New York's "budget" is more overstuffed than ever (and not just with dollars)

The governor's habit of packing her Executive Budget with scores of unrelated policy provisions—essentially her entire program— is counterproductive and self-defeating

With just over a week left before the April 1 start of the next fiscal year, what are Governor Kathy Hochul’s priorities in budget negotiations with the Legislature? According to Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (as reported late last week), Hochul has indicated her top budget deal objectives are:

• Ban the wearing of facemasks in public places

• Change the pre-trial discovery process in criminal cases to lighten the
  untenable compliance burden it places on prosecutors

• Make it easier for New York courts to order involuntary commitment of seriously mentally ill persons

• Ban student smartphones in public schools

The second and third items would each represent significant changes to current law, addressing the closely related problems of urban crime and public disorder, which polls have identified as a priority concern of New York voters since 2020. But Hochul’s proposals face opposition from hard-core progressives among her fellow Democrats in the Senate and Assembly majorities. Getting either one past the finish line (without significant watering down) would be an accomplishment.

The other two items are trivial by comparison. However desirable it may be to enact a statewide school cell phone ban (which many schools are already imposing) or to prevent disruptive protestors or would-be muggers from disguising themselves with facemasks, the passage of one or both measures won’t noticeably make a difference in the lives of most New Yorkers. Yet these proposals, too, face legislative resistance.

All four items also have one thing in common: they don’t belong in the budget.

Hochul’s practice of routinely stuffing scores of non-budget programmatic and policy provisions into the budget’s Article VII implementing legislation reached a new extreme this year.¹ Roughly half the 176 provisions spread across the five Article VII bills in her FY 2026 budget package aren’t required to implement the budget and don’t relate to proposed spending or revenues.

In addition to the four gubernatorial priorities identified by Heastie, these include such disparate proposals as expanding the human rights complaint process, codifying abortion as protected emergency care, dispossessing domestic violence abusers of firearms, eliminating the statute of limitations for sex trafficking cases, and allowing New York City to lower speed limits in bike lanes, to name just a few.² Hochul’s 30-day amendments in mid-February included another big non-state budget issue: a questionable change in actuarial assumptions for New York City pension systems, the subject of two previous posts here. (The mask ban was not included in Executive Budget legislation or amendments, but Hochul identified it as a priority after her formal budget submission was completed.)

Heastie at least has complained mildly about the practice, noting last week that “the policy things that are put into the budget by the governor usually dominate” her budget talks with legislative leaders. The speaker has sought to minimize the inclusion of non-budget policy items in the Assembly’s one-house budget resolutions.

Conventional wisdom in the State Capitol these days assumes that packing Article VII budget bills with unrelated statutory provisions is a smart strategy because “the governor generally has more leverage over budget bills than other legislation,” as two seasoned Capitol reporters put in this Gothamist article last week. Albany’s current generation of lawmakers, staffers, journalists, and lobbyists all seem to take for granted that it’s always been done this way.

But it hasn’t always been done this way. Indeed, before Andrew Cuomo’s second term, it never was. Pre-2015, items with no direct fiscal implications were rarely included in any governor’s Article VII bills. And I’d argue that Hochul’s budget bill-packing doesn’t maximize her leverage; rather, it needlessly compresses the period for old-fashioned arm-twisting, arguing, lobbying, log-rolling, and deal-making on important issues that deserve more concentrated attention and effort, and it dilutes rather than concentrates her leverage.

Hochul’s scattershot approach to policymaking has yielded an unimpressive track record in areas she claims to view as priorities, even though her party controls sizable majorities in both houses of the Legislature—an advantage enjoyed by no Democratic New York governor in modern times until 2019.³

Betting everything on the budget-making process isn’t just a counter-productive strategy for the chief executive. It also dis-serves the public by perpetuating the very worst aspects of Albany-style lawmaking—ensuring the negotiation of complex major legislation behind closed doors, minimizing debate, accountability, and oversight. It’s how we got, among other things, the pro-defendant pre-trial discovery and bail “reforms” of 2019—as well as Hochul’s corrective tweak of a bail law provision in 2023.

Moreover, cluttering the budget-making process with unrelated policy proposals distracts attention from what should be the governor’s main fiscal focus—controlling spending, which the Legislature is intent on increasing to unsustainable levels. Or, as things now stand in New York, even less sustainable levels.

Unfortunately, Hochul is off to a bad start on this front. As I noted in this City Journal article, the state-funded portion of her operating budget for FY 2026 is balanced only on paper, propped up by $7 billion in accumulated surpluses from prior years. Adjusted for accounting gimmicks, Hochul is seeking to boost state operating expenditures by nearly $12 billion, or 8.5 percent—the largest such increase sought by a New York governor in 40 years.⁴ Not large enough for legislators, though. They will push to inflate spending additional billions of dollars, based on the Senate and Assembly one-house wish lists.

