Last month, City Comptroller Scott Stringer said the Big Apple is set to lose up to $6 billion in tax revenue due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

That led de Blasio to detail $1.3 billion in proposed budget cuts, carving out funds he had initially planned for education, social services, benefit programs and even transportation.

“There isn’t real cutting being done,” argued Maria Doulis, a vice president with the Citizens Budget Commission. “The amount is small relative to what they need to do. Mr. Mayor, what else you got?”

City Hall spokeswoman Laura Feyer, pointing to the unprecedented number of unemployment claims since the city became the epicenter of the pandemic, said more trims are in store as the mayor plans to release his revamped executive budget on April 23.

When you add in the old projects and the new ones, the MTA's capital plan is closer to $70 billion, said Andrew Rein of the Citizens Budget Commission.

These old projects take precedence over new plans, creating both headaches and confusion for city planners trying to set funding priorities.

Looming over everything is the debt the MTA holds.

The the transit administration pays a dollar in interest on its loans for every six dollars it takes in, said Danny Pearlstein of the Riders Alliance.

"They're in a really fiscally significant challenging position," Rein said. "They're bleeding money on a daily basis."

Transportation experts almost uniformly agree that the MTA must prioritize essential repairs, such as signals and switch replacement

"There will be money," Rein said. "Maybe not the $70 billion, but there will be money to focus on the state of good repair."

The agency must not let a drop in service become a reason riders consider alternatives, transit experts warn.

"If the service quality declines, then riders will leave the system," Rein said. "Then you enter that budgeting death spiral."

On Tuesday, as a first step to dealing with the current economic crisis, City Hall rolled out a $1.3 billion budget cut. The majority of these cuts come from education and health and social services, amounting to $264 million and $256 million, respectively.

However, Maria Doulis of the nonprofit Citizens Budget Commission says that these budget cuts will not be enough to address the city’s deficit.

Meanwhile, the actions to reduce spending can charitably be described as modest. The state moved to delay a planned 2% pay raise for employees and Mayor Bill de Blasio is scaling back the expansion of Pre-K for three years, ending a summer youth jobs program while raising the possibility of long-term borrowing.

“The city needs to pare back to essential services that protect New Yorkers and it needs a bold effort to improve efficiency in programs large and small,” said Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission. “Without first doing this, any discussion of alleviating fiscal stress by long-term borrowing, which makes future New Yorkers pay today's bills, is premature.”

And, despite the mayor’s answer, advocates and budget analysts suggested that budget adjustments do indeed exist to set priorities and send signals.

“This process is supposed to force a commissioner to be very clear and strict in setting priorities,” said Maria Doulis, vice president of the Citizens Budget Commission. “You have to be very clear about what is most critical to the mission of your agency and what you’re willing to reduce or go without.”

“It’s a very small amount of money in the context of multi-year negative financial impacts the state us facing from the recession,” said David Friedfel, director of state studies for the independent Citizens Budget Commission. “In light of the revenue losses, those reserves are relatively small.”

The CBC has advocated the past few years for New York to bolster its reserve position through increased Rainy Day Fund deposits. The state had an opportunity to sure up reserves when it received around $12 billion in financial settlements from 2015 to 2018, but did not use any of it for rainy day funds.

Friedfel noted that New York’s current reserves are small relative to the likely revenue losses that would occur during a recession. A 2018 CBC analysis showed that year over year tax revenue losses experienced in the 2002-2003 recession and the Great Recession of 2008 would translate into losses between $9.2 billion and $12.0 billion in the first two years of another economic downturn.

“The state definitely missed an opportunity to not use more of the bank settlement funds for reserves,” Friedfel said. “It can be politically challenging because of calls for increased spending from different groups, but if you have more in reserves you don’t have to cut as deep in a recession.”

This week, the mayor warned of tough decisions ahead of April 23, when the administration plans to release its executive budget. “It's going to be a very sober day,” he said.

Hours later, his office released a list of programmatic cuts that will do little to increase the efficiency of city government.

"[There's] not nearly as much of an active effort to look at the effectiveness and efficiency of existing programs and really do the belt tightening that this situation is going to require,” Ana Champeny of the Citizens Budget Commission said in a presentation Wednesday.

Now his planned “cuts” don’t even equal the spending hikes he’d intended for fiscal year 2021 — when the businesses and other taxpayers that feed city government have been knocked back far more than just a single year.

The Citizens Budget Commission warns that shortfalls in revenue could total $20 billion over the next three fiscal years, but the mayor can’t think about real savings.

He means to nip just $273 million from school spending — at $25 billion, one of the biggest categories in the budget. And even then, much of it is in simple stuff like delaying a pre-K expansion.

School districts across Nassau County will take a hit in the 2020–2021 year due to financial uncertainty at the state level resulting from the coronavirus pandemic. How much schools will be affected is yet to be determined.

The Senate passed the New York state budget April 2, two days after the deadline. The budget outlines $177 billion in spending, just $1 billion short of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s pre-pandemic proposal, despite the state’s projected $15 billion revenue loss this coming fiscal year.

Lawmakers “passed something akin to a wish list and punted to the state budget director to figure out what can and should happen later,” said Maria Doulis, vice president of strategy, operations and communications for the Citizens Budget Commission.

While debt is routine for capital projects, Maria Doulis of the Citizens Budget Committee warned that type of borrowing has only been done "in the most dire of circumstances" such as the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and Sept. 11. "Borrowing for operating purposes puts future New Yorkers on the hook for today's services; it should only ever be considered as a last resort," she said.

Given de Blasio's $20 billion increase to the city budget since taking office, his addition of more than 30,000 municipal employees and his resistance to ever enforcing budget cuts, Doulis said the mayor has "considerable work to be done curbing spending" before resorting to issuing bonds to cover the daily costs of governing.

Carol Kellermann, former head of the same commission, said de Blasio will be judged by his handling of the fiscal fallout from the crisis.

“He was a mayor during good times,” she said in a recent interview. “But this will be the ending of the story: Did everything get wiped out? Was he able to steer a course to preserve the things that are important to his legacy?”

De Blasio says city agencies will cut 'at least' $1.3B amid coronavirus

Andrew Rein, president of the nonprofit Citizens Budget Commission, said that the initial $1.3 billion in cuts are simply a “first downpayment” on what’s to come.

“It’s a beginning but it’s far from the end,” Rein told The Post. “The bottom line is we are so far from the bold action that’s needed to even start to address this budget gap that we’re running into.”

He added: “We know between this year and next year we’re facing about $6 billion and possibly greater revenue shortfalls plus the hits from the state budget, plus new spending that the city should do and is doing to address the pandemic,” Rein said.