SCHUMER REVEALS: PRESIDENT’S BUDGET BLUEPRINT A BOON FOR UPSTATE NEW YORK; SENATOR HIGHLIGHTS MAJOR INVESTMENTS FOR NEW YORK FAMILIES, WORKERS, AND UPSTATE COMMUNITIES

President Biden’s Proposed Budget Will Improve Lives In Every Corner Of The Empire State – Making Major Investments In Programs Essential To Upstate, All While Cutting The Deficit By Nearly $3 Trillion Over 10 Years 

Senator Details What Happens Next With The Budget As He Rallies To Ensure Upstate Is Not Left Out

 Schumer: Budget Proposal Was Created With Upstate Families And Workers In Mind

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer today revealed how the President’s budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2024 will help boost funding for a number of key programs for Upstate New York. The senator said he is pushing for bipartisan support for the President’s proposal, breaking down the positive impacts it will have for families and workers across the Empire State.

Specifically, Schumer highlighted how the budget would protect and strengthen Medicare and Social Security, lower prescription drug costs, boost working families, invest in manufacturing, rebuild Main Streets and infrastructure, and train workers for good-paying jobs, all while reducing the deficit by nearly $3 trillion over 10 years and uplifting dozens of key programs that support Upstate New Yorkers.

“President Biden’s budget blueprint is a bold vision that shows how we can invest in communities like those in Upstate New York, while lowering the deficit, and helping families and workers. From increasing funding for Community Development Block Grants to rebuilding Main Streets, extending the $35 insulin cap to all Americans and strengthening Social Security and Medicare, and boosting federal support to bring manufacturing back to America, this budget puts Upstate communities that rely on these programs first,” said Senator Schumer. “I will do everything in my power to bolster bipartisan support for these vital investments, which will improve lives in every corner of the Empire State from Buffalo to Albany and Watertown, to the Southern Tier and Hudson Valley.”

Listed below are some of the most significant investments proposed in President Biden’s budget, that would benefit communities across New York:

COMMUNITY INVESTMENTS & HELPING FAMILIES:

• Community Development Block Grants: The administration’s budget proposal includes an increase of $100 million above FY23 levels to $3.4 billion for the Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), a cornerstone of affordable housing, economic development, and community revitalization. These vital funds are distributed throughout all of Upstate New York to development projects and vital services to seniors and working families. CDBG is a signature program for Upstate communities to create jobs, provide decent housing, and spur economic development and small business opportunities.
• Child Care Entitlement to States: Requests $400 billion over 10 years in new mandatory funding to expand access to quality, affordable child care to working families. An estimated 16 million more young children would be eligible for child care subsidies under this proposal. The subsidies would be available to families with children under the age of 5 earning up to $200,000 per year, and would ensure that the lowest income families pay nothing and most families will pay no more than $10 a day per child. This would lead to $400 in monthly savings for a median income family with one child.
• Child Care and Development Block Grant: Proposing $9 billion, an increase of nearly $1B from FY23 enacted levels.  This block grant will provide child care assistance for low-income families and critical funding to child care providers in order to increase access to high-quality affordable child care. This budget increase will serve an estimated 2 million children. These funds are particularly critical for low-income families living in child care deserts in upstate New York who are desperately trying to access child care. On a monthly basis, New York is able to serve over 52,000 families through these funds.  
• Head Start: Proposes $13.1 billion for Head Start, an increase of  $1.1 billion over the FY23 enacted levels. This includes $400 million dedicated to raising pay for Head Start teachers and staff, and an additional $440 million for cost of living adjustments. These investments will serve an estimated 813,573 children through 1,600 local Head Start agencies across the country. Approximately 35,000 children participate in Head Start in New York.

SOCIAL SECURITY:  President Biden’s budget commits to protecting and strengthening Social Security and opposes any attempt to cut Social Security benefits for any current or future recipients.

