Since April, New York’s state-funded home care program has been in upheaval. That month, the $9 billion program was taken over by the company Public Partnerships, LLC (PPL), which became responsible for managing the care of the hundreds of thousands of elderly and disabled New Yorkers who use it.

Home care workers and patients have consistently struggled to navigate PPL’s bureaucracy, reporting unreturned calls, missed paychecks, malfunctioning software, and other issues. Thousands of people have left the program entirely.

On Thursday, New York lawmakers held a hearing trying to get to the bottom of the chaos.

They did not get the answers they were looking for. Over the course of more than four hours, the main witnesses at the hearing spent most of their time dodging or declining to answer questions from the dozen assembled state senators.

“We hardly got any information,” said Senator James Skoufis, who chairs the Investigations Committee. “80 percent of it was a complete waste of our time.”

On Tuesday, the Legal Aid Society asked a judge for a second time to compel the state prison agency to curtail its practice of keeping incarcerated people confined to their cells and dorms for upward of 20 hours a day — or else this time take the extraordinary step of holding the prison agency in contempt. New York state prisons have subjected thousands to such conditions for six months, including during extreme summer heat; the motion alleges that the prison agency hasn’t fulfilled the legal requirements to justify it.

Mayor Adams has surpassed each of his predecessors individually in terms of new and preserved affordable housing units, but he has not exceeded their combined total — as he said he did during a press event in July.

A notable New York politico has filed hundreds of lawsuits on behalf of a doctor repeatedly accused of being a key cog in a sprawling auto insurance fraud ring, according to records reviewed by New York Focus.

Between May 2024 and July 2025, Frank Seddio, Brooklyn’s Democratic commissioner on the New York City Board of Elections, filed more than 500 “no-fault” auto insurance lawsuits on behalf of a Brooklyn-based physician. The cases were filed under the state law meant to expedite drivers’ reimbursements for medical expenses stemming from accidents — regardless of who is at fault.

Before becoming Seddio’s client, Dr. Jules F. Parisien had been accused across multiple lawsuits of participating in schemes to obtain money from insurance companies by submitting thousands of fraudulent, unlawful, and non-reimbursable claims for purported medical services.

Seddio is a former state assemblymember, Surrogate’s Court judge, and chair of the Brooklyn Democratic Party whose recent campaign spending as a Brooklyn Democratic Party district leader has faced media scrutiny. He has not been charged with any wrongdoing and did not respond to questions about how he became involved with filing the cases.

Progressive lawmakers rallied in lower Manhattan 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.