The New York State budget negotiations drew to an anti-climactic close this week. This was not only the longest budget negotiation in the last sixteen years but also one of the most nonsensical. The enacted budget does almost nothing to protect the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers about to lose health care and food stamps in the wake of Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) — nor did Hochul harness the energy and enthusiasm to build a more affordable New York City and state that carried Mayor Zohran Mamdani into office.

Looking at the state budget legislation, you could easily miss that this year’s budget fight came at such a historic moment: unprecedented federal cuts to the social safety net alongside the most energetic and animated campaign for new revenue and expansions to publicly funded programs in modern history. Rather than respond in kind, lawmakers in Albany punted. The result will be at least 450,000 New Yorkers losing access to health insurance this July and possibly well over one million losing access over the next year, bringing the state’s rate of uninsurance back to its pre–Affordable Care Act level.

Further, federal funding cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are showing up in New York state’s program data, where we see disenrollment of about 100,000 SNAP participants already. We should expect to see this number increase over the next twelve months as funding gets tighter and new work requirements kick in fully.