It’s not as if the governor is without leverage outside the budget process. She holds the strings on billions of dollars in pork-barrel spending and procurement, not to mention thousands of jobs. She controls the state Democratic Committee and her own very effective campaign fundraising operation. And yet, if the past is any guide, the enactment of the FY 2026 budget will also be the end of her efforts to fix the discovery process and involuntary commitment, for this year at least. She’ll have to settle for whatever she can get—and whatever she does get is likely to cost taxpayers plenty in budget concessions.

A different approach

If budget stuffing is bad politics, bad governance, and bad management, how’s the governor supposed to win passage of a legislative program? Answer: identify an overriding priority and focus on it relentlessly, for an entire session, within the context of a larger agenda. By all means, don’t rule out a deal linked to some budgetary concession to lawmakers if the price isn’t too high—but don’t confine your efforts to the budget.

Hochul’s proposals for reform of the pre-trial discovery process (or involuntary commitment of the seriously mentally ill) would likely find support among moderate Democrats in both houses, especially in competitive suburban swing districts. However, Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins will only allow a vote on criminal justice reform if convinced by their internal discussions that a majority of Democrats support it. So Hochul should work on building majorities within the majorities behind the scenes, cultivating more allies among the rank-and-file. (They are, after all, in the same party.)

Yes, history offers isolated examples of governors winning a non-fiscal policy priority via the budget process—e.g., Cuomo’s $15 minimum wage law in 2016. Such examples are few and far between, however. Another example that comes to mind is George Pataki’s extraction of an important workers’ compensation reform⁵ from Speaker Sheldon Silver as a condition for agreeing to the state’s fiscal 1997 spending plan. Notably, Pataki had not included the workers’ comp provision in his original budget bills; he raised it late in negotiations when he realized that Silver, in an election year, was anxious to close on a budget deal.

Cuomo’s biggest non-fiscal legislative victories— the local property tax levy cap, legalization of same-sex marriage, and the gun control law known as the SAFE Act—were launched outside the budget process and passed by a Republican-controlled Senate and Democratic Assembly. A fourth, the Tier 6 pension reform, was initially part of his FY 2013 proposed budget (since it generated actual savings), but was passed separately before the budget.

Hochul and her staff should look back on the tactics and tradeoffs employed by her predecessors—from as recent as Cuomo to at least as far back as Nelson Rockefeller—for some lessons in how a governor might work around hardcore ideological blocs in the Legislature to get her way on at least a few key items that have broad support, without needlessly cluttering her budget.⁶

1. See my primer on New York’s Executive Budget law for more on the constitutional underpinnings of the budget process, including the crucial difference between appropriations bills (whose wording cannot be changed by lawmakers) and Article VII language bills, whose provisions can be substantially amended or reworded by the Legislature before passage.

2. The “budget implications” for these provisions in the governor’s support memorandums range from dubious to pure BS—e.g., the emergency abortion provision is described as necessary to implement the budget because “it is a vital component of the Governor’s comprehensive agenda to strengthen reproductive health rights.”

3. The Senate Democratic majority under David Paterson in 2009-10 was a tenuous and ultimately shambolic 32-30; the previous bicameral Democratic majority under a Democratic governor (Herbert Lehman in 1935) lasted just a year and featured only a four-vote majority in the 150-seat Assembly.

4. She’s also pre-emptively surrendered on taxes, proposing a five-year extension of the significant millionaire-earner income tax hike approved under Cuomo in 2021, which isn’t due to expire until the end of calendar year 2027. And she has abandoned her 2024 attempt to eliminate the “save harmless” aid increases to school districts with falling enrollment.

5. The Omnibus Workers' Compensation Reform Act in New York, codified as Chapter 635 of the Laws of 1996, repealed the so-called “Dole v. Dow” right to seek third-party manufacturers liable for workplace injuries. The old law, unique to New York, created lucrative litigation opportunities for Silver’s allies in the tort bar.

6. On the federal level, a textbook example of how an executive can win support across party lines would be President Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 “dam” conversation with the Senate Minority Leader, Everett Dirksen, who had mustered Republican votes to pass the Civil Rights Act and whose support LBJ still counted on for other legislation. Unfortunately, the New York State Legislature much more effectively marginalizes its small GOP minorities—who would provide the support needed to pass discovery reform or involuntary commitment in an open vote (which, this being Albany, will never happen).