Mayor's Budget Earmarks $3.4B to Support 35K NYPD Officers

NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams’ new budget proposal, to be released Thursday, would establish free after-school programs and put up billions of dollars to support up to 35,000 NYPD officers, according to a preview of the plan shared with the Daily News.

The mayor is expected to formally reveal the executive budget for the 2026 fiscal year in a speech in Queens Thursday.

This budget comes as Adams runs for re-election, and as economists warn of a possible recession amid President Donald Trump’s tariffs and federal funding cut threats.

Adams, who is emphasizing affordability and public safety as his core issues headed into the November general election, said in a statement that the plan prioritizes working families and noted that the city is maintaining funds to provide financial security for New Yorkers.

“We are doing all of this while maintaining record-high reserves to help us face anything that comes our way,” Adams said. “This is the budget my mom needed, that my family needed, and, with it, we’re saying to working families: your city has your back.”

The budget blueprint comes in at $115.1 billion — just slightly bigger than Adams’ $114.5 billion preliminary budget proposal released in January.

The proposal includes about $3.4 billion to support a uniformed workforce of about 34,000 NYPD officers in the 2026 fiscal year, which starts July 1, according to the preview of the plan.

That still lower than the number of officers the NYPD had pre-pandemic. Since then, the department has dealt with a serious staffing crisis, as officers have retired in large numbers without being replaced.

In conjunction with the funding, Adams announced Wednesday his administration is on track to actually get 35,000 officers back on the NYPD headcount by fall 2026. He credited that to a reform enacted earlier this year by NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch that lowers the number of college credits a police recruit must have to apply to join the department.

Since that policy shift, more than 9,700 people have applied to take the NYPD officer exam, according to the mayor’s office.

The mayor’s budget proposal also commits to doling out $199 million each year to fund education programs once bankrolled by federal pandemic-era stimulus funding.

Though Adams is touting his plan as the “best budget ever,” it doesn’t restore some key funding reductions he included in his January 2026 fiscal year spending proposal.

The City Council has consistently argued that just about all those reductions should be restored. The fact that the plan didn’t reverse some of them indicate its Democratic members and the mayor could still have a rocky few months of negotiations ahead of them before they must reach a deal on the next budget by July 1.

After the mayor faced fierce criticism for previously announced cuts to 3-K and preschool services, in this plan he’s committed to putting $167 million in annual funding to continue operating those programs, with $92 million in new baselined funding for the city’s 3-K program providing free full-day education for 3-year-olds.

Still, that falls short of the minimum $112 million the Council says is necessary for universal 3-K. The Council’s budget response from last month called for a $55 million increase in funding for pre-K special education seats, too.

Adams’ plan proposes adding $15.7 million in extra funding for the city’s three public library systems’ operations. However, that additional funding allocated by Adams’ plan also falls short of what the City Council and advocates say is needed.

In its budget response last month, the Council argued the city needs to secure an additional $62.5 million in baselined funding for the three systems in the next budget in order to address “unmet expense needs.” The Council also argued in its response that such a funding increase would allow the city to “expand 7-day library service to 10 additional branches citywide.”

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