Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the Trump administration hasn’t given the state $87 million in promised federal funding.
Page A9From§Eachthe early bird edition — 1 September 2026
Congress passes bill funding government; White House withholds counterterror funds from New York anyway.
As it ran on the front
I wrote this down, hold on — I've got a notebook full of numbers and I can never find the page I need when I need it, give me a second... here. Okay. September. The House passes a funding bill. Avoids a shutdown. Midterms coming up. That's page one.
Page two, same week, different number: the governor of New York says the White House is withholding counterterror funds from the state, and that the withholding threatens safety. I wrote 'threatens safety' in quotes because that's not my phrase, that's hers, and I try to only write down what people actually said, because my memory's not what it used to be.…
…(cont) So I've got these two pages sitting side by side on my kitchen table, and I keep going back to the same word — 'funding.' It's on both pages. Page one: government gets funded, shutdown avoided, everybody goes home happy before an election. Page two: a specific pot of money, for a specific city, for a specific kind of threat, doesn't get released, same season.
I did a little thing at home, nothing fancy — I've got two jars, and I labeled one 'government' and one 'New York counterterror,' and I put a dollar in the first jar because, well, the funding bill passed, money's flowing, that's documented. Second jar, I don't have a dollar to put in it, because near as I can tell from the governor's statement, that jar's still empty. Same government. Same week. One jar full, one jar empty, and I can't for the life of me find the sentence anywhere in what I've got here that explains why.
Oh — and, uh, excuse me, one more thing before I let you go. If the government had enough on hand to avoid a shutdown for the whole country, what was sitting in the specific line for New York's counterterror funding that week? I don't know. It's not in my notes. Maybe it's in somebody else's.
“They found the money to avoid a shutdown right before an election, same week New York's counterterror funding got frozen. Funding shows up fast when the calendar's the emergency; it moves slow when the emergency's an actual city. That's the whole trick — there's money, it's just not going where the sirens are.”
“Withholding a specific allocation pending review is standard fiscal oversight, and it's frankly irresponsible to call that a threat to public safety before the review's even — okay, the governor did call it a threat to public safety, that's her statement, I'm not disputing she said it, I'm disputing that it's — it's fine, it's just a timing issue.”
The receipts
The House passed a continuing resolution that funds the government through Dec. 11.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.