Is Mayor Eric Adams really slashing spending, as he promised Wednesday?

Behind the swagger and flash, there is some substance, at least so far — but Adams also leaves a lot of shiny asterisks. He didn’t say so, but his entire budget holds together or falls apart depending on whether he is tougher on labor costs than any mayor in modern history.

The first Adams budget is, as Adams said, “radically practical,” at least on paper. Total spending, after adjusting for small surpluses and deficits that carry over from year to year, will clock in at $101 billion. Take out federal and state grants, and Adams proposes to spend about $75.2 billion in local taxpayer dollars for his first fiscal year, 2023 (which starts July 1).

That’s about 1% over the $74.4 billion in local dollars Mayor Bill de Blasio planned to spend through the end of this 2022 fiscal year.

Remember, inflation is running at 7.5%. So if Adams can pull off a 1% spending increase, real spending, in terms of the goods and services the money actually pays for, will be significantly lower. 

And a little more credit where it’s due: Over both fiscal years 2022 and 2023, de Blasio had planned to spend $149.2 billion in local resources. Adams plans to spend $148.8 billion.

No, this doesn’t “reduce spending by more than $2 billion,” as the mayor’s press release promised. But it is something. Consider the alternative: De Blasio hiked spending at twice the inflation rate his first year in office — and, in the middle of a boom, whined he needed a tax hike to fund even more. 

Another way in which the tone has changed: Adams points to record-high Wall Street bonuses and notes that they’ll probably fall, meaning we should be cautious. His predecessor would have intoned how we have to share all that wealth.

Adams’ new-spending priorities are well targeted, too. He wants to expand the earned income tax credit for poorer workers and add a child-tax credit, for about $300 million a year. A single parent with a child earning $15,000 would receive an additional $1,200 back from the city government each year, in the form of a negative income tax, double the current local benefit. This program is solid in that it rewards work, including part-time work.

He’s also adding about $25 million to the Fair Fares program, subsidizing half-price MetroCards for poorer riders. This initiative, too, is good in that it removes any excuse, flimsy as it was, for farebeating — important as Adams ramps up enforcement in the subway system. 

Spending $80 million to increase the summer-youth employment program by 30,000 people to 100,000 is cheap, and even if results are mixed about whether this stuff reduces crime, it can’t hurt.

He proposes about $1.5 billion in agency spending over two years, including for his gun-violence blueprint, but also asks departments to make $1.9 billion in spending cuts elsewhere to make up for it. Some of the cuts are vague and unrealistic — like proposing savings years in the future by “reestimating” consulting contracts — but at least it’s an effort.

It would be really easy for Adams just to throw money at certain problems to prove he’s doing something. In answer to a question about whether he’ll add more police officers, for instance, he said he’ll look at why so many of the officers the city already has are sitting behind desks rather than out on patrol.

He’s cutting vacant positions by about 7,000 — another turnaround from the de Blasio years, during which headcount incessantly increased.

But: Adams has said little to nothing about how he will approach new labor agreements with the still 329,000-strong municipal workforce. That’s important, as two major contracts are lapsing: The city’s agreement with DC37, the civilian-worker union, is up, and the teachers’ contract will expire this year. 

De Blasio left little room in the budget for raises. The former mayor assumed that workers will “pay” for their first two years of raises by working more productively and assumed only 1% raises after that.

That’s unlikely: Workers are going to be aggressive. They’ll want their income to keep up with inflation. Even a 2% raise would cost about $1 billion annually.

On paper, if Adams can pull off his approach to labor, his budget is a decent start. But that means we can’t have him award major labor agreements just after the city finalizes its budget over the summer.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.