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Progressive Lawmakers Urge Special Session to Address Trump’s Cuts, Breaking from Top Democrats

Whether legislators should return to Albany this year to tackle historic cuts to Medicaid and food assistance has become a thorny political question.

Jie Jenny Zou · August 14, 2025

Lt. Governor Antonio Delgado was flanked by Assemblymembers during a rally in lower Manhattan on Aug. 13, 2025. | Jie Jenny Zou

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Progressive lawmakers rallied in lower Manhattan on Wednesday with a message for Governor Kathy Hochul: It’s time for New York to act on President Trump’s federal cuts.

Backed by over 60 left-leaning groups, the event called for state legislators to return immediately to Albany and get to work fortifying New York’s safety net.

“It doesn’t make sense to wait for the cuts to actually happen,” Assemblymember Claire Valdez, one of the legislators who spoke at the rally, told New York Focus. “It’s pretty simple: The Republicans have made their decisions and it’s time for us to make some as well,” Valdez said of the Democratic party.

“It isn’t sufficient anymore to say the Republicans did such a bad job. What have we done?”

Legislators departed Albany for the year in June after delivering a delayed state budget that largely ignored inevitable federal cuts. Weeks later, Trump signed his “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” into law, slashing over $1 trillion to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) over the next decade.

The result is billions less in federal support for New York’s Medicaid program — the most generous in the country, with nearly 7 million New Yorkers enrolled — and an unprecedented funding cliff for SNAP, which feeds 1.7 million households statewide. The largest Medicaid cut takes effect January 1, giving the state little headway.

Despite the high stakes and tight deadline, top Democrats including Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins quickly ruled out the need for a special session, delaying the matter until next year. Governor Kathy Hochul, whose office was granted emergency powers to temporarily manage any fiscal gaps, has seemingly agreed.

Now, a contingent of progressive leaders and groups are calling on the legislature to reconvene and raise taxes to avoid cuts to lifeline services, as well as to expand protections for immigrants from Trump’s mass deportation push.

The idea is proving to be politically divisive in more ways than one.

Backed by over 60 progressive groups, the rally on Aug. 13, 2025 called for a special session to address forthcoming federal cuts to Medicaid and food assistance. | Jie Jenny Zou

Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado has emerged as one of the most vocal proponents of a special session as he mounts a primary challenge against his boss in next year’s gubernatorial race. Hochul has remained staunchly opposed to raising taxes on the wealthy, despite calls from both the Assembly and the Senate in recent years to do so, and has emphasized that the state can’t backfill massive federal cuts.

Relations between Hochul and Delgado have unsurprisingly soured. Hochul’s office quietly stripped Delgado of all but one staff member and disabled his state email address earlier this year, long before he officially announced his run for governor in June. Delgado has bashed Hochul for failing to act decisively, most recently in an op-ed in The New York Times.

“We have a responsibility in New York to lead,” Delgado said in an interview with New York Focus. “The state can do something, it’s actually in the position to do something, given our resources and capabilities.”

Delgado appeared alongside eight state Democratic lawmakers at yesterday’s rally, demanding a special session and also the passage of New York for All, a bill aimed at protecting immigrants from increased enforcement actions under the Trump administration. Attendees held signs reading “Tax the Rich” and “Protect New Yorkers from the Federal Budget Scam.”

Why Won’t New York Lawmakers Call a Special Session to Address Trump’s Cuts?

Jie Jenny Zou

The legislature or governor can call a special session any time and for any purpose. The last one took place in 2022, just days before Christmas, when lawmakers convened to give themselves raises that made them the country’s highest paid state legislators with a base salary of $142,000.

Delgado challenged Hochul’s claim that the state cannot afford to backfill cuts, pointing to New York’s status as a leading economy by global standards.

“It’s a cop out,” Delgado told New York Focus. “Therefore, don’t do anything? Therefore, don’t try to mitigate any of the harm that’s coming? Therefore, let so many people that have to suffer, suffer? Is that the way the logic goes?”

