By Ronald Brownstein
The Philadelphia Tribune
https://www.phillytrib.com/
—AP PHOTO/JULIA NIKHINSON
The impending confrontation between President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani looms as the biggest battle yet in the escalating fight between the administration and the nation’s Democratic-run cities.
Trump is using a pincer movement to try to bend blue cities to his will. On one flank, there’s the highly visible, highly militarized immigration enforcement actions and the actual or threatened National Guard deployments in Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland and Washington. On the other, there’s a stealthier attempt to coerce cities into adopting a broad range of conservative policies by threatening to revoke their federal funding.
Trump’s confrontation with Mamdani will bring greater attention to this fiscal struggle. Both men have political reasons to welcome their approaching clash. Trump clearly believes Mamdani’s election will help him portray Democrats as un-American radicals more concerned about coddling criminals and undocumented immigrants than fighting for average families. And Mamdani is happy to push back against Trump in a city where 70% of voters disapprove of the president. The incoming mayor has already laid out his roadmap for doing so, with a remarkably detailed six-page policy paper released during the campaign for “Trump-proofing NYC.
Many observers think Trump is unlikely to pursue a major deployment of immigration or National Guard forces into New York because it has a massive and highly regarded police force, obviously declining crime rates, and above all, a large concentration of wealthy GOP donors who will lobby him against the idea. (Such donors were central to dissuading Trump from sending federal forces into San Francisco last month.)
But fiscal pressure is a different story. And here, New York is highly vulnerable. The latest figures show that the city relies on direct federal funding for $7.5 billion of its $116 billion budget. As New York City Comptroller Brad Lander (a prominent Mamdani supporter) cataloged in a report immediately after Trump’s reelection, federal money is indispensable to almost everything the city does. The feds provide $1.3 billion toward its services for the homeless, $679 million in Title One money toward schools in low-income neighborhoods, and $588 million toward the city’s universal school breakfast and lunch program.
Beyond those direct contributions to the city’s budget, Lander found another $90 billion or so in federal dollars that flow into the city annually for transit, infrastructure investments, rent vouchers to the city’s public housing authority, and, most of all, Medicare and Medicaid payments to hospitals and health-care providers. All this gives Trump an enormous list of pressure points to squeeze.
Although the threat to choke off these funds is not as kinetic as immigration raids or National Guard deployments, it displays the same impulse to view blue jurisdictions as hostile territory to be subdued. And that impulse is getting stronger. Until now, the administration has attempted to withhold funds unless blue cities accept Trump’s policy demands. (More on that in a minute.) But during the New York mayoral race, Trump went further, repeatedly warning that he would withhold funds if voters elected the candidate he opposed (Mamdani). “It is more nakedly authoritarian to say ‘not only are we going to punish you for the policies you support, or the actions you take to protest in the streets, but now we are going to punish you for who you voted for,’” said Jill Habig, founder and CEO of the Public Rights Project, a nonpartisan legal firm working with cities targeted by the administration.
Trump’s financial assault on blue cities has been panoramic both in its targets and its demands. The administration has already threatened to pull funding for virtually all major domestic services to cities that refuse to adopt a wide array of conservative policies — including ending all programs to promote diversity in hiring, contracting or education, cooperating unreservedly with federal immigration enforcement and restricting transgender rights.
So far, federal district courts around the country have blocked the administration from imposing these conditions. Richard Briffault, a Columbia law school professor who specializes in federal relations with local governments, says courts have consistently concluded that the administration lacks the authority to add requirements for the money that Congress did not mandate when it created these programs. Multiple courts have agreed that “if these are not provisions in the formula or the requirements (of the legislation), the White House can’t add them,” Briffault says.
Yet as quickly as it has lost these cases, the administration has rolled out new ways to squeeze blue cities. Just days after a court ruled that the Department of Homeland Security could not tie disaster preparation grants to immigration cooperation, for instance, the department simply announced it was shifting a comparable amount of grant money from blue to red states (which prompted follow-up litigation from a dozen blue states). Even after a district judge this summer blocked Trump from tying transportation, housing and public health spending to an array of culture war goals, the administration still canceled funding for a major New York-New Jersey transit project, insisting that it violated Trump’s executive orders on diversity.
Briffault and Habig both believe that even though the Supreme Court majority has often deferred to Trump, cities will ultimately prevail. The cities’ lawyers are arguing — correctly — that Trump’s demands violate multiple precedents limiting Washington’s ability to “commandeer” local governments to follow federal dictates. Yet even if cities do eventually triumph, Briffault notes, critical funding streams might be disrupted for years as these legal battles proceed. For Trump, Briffault says, “it may be less about winning than about wearing down the other side.”
For all the drama of a Trump-Mamdani showdown, no one should forget that “winning” for the president would mean disrupting social safety net programs that help struggling families in the city where he made his fortune. “They are targeting the politicians,” Habig says, “but it’s the people who actually get hurt.” Trump’s determination to cut SNAP benefits during the government shutdown offers an ominous preview of how many vulnerable families in New York he may be willing to hurt to pressure his young adversary in the mayor’s office.
