Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration released a list of proposed budget savings on Wednesday totaling $200 million. The problem: he promised $1.7 billion.
That means City Hall has publicly accounted for roughly 12 cents of every dollar it pledged to cut from a bloated $127 billion proposed budget, with a $5.4 billion deficit bearing down on New York City taxpayers.
The list itself tells you everything you need to know about how seriously this administration takes fiscal discipline. Among the highlighted savings: a $20,000 Slack messaging subscription at the Taxi and Limousine Commission. A $133,000 software change at NYC Emergency Management. The Economic Development Corporation will save $626,000 by bringing marketing in-house.
This is what passes for budgetary courage at City Hall.
Mamdani signed an executive order directing every city agency to appoint a "Chief Savings Officer" to comb through budgets and find a combined $1.7 billion to plug the deficit hole, the Post reported. Those officers were supposed to deliver a public report of their findings by March 20.
That deadline passed without a peep. City Hall officials refused to release the reports or provide any additional information on the cuts. When budget director Sherif Soliman finally appeared at a delayed budget hearing before the City Council, he took the same stonewalling approach. Council Speaker Julie Menin and finance chair Linda Lee pressed him for the full list of savings. His answer was a masterclass in bureaucratic non-commitment: "We are evaluating. As soon as we have additional updates that are ready to share we may opt to share them."
"May opt." Not "will." Not "here's the timeline." May opt. That is the language of an administration that either hasn't done the work or doesn't want anyone to see what it found.
Mamdani himself, at a news conference, insisted the full $1.7 billion in savings had been identified. He just couldn't show anyone the receipts:
"They've put forward $1.7 billion in savings, and we are going through all of the different recommendations from the agencies and the departments to approve the number of those recommendations."
He added that New Yorkers "may have to wait till the end of April" to see the full picture, when the executive budget is due to the City Council by April 26. So the mayor who demanded transparency from Albany can't manage it from his own agencies.
Councilman Phil Wong, himself a Democrat, pointed out that officials only provided information on roughly 15% of the $1.7 billion target. And even if the full amount materializes, it won't come close to closing the gap:
"Even if the full $1.7 billion is realized, it still falls well short of the multi billion dollar gaps projected in the years ahead. New Yorkers deserve transparency. They deserve to know what savings are real, what is recurring, and what is simply being counted as savings."
Wong also noted that the scale of the items on the list raises serious questions about the seriousness of the exercise. He called out cuts "as small as a $20,000 software subscription" as evidence that the effort lacks the ambition the moment demands.
Here's what the administration's own itemized list contains:
Add it all up and you get a fraction of what was promised. The biggest line items are vague. The smallest ones are trivial. And large swaths of the claimed savings exist only as assertions that the administration won't back with documentation.
The real strategy here was never about cutting spending. It was about building a political case for tax increases. Mamdani has cast the budget shortfall as a crisis that requires Governor Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers to raise taxes on the wealthy. In February, he issued an ultimatum: raise taxes on the rich or New York City homeowners face a 9.5% property tax hike.
This is the oldest play in the progressive governance handbook. Propose a budget so enormous that no amount of trimming can balance it, then treat the gap as proof that taxes must go up. The efficiency exercise was never designed to succeed. It was designed to fail visibly enough to justify the tax demand waiting in the wings.
A $127 billion city budget, and the best the administration can do is scrounge up $200 million in verified savings while waving vaguely at $1.5 billion more it can't or won't document. The deficit, by the administration's own projections, sits at $5.4 billion. Even the full $1.7 billion would cover less than a third of that.
Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, offered the most measured assessment, and the most damning:
"The administration will have to go much further than the $1.7 billion target — and there's plenty of opportunity. This administration must be as ambitious about government efficiency as it is about affordability. That means real transformation on how we run government, and not spending money that doesn't help New Yorkers. An efficient government is an affordable one."
The key phrase there is "plenty of opportunity." The money is there to be found. The question is whether anyone at City Hall actually wants to find it, or whether performative austerity is the whole game: appoint officers with impressive titles, miss your own deadlines, release a list padded with five-figure line items, and then pivot to demanding Albany raise someone else's taxes.
Meanwhile, Mamdani released a social media video touting how much he's cutting waste. The video is easier to produce than actual savings. That distinction increasingly defines this administration.
New Yorkers were promised a government that would tighten its belt before reaching into their wallets. What they got was a $20,000 Slack cancellation and an IOU for the rest.