those losses – and don’t want to give the federal government their playbook, Mamelak Altus said. The city plans to send written testimony to the Council, she added.
Independent budget experts used Wednesday’s hearing to call on the Adams administration to make the budget process more transparent and save money in the city’s rainy day fund to prepare for future cuts. Jacqueline Sherman, general counsel and chief innovation officer at the city’s Independent Budget Office, said the administration continues to underestimate costs for things like uniformed personnel overtime and housing vouchers while overestimating spending on asylum seekers and payroll costs – two inaccuracies that have obscured the budget process during an especially uncertain time.
“The serious fiscal uncertainties facing the city have real implications for the services all New Yorkers rely upon,” Sherman said during her testimony. “Now more than ever, New York City needs a budget process that is transparent, realistic and focused on long-term stability.”
Nick Garber contributed reporting to this article.
