Eric Adams, the scandal-ridden mayor of New York City, is having a very bad November. Already under federal investigation for fraud, corruption, and conspiracy, he was hit last week with a civil suit for sexual assault allegations dating to the early 1990s.

But Adams’s personal woes have not dampened his ambitions to impose budget cuts on working-class New Yorkers. The self-described “swagger” mayor is now pushing to slash funding across all city agencies, infuriating a diverse set of constituencies and worsening the city’s cost-of-living crisis for ordinary New Yorkers. While Adams loves to attack socialist elected officials for being out of touch, he has repeatedly pursued policies that favor the rich and well-connected.

On November 2, Adams abruptly left Washington, DC, where he had traveled with other big city mayors to request additional federal funding for asylum-seeking migrants. (New York City has received the bulk of asylum-seekers in the US since 2022, with approximately 118,000 coming from the southern border.) Adams’s quick departure came after the FBI raided the home of an associate close to Adams’s 2021 mayoral campaign and 2025 reelection bid, with agents seizing cell phones, laptops, papers, and other evidence. The raid was the latest in a series of investigations (triggering indictments and guilty pleas) of Adams’s colleagues and donors for potential campaign finance violations and related illegal activities.