At the rally, Delgado drew a connection to last year’s presidential election, in which New York saw the largest swing towards Trump of any state. “You know why? Because people don’t see the difference,” he said of the Democratic party’s messaging. “They don’t feel the impact. They hear the words, ‘affordability,’ but where is the action?”

Hochul’s office declined to comment on Delgado’s criticisms or specify whether she would back a special session. In a statement, the office wrote: “No state can backfill the devastating cuts coming out of Washington. While Republicans strip away funding and hike costs, Governor Hochul is laser focused on her affordability agenda and, unlike our Republican federal representatives, actually wants to make life easier for the people she serves.”

‘A Winning Political Message’

At least one local leader is urging Albany to reconvene, too. Ulster County Executive Jen Metzger supports a special session and wrote an op-ed last month urging the state to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations as a way to rebalance the scales in the wake of Trump’s megabill, which will deliver billions in tax relief for those groups.

“There seems to be this assumption in a lot of what I heard that costs are going to be pushed down to counties … and also that people are going to lose their benefits,” said Metzger. “Neither of those two things are necessarily the outcome or have to be the outcome.”

Her county, which is located in the Mid-Hudson Valley, is currently in the midst of a severe housing crisis. Close to a third of county residents are enrolled in Medicaid, and 18,000 households depend on SNAP. A good share of the county’s Medicaid recipients are under the state’s Essential Plan, which will be hit particularly hard by incoming federal cuts.

“There’s an opportunity to really lead on just principles of fairness and common decency, to just be the positive alternative model to what’s happening at the federal level,” Metzger said. “This is truly an opportunity to show bold political leadership and a vision that is truly about affordability. That is a winning political message.”

Marchers in lower Manhattan stage a "die-in" on March 15 to protest proposed cuts to Medicaid.

Medicaid Cutbacks Could Trigger Healthcare Crisis for Millions in New York

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Left-leaning groups like the Fiscal Policy Institute have raised concerns that leaving discussions around handling federal cuts to the state’s chaotic and opaque budget process next year will make severe service cuts more likely, as legislators race against the clock.

Carolyn Martinez-Class of Citizen Action of New York, one of the main groups behind the rally, said organizers have reached out to roughly 70 percent of state lawmakers to join their call for a special session. So far, they have received support from a little over 20 of the state’s 213 legislators.

Assemblymember Valdez said her colleagues’ reluctance to return to Albany is striking, considering that just a few months ago, lawmakers had all but assumed that a special session to deal with federal cuts was inevitable. “All of a sudden, now that we’re here, the political will has dissipated.”

“The best thing that should be done is that there should be a robust and transparent discussion now.”

—John Kaehny, Reinvent Albany

Valdez and Martinez-Class chalked up the waning interest to a combination of reelection strategy and confusing fiscal estimates from the state. “Many lawmakers are looking at this as an opportunity to bolster their own campaigns and believe if the crisis takes effect, then that’ll strengthen their chances against Republicans,” Martinez-Class said. “That is shortsighted and I don’t think it’s going to play out that way.”

Energy for a special session also seemed to dampen, Valdez said, after Hochul’s budget director conservatively pegged the federal funding loss at a manageable $750 million for the remainder of the state’s current fiscal year.

The budget office declined to provide Focus with a detailed breakdown of the July estimate, which appears to be missing several Medicaid line items and doesn’t currently factor in any changes to SNAP until the state’s next fiscal year, which starts in April.

John Kaehny of Reinvent Albany, which has long advocated for greater transparency in the state budget, agreed that many Democrats, including Hochul, seem to be banking on a reelection strategy that squarely places the blame for painful cuts on Republicans and the Trump administration. Lessening that pain, he said, could undercut that message.

Kaehny doesn’t think a special session is the only way for Albany to be transparent about how it handles declining federal support. Instead, he suggested a series of public hearings that could take place this year.

Stakeholders at the state and county level could lay out potential impacts and outline different scenarios based on various funding levels, providing the public with a better understanding of what Medicaid and SNAP could look like in the years to come, he said.

“The best thing that should be done is that there should be a robust and transparent discussion now. And it doesn’t have to mean the legislature is in session, that’s not required,” said Kaehny. “A dose of sunlight would help, but we’re afraid to even go there.”