Eric Adams and Adrienne Adams are both running for mayor. They’re also hashing out the city’s $115 billion budget.

They call it the budget dance – that annual, winding back-and-forth, push-and-pull between the New York City Council and the mayor’s office as they shake out a spending plan for the coming fiscal year. But what does that dance look like when the leading performers are simultaneously competing for the same role? 

When City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and Mayor Eric Adams come together in the City Hall rotunda for their annual culminating budget handshake, they’ll be doing so mere days after the June 24 primary election in which they both (at least initially) ran for mayor. This year’s budget process and the most consequential part of the Democratic mayoral primary line up almost exactly. And as the speaker vies in a crowded race to dethrone the mayor, the city’s access to billions of dollars in federal funding is also in doubt under threatened Trump administration cuts.  

The extraordinary political environment could certainly complicate budget negotiations. But there will also be an incentive for these city leaders to deliver a well-received budget they can tout while simultaneously battling it out on the campaign trail.

“I don’t think the mayor would benefit from a protracted and bloody budget fight like we’ve had every year,” said City Council Finance Chair Justin Brannan, who is also running for city comptroller. “If the mayor is indeed running for reelection, I think he would benefit from giving the council what we want and putting this to bed early.”

Process and precedent 

Mayor Adams released his preliminary $114.6 billion spending proposal for fiscal year 2026 in January, and the City Council is roughly three weeks into their series of public hearings to analyze the mayor’s plan. Early this week, the City Council will release its formal response, laying out all the ways members think the mayor’s proposed plan should change. From there it’ll be full steam ahead on negotiations. Mayor Adams will release an updated executive budget at some point in April, the City Council will hold another round of hearings, and there will be many rallies and press conferences as individual members and advocates fight to get their priorities reflected in the final spending plan. Negotiations will further intensify as the clock ticks down to the June 30 deadline. 

Both Mayor Adams and Speaker Adams have disputed the notion that their opposing candidacies will politicize the budget process. “We’re professionals … We’re going to do what we have to do with this budget. We'll sit down with her team, and we'll land a plane,” Mayor Adams said at a recent press conference, repeating a phrase used often during last year’s budget negotiations. “Regardless of our positions, whatever we’re doing, myself and the mayor, we are working for the benefit of the people of New York,” Speaker Adams told reporters last week. “Once again, we’re going to come together to create a budget that is equitable for the people.”

There’s very little historical precedent for the dynamic. While many comptrollers have run against incumbent mayors – like city comptroller Brad Lander currently is – only one City Council speaker has. (A City Council speaker has never successfully made the jump to being elected in another citywide role. Every single comptroller over the last three decades has launched a bid for mayor and lost.) The only time a City Council speaker has challenged a sitting mayor – thus navigating the dual roles of negotiating a budget with a mayor while running against them – was in 2005 when then-Speaker Gifford Miller ran in the Democratic primary, hoping to oust Republican then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Miller lost, never getting the chance to face Bloomberg in the general election. He’d struggled to raise his profile and differentiate himself through the budget process after Bloomberg unveiled a proposal packed with new money for libraries, summer jobs, and other programming and proposals that aligned with many of Miller’s own priorities, The New York Times reported at the time. Speaker Adams is the first sitting City Council speaker to run against an incumbent mayor of her own party in New York City.

Landing the plane

The last two budget cycles were highly contentious. Both years, the City Council fought back hard against a flurry of proposed across-the-board cuts proposed by Mayor Adams, which he’d argued were necessary to offset budgetary gaps exacerbated by spending for asylum-seeker services. Diverging budget projections from the Adams administration, the City Council, and budget watchdogs further complicated the process. Some cuts were ultimately restored, but not without a long, bruising battle.

The preliminary budget proposal unveiled by Mayor Adams in January spared the city from the unpopular broader cuts that accompanied the last few budgetary cycles. Despite concerns about federal funding, the mayor himself has painted an altogether rosier picture of the city’s financial situation for fiscal year 2026 compared to the past couple of years, seemingly starting negotiations on a more promising note. Granted, that was before Speaker Adams launched her mayoral campaign. 

“On substance, they should be able to land this plan no problem. I think they’ll both want a budget,” said one City Hall source, who requested anonymity to speak freely. “I just think there will be a few more fireworks, but I think it’ll just be politics and posturing versus anything that represents major, major, major policy disagreements.”

Tension between the two aside, much of the actual budget negotiations are handled by professional staff who aren’t beholden to voters. It’s not like the mayor and speaker are locked in a room together, one on each side of a table, hashing the budget out piece by piece. The process plays out over months and many different people are involved. 

“I’m not saying things are all roses and everything, but I don’t think that it is statistically different from what happened in 2023 and 2024 where the mayor and the speaker political leaders have had their tension and disagreements, but the professional staff on both sides end up working it out,” Democratic political strategist Trip Yang said. 

Some City Council members, staff and political consultants have still expressed doubts – particularly in relation to the mayor’s side of City Hall. 

“I believe this budget cycle will be one of the more tense and difficult negotiations between the mayor and speaker given that they are now on opposite sides to represent the City for the next four years,” said one democratic political consultant who was an adviser on a former mayoral campaign.

Federal funding in doubt

Further complicating things, the federal government and its threats to cut funding – some of which have already transpired – loom large over budget proceedings. Roughly 8% of the city’s latest budget for 2025 comes from federal funds, about $9.6 billion. Budgeting experts have warned that Mayor Adams’ budget proposal for the coming fiscal year leaves little to no wiggle room.

Ana Champeny, vice president for research at the fiscal watchdog Citizens Budget Commission, said election budgets always tend to be challenging because they can distract from the real issues at hand – a big part of that being the threat of federal funding cuts this year.

“We would like to see a real discussion of budget and financial management and management of government services as part of a campaign to make sure that these are the real issues about how you govern and manage the city,” Champeny said, adding that there’s still a lot of time between now and the primary election for campaigns to do this. 

The city’s Independent Budget Office Director Louisa Chafee noted that incumbents or recent office holders have all run for their colleagues’ seats in the past. 

“What’s different this year is the silence from City Hall in the face of rapid and sweeping changes in the federal executives’ fiscal, regulatory, funding and employee’s policies. This silence, combined with shrinking surpluses, structural budget gaps, and the potential changes in the local economy, is putting the City’s fiscal stability at risk,” Chafee said in a statement.