NEW YORK CITY — New York City will reduce spending on asylum seekers by 30 percent overall — a shift in funding that will help spare city agencies from another round of cuts planned for April, said Mayor Eric Adams.
Adams announced Wednesday that he’ll cancel 5 percent budget cuts for city agencies and will lift a hiring freeze.
But that wasn’t all — Hizzoner said he specifically ordered migrant spending to be cut another 10 percent on top of previous 20 percent reductions.
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“The combination of our tough, but necessary financial management decisions, including cutting asylum seeker spending by billions of dollars, along with better-than-expected economic performance in 2023, is allowing us to cancel the last round of spending cuts, as well as lift the near total freezes on city hiring and other than personal spending,” he said in a statement.
“Make no mistake — we are not yet out of the woods, as we still need Albany and Washington, D.C. to play their roles in providing New Yorkers with additional support.”
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The further reduction in asylum seeker spending came amid a renewed controversy over a city program to give some migrants debit cards to pay for food.
An opinion piece Tuesday in the New York Post deemed the program a “boondoggle” that could end shelling out $53 million to a company called MoCaFi to administer up to $10,000 per card.
Many conservative critics quickly seized on the opinion piece.
“Democrat-run New York City is giving illegal aliens up to $10,000 each in taxpayer dollars,” tweeted Rep. Jim Jordan.
(Seeking asylum is not illegal and is enshrined in federal law.)
City Hall officials shot back that the Post’s opinion piece was inaccurate.
Adams said the debit cards were eyed as a solution to a $7.2 million problem: food waste.
Some asylum seekers have not been eating city-provided food because of cultural preferences, he said.
The debit cards were being tested among 500 asylum seekers to give them food options and avoid waste, he said.
“We are using this pilot to see if we’re successful, we’re going to expand it if we’re successful because we got to find successful ways of bringing down the cost and dealing with this crisis that taxpayers should not be paying,” he said.
Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright said the maximum that would go to MoCaFi is about $2 million.
“All of the balance of the resources, the potential resources on the contract would, in fact, go to the families to buy food and baby supplies,” she said.
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