Two weeks ago, Mayor Wu declared that the state of the city is strong— and that includes the overall economy. But there’s a storm gathering from a hostile Washington, D.C., regime that seems intent on testing and eroding that strength. And so, as Wu, her budget team, and her city council colleagues prepare to plan out spending for fiscal year 2026, they’re already telegraphing the belt-tightening that many of us are already doing in our own lives and businesses.

Wu and City Councillor Brian Worrell, chairman of the council’s Ways and Means Committee, exchanged letters on Monday that offer a sneak peek into what we’ll likely see when Wu delivers her first draft of the proposed FY26 budget to councillors for review next week.

“Discipline”… “No new city positions”… “Caution”… “Worst case scenarios” – those were the key words sprinkled throughout their correspondence, in which both the mayor and the council’s lead budget broker outlined the likely content and tone of the budget season.

“This year’s budget must reflect fiscal discipline to protect Boston’s community and economy in the face of federal uncertainty,” the mayor advised. “The FY26 budget will focus on protecting critical city services our residents and businesses depend on and meeting our long-term financial obligations. City departmental budgets…will reflect eliminating long-term vacancies to constrain growth, with no new City positions; targeted reductions in non-personnel items; and limited new resources to support critical services.”

In his own letter, Worrell had advised the mayor “to limit [the city’s] overall budget growth in order to stay nimble enough financially to backfill critical city services for any federal funds that are lost in FY26.”

He wrote: “Last fiscal year, the city saved tens of millions of dollars in salaries, and in order to achieve the City Council’s limited requests, we suggest leveraging payroll savings from the nearly 2,000 vacant jobs in the city.”

How much of a hole could get blown in the city’s budget in a worst-case scenario? In her memo, Wu notes that there’s $300 million in federal funds “supporting critical city services each year.” And that figure does not account for the impacts on property and sales taxes and other revenues that Boston relies on for its coffers— all of which are likely to be impacted by Trumpian tariffs and other chaotic trade policies that are just now coming into the city lens.

We’ll know a lot more about just how austere the budget will be by this time next week. But suffice to say, we should all brace for impact. A hiring freeze is not a new device for city administrations that have faced daunting economic downturns. But the new dynamic this year is a White House that seems committed to ravaging the larger statewide and regional economy with sweeping cuts to grants and wholesale workforce “reductions,” a.k.a. mass firings.

In this context, it’ll be important for the mayor and the council to chart a course that’s not only fiscally responsible, but also intentional about how we redeploy resources. As Worrell suggests, some savings might be realized by redirecting payroll costs from some 2,000 city positions that his committee says are currently unfilled. That’s a sensible measure on paper as long as it does not undermine public safety and essential city services. The mayor and Boston’s other elected leaders didn’t seek out this assault from Washington, D.C., but they must be counted on to respond on our behalf with creativity, restraint, and prudence. The signal sent this week is that they understand that assignment.