Rudy Giuliani’s welfare reform was one of the great unheralded policy successes of the modern American city. By requiring work, verifying eligibility, and treating dependency as a condition to be escaped rather than a lifestyle to be subsidized, New York City drove its welfare rolls down from over a million recipients to a fraction of that number. It took a generation to build that achievement. It has taken New York’s political class about four years to demolish it.
According to a Fox News Digital review of city records, New York City paid out more than $2.6 billion in cash assistance in 2025, reaching 864,999 people. That is a 30-year high, a level not seen since before Giuliani’s reforms took hold in the early 2000s.
The dollar figure represents a 71 percent increase over 2022, when the city distributed $1.57 billion. Fold in SNAP benefits, and the city’s Human Resources Administration data shows more than $7 billion in welfare flowing to residents in 2024 alone.
These are not partisan numbers. The New York City Comptroller’s office, hardly a nest of conservatives, reported that 584,554 New Yorkers were receiving public assistance as of December 2024, the most in at least five years and a 64 percent increase over December 2020.
When the city’s own Democrat officials are documenting the surge in their routine financial reports, the debate over whether it is happening is over. The only question left is why, and what comes next.
Incentives Are Undefeated
The why is not complicated. New York’s population grew only modestly over the same period, according to census estimates, which means the welfare explosion cannot be explained by simple headcount. What changed is the composition of the city and the posture of its government.
The comptroller attributes part of the rise to shelter and services for asylum seekers alongside expanded rental assistance, which is a polite way of saying the city invited enormous new demands on its safety net and then met them with an open checkbook. Meanwhile, the people who fund that checkbook are heading for the exits.
Every policy signal the city sends points the same direction. Taxes on the productive rise. Benefits for the dependent expand. The predictable result is a sorting: those who pay leave for Florida and Texas, and those who collect stay or arrive. A city cannot run indefinitely on a shrinking base of payers and a swelling roll of recipients, but New York seems determined to test the proposition empirically.
Mamdani Hits the Accelerator
To be fair to Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and fairness matters even when the subject does not extend it, this trend predates him. The rolls swelled under his predecessors. But inheriting a fire is different from pouring gasoline on it, and the new mayor’s first budget tells us exactly which he intends to do.
The nearly $126 billion spending plan he signed with the City Council in June allocates $14.63 billion to the Human Resources Administration, up from $11.97 billion the year before. That is a $2.6 billion increase for the welfare bureaucracy in a single budget cycle, and it now consumes 14 percent of everything the city spends.
At the same time, Mamdani has declared open season on the people who actually generate the revenue. His pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes was announced in a video filmed outside the building where hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin owns a penthouse, with the mayor declaring, “Well, today we’re taxing the rich.”
Griffin responded by calling the stunt “creepy” and “frightening” and threatening to freeze a major Midtown renovation for his Citadel offices. One can quibble with billionaires’ sensitivities, but one cannot quibble with their mobility. Capital goes where it is welcome, and Mamdani is making sure it knows it is not welcome in New York.
The arithmetic here is not ideological. A city that grows its welfare outlays by 71 percent while chasing away its largest taxpayers is writing checks against an account it is simultaneously draining. Margaret Thatcher’s old line about socialism running out of other people’s money is quoted so often because it keeps coming true, and New York is currently staging the most expensive revival of the show in American history.
Scripture saw this dynamic long before the economists did. “He that earneth wages earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes,” the prophet Haggai warned a people who labored much and kept little, because they had ordered their house wrongly.
New York has ordered its house wrongly, and the bag is leaking billions.
Giuliani proved that a great city can reverse dependency with will and clear incentives. Mamdani is now proving the inverse, that a great city can manufacture dependency with equal efficiency. The difference is that Giuliani’s experiment left New York stronger. This one will leave it holding the bag, holes and all.