Deficit Reduction:

The President’s Budget improves the fiscal outlook by reducing the deficit by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade. It accomplishes this through commonsense measures to make the ultra-wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share, and ending wasteful spending on Big Pharma, Big Oil, and other special interests. Some of these measures include:

• Proposing a Minimum Tax on Billionaires. The budget would end the ability of the ultra-wealthy to use loopholes to determine how much tax they want to pay and when they want to pay it, imposing a 25% minimum tax on the wealthiest 0.01% of Americans and ensuring billionaires don’t pay a lower tax rate than nurses and firefighters.
• Expanding Medicare’s Ability to Negotiate Drug Prices. The Inflation Reduction Act that Senator Schumer led to passage finally gave Medicare the power to negotiate with drug companies on the high prices they charge for prescription drugs, and the Budget builds on that progress. Through increasing the number of drugs Medicare can select for negotiation and bringing more drugs into the negotiation process sooner, the feds are expected to save nearly $160 billion, all while simultaneously helping seniors with lower drug costs.
• Repealing the 2017 Trump Tax Cuts for the Wealthy and Giveaways to Large Corporations. The 2017 Trump tax law slashed tax rates for the biggest multinational corporations and gave an average tax cut of nearly $200,000 for the top 0.1%. The budget would roll back the tax cuts for those making more than $400,000 per year and shut down loopholes that let corporations shift profits overseas.

HEALTH CARE:

• Extends $35 insulin cap to all people, not just those on Medicare: Democrats passed historic drug pricing reforms in the IRA, including a $35/month cap on patient out-of-pocket costs for insulin in the Medicare program. President Biden’s budget calls for this cap to be extended to all commercial markets, which would improve affordability for New York’s 1.5 million adults with diabetes.
• Proposes nearly $1 billion increase in funding for NIH – NY is one of biggest NIH dollar recipients in the country: In FY22, the last full fiscal year, New York received over 9.2% of the $36.99 billion in total NIH funding, supporting over 42,000 jobs and over $8.52 billion in economic activity according to some estimates (link) . A $1 billion increase in funding would mean an estimated $92.8 million in additional research funding, leading to more job growth and innovation in the state.
• Nearly doubles funding for mental health programs and state grants, proposes additional $1.3 billion for addiction treatment programs: In 2023, New York received over $58.5 million from the Community Mental Health Block grant and $28.6 million from the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant. In addition to programmatic investments that would help millions of New Yorkers access better mental and behavioral health care, improve the workforce for these critical areas and support nationwide programs such as the new 9-8-8 National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, the President’s Budget would increase these block grants to New York by $37.4 million for mental health and $9.97 million for substance abuse prevention.
• Invests $8 billion in expand Medicare benefits, such as preventing diabetes, expanding access to behavioral health services and community health workers, improving the quality and safety of long-term care services, and advancing equity: these benefit expansions would help increase care for New York’s 3.6 million Medicare beneficiaries who struggle with chronic conditions like diabetes, accessing care to treat their substance abuse disorders and long-term care needs and more.

HEATING ASSISTANCE PROGRAMS:

• The budget provides $4.1 billion, a $111 million increase from the 2023 enacted level, for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). This program assists households and seniors, particularly those with fixed, lower incomes, by providing monthly benefits to offset the cost of more efficient heating units in the winter, as well as weatherization. Individuals can also receive assistance with their utility bills. Over 700,000 households across Upstate New York received assistance from this program in the past fiscal year.

EDUCATION:

• Pell Grants: Increasing the Pell grant by $820, setting the maximum Pell award to $8,215 for 2024-2025. (FY23 had an increase of $500). Lays out plan to double award by 2029
  •  In 2021, a total of 382,253 New Yorkers received Pell grants at an average of $4,722 per award.  New York ranked fourth among states with the most amount of Pell grant recipients in the country.

TRANSPORTATION & INFRASTRUCTURE:

