Most agree that New Yorkers aren’t calling state lawmakers in fury over a budget that’s 11 days late, but experts say their perception of state finances could change depending on how federal cuts impact New York’s finances and when.
“I don’t think anyone outside of this Albany bubble knows that the budget is late,” said Shontell Smith, partner and head of New York Practice at Tusk Strategies and former chief of staff and chief counsel to the New York Senate Majority. “’I’m still getting my paychecks, I’m still getting my benefits.’ The minute something happens that impacts those benefits and payments, that’s when I think people will really be upset.”
State leaders have made it clear that they intend to negotiate the budget as planned and deal with any potential cuts later in the year as Republicans in Washington work to streamline spending, always making sure to point out that the state won’t be able to back fill all of them.
“Obviously we look at the world in a realistic way,” said Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins this week. “We are trying to balance what we know and we don’t know.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul has faced criticism for spending too much, and both houses of the Legislature want to spend even more.
As a heated debate over Hochul’s proposed changes to the state’s discovery laws, or how evidence is shared with the defense, pushes budget talks into at least next week, if not beyond, experts say the political optics of Democrats squabbling over policy nuances rather than focusing their political energy on fighting Republicans in Washington are probably not great.
“It feels like they should be out there fighting these tariffs, fighting about the rule of law,” said Jack O’Donnell, managing partner at O’Donnell & Associates.
As Democrats continue to navigate a second Trump era and process their defeat last November, he called the fact that the state Legislature has ground to a halt over a policy dispute that most New Yorkers are unfamiliar with, however important it may be, a microcosm of the struggles Democrats have with optics and public perception.
“They’re talking to or at each other and most New Yorkers are sitting here saying, ‘what about tariffs, what about health care, what about trade,’” he said. “This conversation is happening within the walls of the Capitol building.”
But state Sen. James Skoufis, who has been vocal about the Democratic Party’s struggles with messaging, argued that the conversation around discovery likely won’t have the visceral impact that conversations around bail reform in past budget cycles have had on the public’s concerns over Democrats’ priorities.
“That has penetrated with the general public, discovery has not,” he said of bail reform. “There’s no pressure back home. For any lawmakers, or the governor in her travels, people aren’t stopping us in the grocery store or on the street yelling about discovery. I think in large part we are where we are here because there really is no outside pressure to try and wrap up discovery.”
The conversation grew increasingly heated this week, with leaders trading barbs through the press as the governor declined to call a meeting to work through the budget with Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Stewart-Cousins for most of the week.
The governor’s proposal has come with the unrelenting backbeat of pressure from the state’s district attorneys. Hochul sent them out to do her public bidding three days in a row, and legislative leaders have blamed them for egging the governor on in her resistance to meet in the middle.
“At some point we need them to compromise as well,” Heastie said.
Compromise was not on the governor’s mind when she addressed reporters Thursday.
“Let’s roll up our sleeves and get this done, you know what I need to get, I know what I need to get, I know what the vast majority of New Yorkers are looking for, they want common sense public safety,” she said when asked about the optics of her strategy of pushing policies in the budget that she acknowledged may not have survived a normal legislative debate.
Despite their insistence on letting Washington make the first move, given the volatility of the stock market in recent days Smith argued that state leaders would be better off wrapping up the lengthy policy debate and figuring out what their next move is now, not months from now.
“They really should be working to resolve this sooner rather than later before something happens to the market, and the money they think they have right now, they don’t have,” she said.
Some, like state Sen. Finance Committee Chair Liz Krueger, are ready to at least begin the conversation.
“The economy is going down the tubes, and all of our priorities will have to change,” she told Spectrum News 1. “Just get something done and then move on to the really tough issues.”
As the governor drives this fight, Smith pointed out that if state leaders’ “pass-the-budget-now-and-come-back-later" approach backfires and people do begin to care that all of this time has been spent fighting over policy, whether fair or not:
“They’re not going to blame the Legislature. Gov. Hochul will get the blame."