NEW YORK — The Mamdani administration has announced about $246 million in savings from the city budget — a fraction of the $1.7 billion the mayor built into his spending plan for next year — as it struggles to fill a multi-million-dollar budget gap.

The mayor said Wednesday that his administration is working on reviewing and approving the rest of the savings measures, which were proposed by savings officers working across city agencies.

“We are doing the painstaking work of going through their submissions, having a dialog back and forth,” Sherif Soliman, the mayor’s head budget official, said at a Wednesday budget hearing. “What was announced today were concrete examples, highlights of a couple of hundred million dollars, and that process continues as we go on.”

The city is facing a $5.4 billion budget gap, according to the mayor’s office. The mayor’s preliminary budget plan, released in February, already included the $1.7 billion in savings, so Wednesday’s announcement will not help the city close that gap.

Instead of finding further savings opportunities or implementing cuts, the administration had focused on lobbying the state to implement options like raising income taxes for millionaires and hiking corporate tax rates. The mayor’s also proposed drawing down from the city’s reserves.

Mamdani has said that he’d move to raise property taxes if the state didn’t move on that — but those efforts has fallen somewhat flat. The City Council, who would need to approve the hike, has said it’s a nonstarter.

Those methods have drawn scrutiny from bond rating agencies — three of which have recently downgraded the city’s economic outlook.

Of the projected savings announced Wednesday, the biggest chunk came from the Office of Labor Relations, which the administration said would audit employee healthcare coverage to remove ineligible dependents from the plans. The mayor’s office estimated that would save $100 million.

Mamdani also announced his administration would cut back on outside tech, consulting and administrative contracts with the Department of Education — something that Mamdani pledged to do on the campaign trail — as well as nix a $9 million contract with McKinsey and cut a $20,000 Slack subscription.

Budget watchdog the Citizens Budget Commission said the administration could be much more aggressive about cutting fat from the city’s budget.

“The list is a good start, but it’s just that, a start,” Citizens Budget Commission President Andrew Rein said. “The administration will have to go much further than the $1.7 billion target—and there’s plenty of opportunity. This administration must be as ambitious about government efficiency as it is about affordability.”

Phil Wong, a member of the Council’s Finance Committee, pointed out the announced savings amount to just around 15% of the total projected savings.

“Some of the items highlighted, including cuts as small as a $20,000 software subscription, raise real questions about the scale of this effort,” Wong said. “Even if the full $1.7 billion is realized, it still falls well short of the multi-billion dollar gaps projected in the years ahead.”

Despite calls to reduce spending, Soliman said at the hearing that the administration feels that “we’ve taken it as far as we can go to save those savings without cutting critical services.”

Mamdani announced the savings officers in January, giving then 45 days to come up a plan to trim at least 1.5% of their budgets for the current fiscal year and 2.5% for the next. He pledged to make those plans public the day they were due — but on Wednesday, said the officers’ full savings plans would not be publicly available until the release of his executive budget proposal in April.

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