And just backtracking a little bit, I know this is going to sound really cheesy of me to say, but it really warms my heart that there's an entire testimony just dedicated to the mental health programs because I know that it usually gets lumped in with the larger health initiatives which I don't have anything against.

I love the public health initiatives as well and they're super important, but especially in a time where we're dealing with so much around mental health, intersectionality between criminal justice and mental health, homelessness, opioid issues, I just want to say that this is really encouraging to see especially with all the data and percentages and numbers broken down, so thank you for providing that and thank you to our council finance team for coming up with this idea separate it out, so thank you Chima and Florentine for that.

So I just wanted to start off by saying that, and then just going right back into your testimony, so I know that in here, first of all, I think we're all concerned about the potential sort of bleak picture that could be coming down the pipeline with federal cuts and of course we're going to try to do everything we can to make sure that the funding is as minimal as possible in terms of the impact of the cuts and we'll you know obviously on the council side we'll try to help advocate that as much as possible, but I know that in terms of the federal funding cuts, most of it as you mentioned is going to be impacting the state budget more so than the city when it comes to the OASIS and OMH impacts, but you know granted that we're all sort of living in New York City as a whole and a lot of the providers that get city funding also get state funding, how do you see this impacting overall services in the city in terms of who's not getting services or support that they need?

Thank you for the question.

It's certainly something that we're digging into very deeply so that we can both prepare and try to plan as much as possible to mitigate any potential cuts.

Out of the $775,000,000 or so in the mental hygiene part of our overall budget, about 30,000,000 of it is federal.

So it is a small, a relatively small amount.

It's not to say that it's not critical or important, but as described, yes we are very concerned with the mental health funding for the state programs at OASAS and the Office of Mental Health.

That being said, it is again pretty difficult to predict exactly what cuts may come when, but the threats remain both to funding as well as to the staff at the HHS agencies that have already been cut, and also to concerns again about the the timeliness of either recertifications of our federal grants or the state's federal grants and timeliness of payments for existing grants.

We still consider those grants to be an agreement between the federal government and either the state of New York or the city of New York to fund critical public health activities.

And so there of course would be a number of different actions that could happen if there were further cuts to federal funding for mental health programming.

And I think it's it's I know I'm preaching to the choir especially a lot of the advocates in the room and the community leaders know this already, but you know it's it's just so opposite because I think what's gonna happen and what we will see maybe a few years down the line is that if we keep disinvesting in a lot of these programs we're going to have to pay for it more later.

So even though it's technically to the government maybe a savings on paper, we're going to have to end up having to probably pay more money to get those folks back into care and actually provide for their more severe, potentially severe illnesses.

But again I know I'm preaching to the choir.

Can I just make one more comment on that?

I do think you're raising the point about the power of access to care and preventive care as well and particularly because Medicaid is such a huge part of what funds all of our behavioral health services and knowing that if more people are to lose Medicaid then more people again are going to lose access to the ongoing care that would keep them healthier out of the hospital, out of crisis, and also certainly for that same population of folks with behavioral health concerns also making sure that they have their preventive care, screening for cancer, management of chronic diseases.

All of those things are what we would say of course maintain the health of an individual and to lose that course would lead to very concerning downstream health effects.

Definitely.