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Albany Republicans, the minority in the state Senate and Assembly for the last seven years, face a long hike back to political relevance.
They can start by answering the $20 billion question.
That’s the difference between what New York state expects to spend this fiscal year — $148 billion, excluding federal aid and borrowing — and what it would be spending if the last budget enacted with GOP support, in 2018, had kept growing only at the rate of inflation.
That amount is $128 billion.
Republicans correctly note state spending is higher than ever — and, given Albany’s reliance on a small subset of high earners, rising unsustainably.
But they can’t put the blame on the Democrats alone.
The $20 billion question isn’t about what Republicans would cut if voters again entrusted them to steer the state.
It’s a deeper challenge: It asks them to explain, to themselves especially, how they can credibly claim to be the taxpayers’ champions when they not only supported much of this fiscal bulge, but pushed to make it worse.
Most of the budget growth since 2018 has been in just two programs: Medicaid and school aid.
Republicans supposedly concerned about the state’s fiscal picture have repeatedly agitated for higher spending on both.
New York spends $4,942 per resident (enrolled or not) on Medicaid, per Empire Center’s Bill Hammond. That’s 23% more than the next-highest state, Kentucky, and double what New Jersey spends.
A credible opposition party would be hammering Gov. Kathy Hochul on this, arguing that the program is pushing up taxes, crowding out essential services and often failing the vulnerable people it’s meant to help.
But the tiny group of upstate fiscal hawks making these points are undercut by their own Republican team: Sen. Pat Gallivan, ostensibly his conference’s health care point man, last year joined 1199 SEIU, the state’s largest health care union, to demand “Medicaid equity,” a budget-busting increase in what the state pays hospitals and other providers.
New York’s GOP can’t even credibly levy its evergreen complaint about “waste, fraud and abuse” in Medicaid.
The Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program, a once-tiny initiative meant to help a small group of people live outside nursing homes, mushroomed into a $9 billion boondoggle that pays more than 400,000 people to care for 250,000 New Yorkers.
Republicans should have been first to sound the alarm on CDPAP — yet when Hochul proposed modest reforms by eliminating middlemen, they called her suggestion a “full-blown catastrophe” and all but ignored the fiscal hemorrhaging.
Josh Jensen, the top Republican on the Assembly’s Health Committee, even objected to those who called CDPAP a “racket” — which parts of it had absolutely become.
The GOP has done no better on New York’s costliest-in-the-nation public schools.
Expenditures statewide have zoomed past $30,000 per student, and top $40,000 in many districts.
Yet when Hochul last year tried tapping the brakes on these runaway costs, Doug Smith, the top Republican on the Assembly Education Committee, and other GOP lawmakers stood literally shoulder-to-shoulder with the teachers’ unions at a Long Island rally to oppose her.
Together they preserved automatic aid hikes for wealthy but shrinking districts, filling empty classrooms with state cash without demanding better outcomes.
New York’s most egregious practices — giving public workers automatic pay raises after their contracts expire, and making tenured teachers nearly unfireable — continue without GOP scrutiny.
The most effective mechanism for education accountability would be allowing more charter schools, giving parents better options.
But explain that to Republican Assembly members like Jodi Giglio and Jarrett Gandolfo, who in 2023 posed in anti-charter videos at the teachers’ union’s request.
That’s the Republicans’ problem in a nutshell: If a public employee union, or a trial lawyer, or the building trades might wrinkle a brow, criticism about virtually any state law, program or practice is off the table.
Republicans follow this rule as they use the MTA as a pinata-on-rails.
Fare hikes? Bad. Congestion pricing? A sin.
But try getting the median GOP lawmaker to say something about bloated union contracts, or liability rules, or “prevailing wage” determinations pushing MTA costs to the moon.
Republican cravenness was never on greater display than in March 2024, when the Senate minority, including Sens. Alexis Weik and Dean Murray, pushed to retroactively sweeten public employee pensions at a future taxpayer cost of billions of dollars.
Albany Republicans don’t even uniformly oppose the state’s handouts to film, television and theater producers, which cost taxpayers upward of $1 billion annually.
It’s time for some serious introspection — about why state spending has gotten so far out of control, and about why Republicans have so little credibility to do something about it.
New York needs, and voters have historically rewarded, honest critics of fiscal profligacy.
Can their GOP lawmakers be honest with themselves first?
Ken Girardin is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.