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The City of San Antonio will soon launch a regional tabletop exercise with regional partners to game out how they might respond to potential major federal funding cuts.
The White House has prioritized cuts to federal spending, and has singled out specific programs like Head Start, the Community Development Block Grant, and more for deep cuts or eliminations.
Approximately $153 million of the city’s current $4 billion budget, just shy of 4%, comes from federal grants. Some of that money is used to fund 663 city staff positions across the city government, from the San Antonio Police Department to the Neighborhood and Housing Services Department and the Metropolitan Health District.
Most federal grant-funded roles would be eliminated if funding was lost. However, SAPD officers funded through Department of Justice grants would be required to be retained even if those grants were cut.
The city’s budget director Justina Tate told the city council on Wednesday that they need to plan for what these unprecedented spending cuts could do.
“We need to prepare for the impact of these reductions to the city's budget, as well as understanding the impacts to the community partners and vulnerable populations,” Tate said. “This is now more critical, as the city's revenues have slowed, creating fiscal stress on the city's budget.”
The city was already bracing for a $150 million deficit in 2027, and that was without any federal cuts.
The Department of Human Services receives the largest portion of federal funding, followed by the airport, Metro Health, and the Neighborhood and Housing Services Department.
There are 191 positions in DHS and 294 positions in Metro Health that are funded by federal grants.
Child and youth services receive more federal support than any other city service, taking a full third of the city’s entire federal grant allocation; $35 million of that goes to Head Start.
“I'm really worried,” District 1 Councilmember Sukh Kaur said. “I think Head Start is a great tool for our community. I have very little hope that it will be continued, and so I don't know whether or not that's something that we should maybe discuss in the Educational Opportunities Committee in terms of how do we fill in that gap there?”
Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones, who spearheaded the tabletop effort, said the council should be realistic about what they’re facing over the next year.
“This news is not going to get better as time moves on,” Jones said. “So the best thing we can do to help ourselves is to reduce the uncertainty, ask the questions, check our assumptions, and then already be very thoughtful about (this) as we're going through each of these briefings, who gets funding, who may not get funding.”
City Manager Erik Walsh said despite the importance of the tabletop, the council and public shouldn’t expect many answers to come out of it.
“Efforts like this are designed to stress, break, generate more questions, identify bigger gaps, and it's really important for the organization to know about those things,” Walsh said.
The city will conduct the tabletop exercise in early December with regional stakeholders from school districts, hospital systems, local government agencies, and more.
