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 It’s raining budget cuts. They are pouring down… born in the heavy, lingering clouds of the Great Recession…driven by a newfound and misguided sense of fiscal responsibility … flowing from federal to state to local governments… washing away vast sections of health, education and human services…bursting the flood gates of America’s already fragile social safety net.
February was a bad month for human service providers.
It began when Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed to close the State’s $10 billion budget gap for FY2011-12 almost entirely through spending cuts. The Governor has been adamant about refusing to seek any new taxes to help address the State’s fiscal crisis. He has even refused to extend the existing Personal Income Tax (PIT) surcharge on high income households, first enacted in 2009, which would provide $1 billion in added revenues this year and over $5 billion next year.
Much of what must certainly be devastating impacts to vital services remains unclear, even after Cuomo’s presentation of his Executive Budget on February 1st. In large part, this is due to the Governor’s use of special commissions to identify the specifics of billions in “savings”, creation of new block grants to mask cuts in specific services, and enormous transfers of funding responsibility from the State to localities and school districts – all the budgetary equivalent of smoke and mirrors.
On February 17th, Mayor Bloomberg laid out his own Preliminary Budget for FY2011-12, blaming the State and Federal governments for the loss of 6,000 teachers and at least $370 million in cuts to human service programs – including the elimination of 16,629 subsidized child care slots and the likely closure of 110 senior centers serving between 8,000 and 10,000 older New Yorkers. In both cases, advocates estimated the cuts to be approximately one-third or more of the City’s total commitment to these programs. Of course, these $370 million in new funding losses are on top of the hundreds of millions in programs – funded by the City Council only for the current year – which the Mayor once again declined to include in his budget.
If you think this is bad, the situation could get markedly worse. Bloomberg is hoping – based on the dubious theory that revenue sharing should be distributed to localities in an equitable manner -- that the State will revise its own budget and fill a remaining $600 million City budget deficit. If not, a new round of budget cuts – likely further impacting human services – will be on tap when the Mayor formally submits his Executive budget for the coming year.
And, in the early morning hours of February 19th, the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives took a meat ax to Federal programs, voting to slash over $61 billion from current year domestic, discretionary spending. The bill, HR-1, is estimated to cut the current year allocations by an average of 13.8 percent. Since Federal Fiscal Year 2010-11 is close to half over, the House bill would actually require immediate spending cuts of close to 25% on average. Individual programs, however, were hit much harder and in some cases -- e.g. AmeriCorps, EvenStart Family Literacy, Mentoring Children of Prisoners, Special Olympics, Teen Pregnancy Prevention Discretionary Grants, Youth Build, etc. -- eliminated entirely.
While it is doubtful that the House bill would ever make it through the Senate and be signed by President Obama as written, we appear headed towards a major show down – including the possibility of a complete federal government shutdown when current spending authorizations expire on March 4th. Any resolution to this dispute is likely to contain significant cuts, particularly in light of President Obama’s own budget proposal for FY2011-12 which includes reductions in a number of programs and a 50% cut to the Community Services Block Grant which funds Community Action Agencies.
This next deluge of federal funding reductions – New York State would lose at least $1.2billion in just some selected programs – is likely to trigger an entire new round of budget cuts at the State and local level.
In the meantime, advocates are attempting to buck up their courage and put up a fight. The Human Services Council of New York is coordinating a new “Who Cares? I Do” campaign, intended to inform the general public about the critical importance of human services for all New Yorkers. Individual sector specific coalitions are mounting their own battles to fight specific budget cuts.
Here are at least some details on the specifics of proposed cuts in the federal, state and city budgets.
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