The Judiciary isn’t playing ball with Gov. Cuomo’s efforts to reduce the state budget, as I point out in the New York Post today. A person who has reviewed the budget proposal by the Office for Court Administration (OCA) emails this follow-up:
[F]urther to your comments on the Judiciary budget, take a look at the proposal buried therein for $25 million in NEW funding for “civil legal services”, which is scheduled to increase to $100 million over four years …
If approved this year, this OCA funding will become yet another “permanent” feature of future budgets outside the control of the Gov or the Legislature. In other words, taxpayers will be funding “community organizers” through legal services funding in perpetuity.
Indeed, excluding pension costs, the big bump in civil legal services appears to be the biggest single net increase in the court system’s proposed spending for fiscal 2011-12.
When Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman announced his support for a major expansion of legal services funding last year, news media coverage portrayed the initiative as entirely altruistic in both its goals and its motivations. Of course, more taxpayer-subsidized litigation inevitably will also send more money to non-profit advocacy groups that depend on government grants — and these groups in turn can be counted on to form a lobbying bulwark against any effort to reduce future funding. It also will mean a bigger caseload for the courts, which can be used to justify more staffing and higher budgets in the future.
Who says there’s no such thing as a perpetual motion machine?
You may also like
Budget Update Paints Less Alarming Picture of Federal Health Cuts
A new fiscal report from the state Budget Division suggests federal funding cuts will hit New York's health-care budget less severely than officials have previously warned.
A relea Read More
How Immigrants Became a Cash Cow for New York’s Essential Plan
The Hochul administration's move to shrink the Essential Plan in response to federal budget cuts has exposed a surprising reality:
For the past decade, immigrants have been a cash c Read More
How Washington’s Budget Bill Will Affect Health Care in New York
UPDATE: The final version of the federal budget bill omitted a handful of provisions that had been included in earlier drafts. One would have penalized states that use their own money to provide coverage for undocumente Read More
Two Dozen School Districts Are Returning to the Polls for Budget Revotes
Voters in 24 New York school districts return to the polls on Tuesday for school budget revotes. Last month, voters in 96 percent of school districts outside New York City conducting votes approved their school budgets for the upcoming year.
The 683 sc Read More
New York’s Proposed ‘MCO Tax’ Would Generate a Fraction of What Lawmakers Expected
The Hochul administration's proposed "MCO tax" would generate far less than the $4 billion in extra federal aid anticipated by state lawmakers when they approved the concept this spring, according to documents obtained by t Read More
Cuomo’s House Testimony Added New Misinformation about Covid in Nursing Homes
Throughout the scandal over former Governor Andrew Cuomo's handling of Covid-19 in nursing homes, Cuomo and his administration repeatedly spread bad information – misstating how its policies had worked, understating death Read More
What Paul Francis Got Wrong About the Empire Center’s Nursing Home Research
In February 2021, the Empire Center published the first independent analysis of the Cuomo's administration much-debated directive ordering Covid-positive patients into nursing homes. The report found that the directive was associated with a statistically significant increase in resident deaths in the homes that admitted the infected patients. Read More
Internal Cuomo Administration Documents Showed Evidence of Harm from Nursing Home Order
State Health Department documents from June 2020, newly unearthed by congressional investigators, appear to show harmful effects from a controversial order requiring nursing homes to admit Covid-positive patients.
Read More