Last year, 278 New Yorkers died waiting for a kidney transplant. In recent years, the toll has been as high as 533. The deaths are a sad but constant presence in a transplant system where the waiting list is roughly six times longer than the list of donors.

A measure in Governor Kathy Hochul’s budget proposal, released last week, aims to boost donations by offering a tax break of up to $10,000 to reimburse donors for the costs associated with their lifesaving gift.

Most people can donate one of their kidneys with low medical risk, but the cost can be a significant barrier. In addition to the procedure itself, donors must take several weeks off work during recovery. No other state has such a reimbursement program for donors, but similar programs in other countries have significantly increased donation rates. Hochul’s proposal could save dozens of lives a year, at a very small cost to the state.

It also wouldn’t be necessary if New York state’s Department of Health had implemented a 2022 law meant to achieve the same goal.

New York student test scores in math and reading have largely stagnated since the pandemic, according to new data released Wednesday.

The National Center for Education Statistics tracks the data among fourth and eighth graders at public schools nationwide and publishes the results every two years. New York hasn’t improved much since the last round of data was released, and its students’ scores are largely consistent with the national average, the data show.

Statewide, fourth grade math scores made moderate gains, and some subgroups — like English language learners, students with disabilities, and economically disadvantaged students — made slight improvements. However, math and reading scores for those groups have largely been on the decline in New York over the last two decades.

This week's Reporters' Notebook has stories about a prominent New York lobbying firm — Patrick B. Jenkins and Associates — racking up fines; a claim by Governor Kathy Hochul that an alternative to cap and invest would be a faster injection of cash (not entirely true); and details about the governor's two proposed updates to Foundation Aid, the complicated formula used to allocate most of New York’s state education funding.

Donald Trump wasn’t kidding.

He told supporters on the campaign trail that he would halt offshore wind projects on “day one” of his second term. On Monday, the new president issued an executive order doing just that.

The order suspended new federal leases, permits, and other approvals for wind projects, and targeted the large offshore installations that the federal government has the most authority over. The move could throw a major wrench in New York’s climate agenda, since the state — like many of its East Coast peers — is counting on the projects to meet its climate targets.

“Without offshore wind, we will not reach our targets,” said Rob Freudenberg, vice president for energy and environment at the Regional Plan Association.

New York’s climate law demands that the state have 70 percent renewable electricity by 2030 and 9 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035. Today, the state has one offshore wind farm supplying 132 megawatts to the grid — about 1.5 percent of the 2035 target. New York is counting on building roughly five larger projects off Long Island by the early 2030s to meet its goals.

Only two of those wind farms are even close to planting a turbine at sea.