• Preserves Essential Air Service: The budget includes $348 million in discretionary funding for the essential air service program.  This program was created to continue air service to communities that had received federally mandated air service prior to deregulation of commercial aviation in 1978.  It currently provides subsidies to air carriers serving small communities that meet certain criteria including Watertown, Ogdensburg, Massena, Plattsburgh, and Saranac Lake.
• More Funding for Amtrak: The administration’s budget proposal includes $1.2 billion for the Northeast Corridor and $1.8 billion for the National Network—a net increase of $612 million. The increase will benefit popular Upstate routes like the Lakeshore Limited, Adirondack, Maple Leaf, and Ethan Allen.
• More funding for safer railroad intersections: The budget proposes adding $245 million for the Railroad Crossing Elimination Program, in addition to the $600 million available through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The new program eliminates railway-roadway intersections and replaces them with bridges, tunnels, or other safer intersection designs. 
• Funding for Trail Networks and Long Distance Trails: The budget repurposes $60 million in underutilized funds to support the new Active Transportation Infrastructure Investment Program created in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. This program is designed to link up existing, scattered walking and biking paths throughout a city into one, seamless network, allowing more people who can’t or don’t drive a car to have safer, more accessible mobility. The program can also help build long-distance trails—like the Erie Canalway Trail—which not only provide transportation for locals but also attract recreation-based tourism, generating hundreds of millions in economic activity and more jobs. 
•  St. Lawrence Seaway: The budget request includes $40.29 million, an increase of nearly $1.8 million from last year to fund two programs – Seaway Operations and Maintenance ($23.99 million) and Seaway Infrastructure ($16.30 million). The Seaway Infrastructure Program (SIP) addresses the needs of the organization’s infrastructure assets in Massena, N.Y., which include vessel locks, buildings and grounds, a vehicular bridge and tunnel, roadways, utilities, tugboats, and equipment. The Seaway is critical to commerce and jobs along the Great Lakes, linking the region with global markets, and directly employees hundreds of people within the North Country.
• Army Corps of Engineers: The proposal includes $7.4 billion for the Corps of Engineers. It also funds specific projects in New York, including:
  • $3 million to continue the Great Lakes Coastal Resiliency Study, to evaluate the impacts of climate change on water levels, waves, and ice conditions, and develop a comprehensive plan to evaluate how best to protect the communities on the shores of the eight great lakes states.

REBUILD MANUFACTURING AND CONNECTING WORKERS TO GOOD-PAYING JOBSECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT:

• National Science Foundation: The budget includes a historic $11.3 billion for the National Science Foundation, $1.43 billion above FY23. This builds on the largest dollar increase for NSF in history that Schumer secured last year as outlined in his CHIPS And Science Act.  Schumer said that Upstate universities and community colleges will be able to utilize this new investment for workforce training, including technical training programs key to supporting the emerging semiconductor industry and other manufacturing industries in Upstate NY with the arrival of major projects like Micron in Central New York, Wolfspeed at the Marcy Nanocenter, and Edwards Vacuum at STAMP, along with expansion of GlobalFoundries, new investment from onsemi in the Hudson Valley, and other manufacturing companies in the chip and clean energy industries, all of which will require a large workforce pool to succeed. This surge of funding will also be important to preparing underrepresented populations for these good-paying jobs, and to translating more research at the state’s universities and labs into new businesses. 
• Regional Technology and Innovation Hub (“Tech Hubs”) Program: The budget includes over $4 billion, about $3.5B above FY23, to begin the implement of the regional technology hubs created by Schumer’s CHIPS and Science Bill, focusing on economic development, job creation, and expanding U.S. innovation capacity in regions like Upstate New York. This will build up major technology hubs across the country to lead in research, manufacturing, and entrepreneurship in key industries, with places like Upstate NY in mind, and this funding represents a major boost to making this program a reality and allowing Upstate communities to compete for major federal investment to bring manufacturing back to America.
• Manufacturing Extension Program: The Budget includes $277 million, a $102 million increase over the 2023 enacted level, for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, a public-private partnership with centers that offers advisory services to an increasingly diverse set of small and medium enterprises so they can thrive in the global economy. NYS has several MEP centers that benefit across each region.
• Appalachian Regional Commission: The budget includes $235 million, an increase of $35 million from last year, for the ARC to support economic revitalization and infrastructure development across Appalachia, including 14 counties in Upstate New York.
• Northern Border Regional Commission: The budget includes $40 million for the NBRC to support economic revitalization and infrastructure development across the northern border region, including 28 counties in Upstate New York.
• Great Lakes Authority: The budget includes $5 million to stand up the Great Lakes Authority, which Schumer successfully fought to authorize the creation of at the end of last year. Modeled after the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Great Lakes Authority will support economic growth and community development in the Great Lakes region, including Upstate counties in Western New York, the Rochester-Finger Lakes, Southern Tier, and North Country regions.
• Increases Access to Capital for Small Businesses: The budget supports historic lending levels across the Small Business Administration’s 7(a), 504, Small Business Investment Company (SBIC), and Microloan programs.  The nearly $58 billion in lending provided in the budget would address the need for greater access to affordable capital, particularly in underserved communities, including rural areas in Upstate New York.  Increasing the authorized lending level for the SBIC program by 20 percent to $6 billion would significantly expand the availability of venture capital funding for small businesses to help build Upstate New York’s innovation economy, in  combination with the significant investments in R&D and manufacturing from Schumer’s CHIPS and Science Bill.

