What The Hell America!

Andrew Cuomo is presenting himself as a sensible, competent executive who can pull New York City back from its current leadership crisis. His candidacy announcement video claims that he will bring back a new era of effective and capable good government to New York City. Cuomo hopes New Yorkers will forget that he spent a decade as governor pushing austerity and cutting funding to our basic social services, including those he claims to care so much for. From schools, transportation, housing, and higher education, Cuomo pushed the interests of the rich donor class over working New Yorkers.

On March 1, Cuomo released a seventeen–minute video announcing his official entry into the crowded New York City Democratic primary for mayor His decision came after months of gossip and speculation that he might run, following Mayor Eric Adams’s public disgrace in the wake of a federal indictment on corruption charges, numerous indictments of his inner circle, and resignations at the highest levels of his administration. Cuomo lays out why he should be mayor — arguments that only work if you have a short memory for his tenure as the governor.

Cuomo briefly acknowledges that he is scandal-ridden and disgraced: “Certainly did I make mistakes, some painfully, definitely.” But “I believe I learned from them, and that I am a better person for it.” As his announcement tweet indicated, Cuomo is banking on his ability to promise “effective leadership” as the cornerstone of his campaign, claiming his superior experience and skill. A vote for Cuomo is a vote to get things done.

From the opening scenes of the video, Cuomo presents a view of New York City in “trouble,” where ordinary New Yorkers feel uncomfortable after “making eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person” and feeling “anxiety in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway. You see it in the empty storefronts, the graffiti, the grime, the migrant influx, the random violence. The city just feels threatening, out of control.”

Cuomo is pulling these “dangerous New York City” tropes straight from Fox News headlines rather than reality. New Yorkers may indeed feel unsafe, and that feeling shouldn’t be ignored. But politicians like Cuomo can choose to turn down the temperature rather than needlessly stoking fears — especially when many signs actually point to the city being incredibly safe at the moment. See, for example, the city government’s announcement last month that crime throughout New York City, including on the subway, is down.

New York City experienced significant reductions in crime and violence during the first month of 2025, with 1,700 fewer overall major crimes, a 16.8% decline compared to January 2024. This comes on the heels of 15.5% crime declines in the month of December.

The overall decrease in index crime encompassed all five boroughs and included a 36.4 decrease in subway crime, as well as double-digit declines in murder, robbery, grand larceny, auto theft, and shooting incidents. New York City also recorded the lowest number of shooting incidents in the month of January since CompStat began tracking the numbers over 30 years ago, including a record five straight days with no reported shooting victims.

Cuomo ignores this data and argues that “these conditions exist not as an act of God, but rather as an act of our political leaders, or, more precisely, the lack of intelligent action by many of our political leaders.” Cuomo was governor of New York State from 2011 until his resignation in 2021, over a decade. He hopes voters forget his role in this “crisis” — and the numerous times Cuomo cut or attempted to cut significant funding to New York City.

Cuomo spent his decade in power at the state level constantly fighting his financial responsibility for city services, pushing more and more costs from the state onto the city, essentially trying to starve out New York City. Cuomo spoke to feeling unsafe around homeless people, but he himself worsened the homelessness problem the year he came into power. In 2011, facing a $10 billion budget shortfall but refusing to raise taxes on the wealthy, Cuomo canceled New York City’s access to a federal program called Advantage, cutting $65 million worth of state contributions. This, in turn, led to a loss of $27 million in federal funds for New York City. Again, in 2016, he pushed the costs of housing homeless people from state responsibility to the city via a surprise executive order.

The New York governor has great power over the budget process, and in his first year in power, 2011, Cuomo immediately ended a temporary tax surcharge on the wealthiest New Yorkers. In Trumpian fashion, he called for cuts to Medicaid and state aid to local schools and proposed the firing of almost ten thousand state workers if their unions did not agree to major cutbacks. Cuts to public education were another hallmark of the Cuomo administration, which helped put New York second-to-last nationally in school funding equity. Cuomo often balanced budget holes on the backs of lowest-income school districts, including New York City. He also often fought former mayor Bill de Blasio to allow for more charter schools, a perennial right-wing wish-list item.

Refusing to raise taxes to fix revenue holes was a major part of the Cuomo administration. Instead he pushed a yacht tax cut, worked to cut corporate taxes, and fought former mayor de Blasio’s plan to tax millionaires in the city. In 2020, as many called on the state to tax the rich in the midst of the pandemic, Cuomo claimed that taxing the superrich would hurt New York because there would “be no billionaires left.” Cuomo himself received over $8 million in campaign contributions from one-third of New York State’s billionaires. (In 2021, a successful Tax the Rich campaign did succeed in pushing through new revenue generation under Cuomo’s leadership.)

Cuomo’s rhetoric about the importance of the subway is especially infuriating when you consider his storied record of cutting subway funding and playing chicken with the city over funding responsibility. It is an uncontroversial fact corroborated by many news sources that the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s (MTA) decline happened under and directly because of Cuomo’s persistent underfunding of the agency. Cuomo continuously cut state funding to the MTA, despite its status as a state-run institution, and attempted to pass on the responsibility to the city, which cannot raise its own taxes.

New York State statutes dedicate funds for the operating costs of the MTA, but Cuomo repeatedly tapped into those funds to cover other state costs (rather than increase taxes), $391 million in his first term alone. His “raids” of the MTA budget (using MTA budget allocations for general state debt servicing) are impressive: $200 million in 2011, $20 million, $30 million, and $20 million in 2013, 2014, and 2015, respectively.

In 2015, Cuomo demanded that the city pay far more than its usual share of capital costs for MTA maintenance. In 2017, Cuomo also cut another $65 million in state funding to the MTA, but restored it only as capital funds. In 2020, Cuomo took out $261 million and another $145 million in 2021.

As governor, Cuomo was also infamous for his austerity toward my employer, the City University of New York (CUNY), as observers called his leadership an “Age of Austerity” for both the CUNY and State University of New York systems. During that time, funding for CUNY fell by 5 percent, adjusted for inflation, even as student enrollments increased. Cuomo attempted to cut $500 million from CUNY’s budget in 2016, a third of the state’s budget allocations to the CUNY system, claiming that New York City had to pay more for the costs of the system. This would have decimated the system, and Cuomo only quietly took back the cuts following public outcry (including my own arrest while seven months pregnant as part of a civil disobedience action).

Cuomo may present a picture of a New York City in crisis, but his political amnesia requires an electorate not hearing about his many misdeeds. He can promise to improve NYC’s public housing, but his record as the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary under President Bill Clinton clearly shows that he oversaw the destruction and demolition of public housing. His tenure was also rife with predatory lending and corrupt practices. Nonprofits and other organizations won federal contracts to renovate blighted housing to build affordable housing, to be lent under a federal program called 203(K). These units were flipped and sold at artificially high prices within predatory lending terms, leaving the federal government with a $250 million bill, with parts of Brooklyn and Harlem being especially hard-hit. Notably, Cuomo refused to intervene when internal auditors at HUD pointed out the fraud during the program.

Cuomo can claim to be a “lifelong New York City resident,” but he hasn’t lived in the city for decades or registered to vote here even last year. His physical location and emotional loyalties are not to New York City, but rather both belong in the wealthy suburbs, to his donor class.

Continuing on with the same austerity-oriented reactionary politicians will not help New Yorkers or challenge Donald Trump. Cuomo has done enough harm to this city. We don’t need any more of it.