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New York, NY — Today, New York City Council Aging Committee Chair Crystal Hudson — alongside members of the Aging Committee and older adult providers & advocates — sent a letter to NYC Aging Commissioner Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez requesting her assistance in empaneling a group of experts to determine how New York City can protect its 1.5 million older adults from recent programmatic and budget cuts from the Trump Administration.
In the letter, Hudson and the other signatories urge Commissioner Cortés-Vázquez to convene a quarterly roundtable meeting with elected officials, older adult service provides & advocates, and aging staff from NYC Aging, the New York State Office for the Aging, and city and state budget officials to discuss recent programmatic and budget cuts and determine how the city and state can continue to serve older adults, many of whom are on fixed incomes and could see a loss of insurance coverage, food access, heating & cooling services, and more as a result of the Trump administration’s actions.
Hudson wrote the letter after the Trump administration announced more than $1 trillion in funding cuts for programs that older adults rely on, including Medicaid, SNAP, HEAP, and AmeriCorps in recent months. The letter’s signatories include Council Members Lynn Schulman, Linda Lee, and Chris Banks as well as Michael Adams (CEO, SAGE), Catherine Chen (Executive Director, Asian American Federation), Beth Shapiro (CEO, Citymeals on Wheels), Kevin Kiprovski (Director of Public Policy, LiveOn NY), Selfhelp Community Services, and United Neighborhood Houses.
NYC Aging has proven a leader on intergovernmental coordination under Commissioner Cortés-Vázquez, convening the Cabinet for Older New Yorkers (codified under Local Law 64 of 2024 by Council Member Hudson), a first-of-its-kind interagency effort to ensure an age-inclusive New York City. A full report detailing the cabinet’s actions was recently published and is available here. The letter also calls on the Commissioner to incorporate a discussion of these cuts into upcoming Cabinet for Older New York meetings and share the minutes from those discussions publicly.
The letter comes one day after Council Member Hudson published an op-ed in the New York Daily News that mirrored this call for collaboration.
The full text of the letter is as follows:
September 22, 2025
Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez
Commissioner, NYC Aging
2 Lafayette Street
New York, NY 10007
Re: Protecting NYC Older Adults Against the Trump Administration
Commissioner Cortés-Vázquez,
As members of the New York City Council Committee on Aging as well as advocates and providers of older adult services that are contracted by NYC Aging, we write to you today to request your assistance in empaneling expert groups to determine how New York City can protect our 1.5 million older adults from ongoing program and budget cuts from the Trump administration.
As you know, the Trump administration has gutted our nation’s social safety net in recent months in a manner that will prove detrimental to the 61.2 million older adults across the nation. The Trump administration is cutting billions of dollars in programs that serve older New Yorkers. Public Law 119-21, colloquially known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, has slashed more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). These cuts are estimated to cost 1.5 million New Yorkers their health insurance and 1 million New Yorkers access to food as a result of $15 billion in cuts. Additionally, the federal government has refused to release $410 million in approved funding for the Home Energy Assistance Program (HEAP), including an estimated $36 million for New York, and has cut $400 million in funding for AmeriCorps, which runs the popular Silver Corps volunteer program for older adults.
We do not need to explain to you the importance of strong public assistance programs in ensuring older adults — many of whom live on fixed incomes and rely on these programs to meet basic needs — can age in place in the city they have long called home, as you’ve been a strong partner in this work. But these cuts will reverberate across our city’s social welfare system. Medicaid cuts will force more older adults to seek care at the city’s free public health facilities. SNAP cuts will drive more older adults to Older Adult Centers for free, congregate meals. And HEAP cuts will mean more reliance on heating or cooling centers during periods of extreme weather.
As such, we request your leadership in working with all relevant stakeholders to monitor these developments and proactively plan to ensure our city’s older adults maintain the benefits they need to remain in our city. Specifically, we request that you add a discussion about this matter to the agenda for the next meeting of the Cabinet for Older New Yorkers and follow-up on the discussion at subsequent meetings while these cuts remain in place. Agency representatives will be best suited to understand the on-the-ground impact of these cuts and can help identify resource and funding gaps in real time. We also request that you provide meeting minutes or a formal read-out of these discussions to our offices in real time so that we can coordinate with you on solutions.
Additionally, we request that you convene a quarterly roundtable meeting with elected officials (including members of the Committees on Aging in the New York City Council, New York State Senate, and New York State Assembly), older adult service providers & advocates, and agency staff from NYC Aging, the New York State Office for the Aging, and city & state budget offices. Such a roundtable would ensure the seamless sharing of information, coordination across all levels of government, and collective exploration of solutions to safeguard continuity of programming and secure critical funding. The first roundtable should be scheduled for before the end of this calendar year.
During your tenure as NYC Aging Commissioner, you have excelled at strengthening intergovernmental relations and coordinating a robust government response among various agencies and officials. Now is the time to leverage this expertise to push back against the Trump administration’s recent attacks on older New Yorkers.
Thank you for your consideration and your tireless support for our city’s aging residents. We look forward to hearing from you and continuing our partnership. Our city’s older adults need us now more than ever.
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