LAW ENFORCEMENT & OPIOID ABUSE PREVENTION:

• Implement the historic Bipartisan Safer Communities Act: The budget proposal includes $280 million in supplemental funding for FY24, to implement major provisions from the historic bipartisan gun safety legislation passed last year. Some of this funding includes:

• • $50 million in supplemental funding for Community Violence Intervention (CVI). The budget calls for $200 million in funding in all for CVIs, a $150 million increase over FY23. This program is a first of its kind grant program aimed at combating gun violence at its root by increasing community trust, identifying those at the highest risk of being affected by gun violence and working to reduce violence through evidence based intervention.
  • $150 million for Byrne State Crisis Intervention Program to implement state crisis intervention court proceedings and related programs or initiatives, including, but not limited to, extreme risk protection order programs that work to keep guns out of the hands of those who pose a threat to themselves or others.
  • $51 million to the FBI to enhance background checks.

• COPS Programs: A historic 66 percent increase to $537 million for the Community Oriented Policing Service (COPS) program to support the hiring of law enforcement and advance public safety through the practice of community policing.
• $10.4 billion in funding for domestic law enforcement, international, prevention, harm reduction, treatment, and recovery efforts.

AGRICULTURE:

• Dairy Business Innovation Centers: The budget includes $25 million for Dairy Business Innovation Centers. Funding is split between four centers serving different regions of the country. These centers provide direct technical assistance and make sub-grants to dairy farmers and businesses across their designated region. New York dairies have received assistance through these centers for processing expansion and innovation, marketing and branding, packaging, food safety, and more.
• Acer Access and Development: The budget included $8 million for the Acer Access and Development program, which provides grants for education, research, sustainability, and marketing activities that promote the domestic maple syrup industry and help support New York State’s vibrant maple industry and the state’s over 2,000 maple sugar makers.

ENVIROMENT:

• Great Lakes Restoration Initiative: The budget includes $42 million for the GLRI to support conservation efforts across the Great Lakes. This funding will be used to improve water quality, reduce pollutants, restore and protect wildlife habitats, and mitigate the impacts of climate change. The GLRI has funded the clean-up efforts at the Buffalo and Niagara Rivers, efforts to improve Lake Sturgeon populations, the restoration of Braddock Bay in the Town of Greece, and the conservation work of NY institutions like Hobart and William Smith College, Clarkson University, SUNY Fredonia and SUNY Oswego.

ENERGY:

• Naval Reactors: The budget includes $1.964 billion for naval reactors. This funding supports the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory which operates the Kenneth B. Kesselring site in West Milton, NY. Kesselring is home to the two remaining operating nuclear-powered prototypes, which provide hands-on technical training to all enlisted and officer propulsion plant operators who operate the 96 nuclear reactors that provide propulsion to the aircraft carriers and submarines operated in the US Navy fleet around the world.

BROADBAND:

• National Telecommunications and Information Administration: The budget nearly doubles the funding for the NTIA from $62 million to $110 million. This will be key as the agency begins the historic rollout of funding passed in the bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s billions to expand access to affordable high-speed internet in places like Upstate New York and across America.

DISASTER RESPONSE & PREPAREDNESS:

• Disaster Relief Fund (DRF): The budget provides over $20 billion for the DRF, which funds all of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) non-grant assistance following a disaster. The DRF includes a $1 billion set aside for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) Program. The BRIC program provides states, local governments, and tribes assistance for pre-disaster mitigation and resilience projects.
• Emergency Management Performance Grants (EMPG): The budget includes $355 million for EMPG. These grants support state, local, and tribal emergency preparedness systems so they can be prepared for all hazards. This funding helps pay for local emergency managers, supporting 5,000 emergency managers across the nation.

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