Draconian Cuts on Top of Already Woefully Underfunded Programs

Derek Thomas, Senior Fiscal Policy Analyst | Gaurav Gupta-Casale, Fiscal Policy Analyst 

At a time when 40 percent of New York City residents are already unable to afford a basic standard of living, President Trump’s federal fiscal year (FFY) 2020 budget would deepen poverty and widen economic and racial disparities. Trump’s budget would hinder effective poverty fighting tools, end or devastate programs that support the needs of children and older adults, and maintain repressive caps on child care and affordable housing. These services, when properly funded, strengthen the economy and improve the quality of life for all New Yorkers.

The budget departs sharply from the most recent bipartisan budget agreement reached in early 2018, which eliminated sequestration spending cuts for FFY 2018 and FFY 2019 and boosted spending for housing and child care. At the same time, the proposal increases tax cuts to high-income taxpayers and heirs to very large estates and massively increases the defense budget.

This report analyzes the impact of the President’s budget on the nearly 40 federal grants that support the four City agencies featured in FPWA’s Federal Funds Tracker – Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD), Department for the Aging (DFTA), and Department of Social Services (DSS) – and in turn, the nonprofit human service providers who rely on these grants.

The President’s FFY 2020 budget would collectively cut DFTA, ACS, DYCD, and DSS’s FY 2019 adopted budgets by nearly $500 million (16 percent of federal funding), and follows a decade of decline to these agencies’ federal funding due to austerity as shown in FPWA’s Federal Funds Tracker.