ALBANY, NY — Are New York’s legislators making the sausage the wrong way?

When it comes to the $268 billion state budget, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie thinks the answer is yes. On Thursday, May 7, shortly after Governor Kathy Hochul announced a deal on the budget, Heastie emerged from his office to tell reporters that there was no deal, and that he’s fed up with Hochul’s practice of inserting most of her legislative agenda for the year—including numerous items that have little to do with spending—into the state’s budget.

“I’m never doing this again. Budgets are supposed to be about money, not policy,” Heastie said.

Could New York change how it makes its budget? This question has quickly escalated from a relatively fringe demand to a central issue in ongoing negotiations.

“There’s something fundamentally wrong with this process,” Heastie said.

But whether he or other lawmakers will take action to change it isn’t clear.

E.J. McMahon, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and longtime observer of New York’s government, said that while Heastie has long complained about the budget process, he hasn’t yet thrown his muscle behind a solution. 

“When the governor submits her proposal, he could say: ‘Governor, we’re not going to act on or consider anything that is not directly related to the budget,’” McMahon said.

But it’s dangerous for lawmakers to openly challenge the governor, since she can veto their bills, or withhold funding from their districts.

“In this conflict, the governor has nuclear weapons,” said former Assemblymember Richard Gottfried. “The legislature has a lot less.”

Even so, on May 7, Heastie appeared to be considering that step. He told reporters that he would refuse to present any new policy matters to his members in closed-door conferences until he had a clearer sense of the financial picture.

Rich Azzopardi, who served as a senior aide to former Governor Andrew Cuomo and worked in the state Senate, said that the current system actually equalizes power between the governor and legislature. 

“As soon as the budget’s done, the legislature gets the upper hand,” he said “So the governor thinks, ‘I have a much better shot at getting my agenda passed if it’s in the budget.’”

For years, lawmakers have talked about passing a constitutional amendment that would give them power to amend items in the budget—a power that belongs only to the governor—instead of just removing them.

“If you think the founders of the country had a good idea when they created a balance of powers between the legislative and executive, this amendment would get us back to that,” said Gottfried, who sponsored the measure when he was in the legislature.

Changes to the state constitution need to pass the legislature twice and then be approved by voters statewide in a November election. A proposed amendment to the state’s budget process failed by a wide margin in 2005. 

A spokesperson for Hochul declined to comment on Heastie’s criticism or the talk about reducing the governor’s powers.

Since she became governor in 2021, negotiations over Hochul’s policy proposals have repeatedly delayed the passage of budgets.

New York’s legislature goes home for the year in June, and the delays take much of the time that the legislature would otherwise have to debate and pass laws. This year, by the time the budget passes, there will be fewer than 20 days of legislative session remaining for the year.

“Albany culture has devolved to a point where it is difficult to get hard policy work done without using the budget as a cudgel,” said Ana Champeny, vice president of the think tank Citizens Budget Commission. “Policy debates can now jump to the front of the line and delay discussion of fiscal issues. Unfortunately, the end result is that both the budget and policy get short shrift.”

Another issue with this system, according to the watchdog group Reinvent Albany, is that it increases secrecy in government, since, unlike the legislative session, budget negotiations happen behind closed doors.

“Because there are bill sponsors and a committee process (however imperfect) in the ‘regular’ session, there are more people telling stakeholder groups and journalists what is going on,” the group said in a statement.

Last month, a small group of lawmakers held a press conference over Zoom where they criticized what they see as Hochul’s outsized power. One of those lawmakers, Manhattan Assemblymember Tony Simone, said that he and some colleagues have had early discussions about amending the constitution to reduce the governor’s powers, or calling a special session in the fall to give lawmakers more time to pass bills.

“The budget process is broken,” Simone told New York Focus.

Hudson Valley Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha echoed those criticisms, arguing that Hochul has weaponized premature agreement announcements for previous budget sessions.

“The Governor is abusing the budget process, which desperately needs to change, but that takes a constitutional amendment, which means the legislature needs to pass a law twice and the voters need to approve it on the ballot,” Shrestha said in a statement.

Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins did not immediately comment on the disagreement. Stewart-Cousins told reporters that there were “conceptual agreements” on some major policies but no comprehensive deal.

This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter at nysfocus.com.