February 24, 2025
“Final week of budget hearings and then on to more spending?”
We’ve reached the final week of joint Senate-Assembly public hearings on Governor Kathy Hochul’s 2025-2026 proposed state budget, which began in late January. Conducted jointly by the Senate Finance Committee, and the Assembly Ways and Means Committee, these forums have examined and critiqued the governor’s proposal in some detail with testimony from state agency officials, public policy and fiscal experts, local government representatives, business leaders, educators, farmers, law enforcement, and many other advocates.
At week’s end, the stage will be set for final negotiations between the governor and legislative leaders on a new state budget. What that means, once again, is that New York’s new fiscal and spending plan will be an all-Democrat decision and throughout the hearings, there’s been no indication that Albany Democrats will be turning away from the big-spending direction they’ve set for this state since taking complete control of state government’s purse strings in 2019.
I have served as the Ranking Member on the Finance Committee since 2021. Year after year, together with many legislative colleagues in both houses of the Legislature, we have warned that New York’s skyrocketing spending is not sustainable.
Remember that Governor Hochul has proposed a 2025-26 budget that starts at $252 billion! That’s simply a mind-boggling number in a state that over the past several years has been no stranger to mind-boggling numbers. The governor’s proposal is already an approximately $19-billion increase over her proposed budget last year, which was record-setting. In other words, the governor and the all-Democrat leaders of the Senate and Assembly – widely acknowledged as the biggest-spending Legislature in state history — will start final negotiations over a new budget looking to increase state spending by at least $19 billion.
It’s likely to go significantly higher because that’s what they’ve always done. Since 2019, the state budget has increased by nearly $70 billion. That’s 40% growth, far outpacing inflation, in just six years of Albany Democrats in complete control.
If Governor Hochul’s proposed Medicaid spending increases alone are enacted, spending on Medicaid will have increased by nearly 60 percent across the four budgets she has overseen as the governor.
“The need to strengthen the State’s fiscal position has never been greater,” state Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli, a Democrat, recently warned in his own analysis of the governor’s budget proposal. “The State’s structural budgetary imbalance has grown, as spending from State sources has strongly increased in recent years and is projected to rise at a rate that outpaces revenues.”
Specifically, the comptroller reports that if currently proposed spending levels are enacted (and keep in mind that this all-Democrat Legislature has always pushed, and pushed successfully, for even higher levels of spending), New York’s budget deficit is projected to reach nearly $28 billion by 2028.
“Uncertainty over federal funding and the ending of federal pandemic aid creates an urgent need to strengthen the state’s fiscal position,” the comptroller concluded. “Preserving state services and maintaining long-term budget balance will require a careful examination of the state’s spending trajectory” to ensure “long-term fiscal viability.”
Translated: Stop the out-of-control spending. Unfortunately, what we’ve heard at this month’s legislative hearings doesn’t inspire confidence that Albany Democrats will heed that warning whatsoever.
Our Senate and Assembly Republican conferences will go on speaking out for greater common sense on state fiscal practices. In our view, we need to keep working against a New York State tax and regulatory mindset that puts our businesses and manufacturers at a competitive disadvantage, imposes red tape that strangles local economies, or prioritizes higher and higher spending, overtaxing, outrageous mandates, and burdensome overregulation.
Our Senate conference has also put forth a “Liberate New York” legislative agenda offering a range of policies focusing on public safety and security, economic growth and job creation, tax relief and regulatory reform, and affordability initiatives to try to reverse New York’s nation-leading population loss. You can read more details of our proposal on my Senate website, www.omara.nysenate.gov.
