By Mike Vilensky 

ALBANY -- Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday dangled the possibility that New York may delay passing a new state budget until federal policies under President Donald Trump become clearer, throwing a wrench into annual state budget negotiations.

Mr. Cuomo's idea on Tuesday, doubling down on suggestions he made the night prior, was something of a negotiating tactic: He said the state may need to pass a temporary extender of the current budget instead of a new spending plan -- unless lawmakers agreed to only minor spending changes in a new budget.

"My position is, we can handle modest increases," Mr. Cuomo said at an impromptu news conference Tuesday in the state Capitol. "I don't want to be in a position where we pass a budget today, we tell a school district 'You're going to get $600 million,' and then... ask the legislature to come back, revise the education budget and say, 'Whoops, now you get $400 million.' It would be chaos. So I would rather pass the budget with reasonable, conservative, cautious financial outlays that could adjust to certain federal cuts or just go the extender route."

The state's roughly $160 billion budget, which includes an estimated $50 billion of federal funding, is due April 1. Mr. Cuomo has prized an on-time budget as a symbol of functional government under his watch, making his announcement that the budget could be kicked down the road all the more surprising.

The extender often has been used by governors amid budget battles because legislators under New York statutes don't get their paychecks until a new budget is passed in a new fiscal year, which begins in April. Legislators under New York statutes don't get paychecks until a new budget is passed in a new fiscal year that begins in April, making the extender somewhat punitive. Mr. Cuomo hasn't used such a measure since taking office in 2011, but his predecessor, Gov. David Paterson, deployed an extender during a budget standoff with the Legislature.

In Albany on Tuesday, lawmakers were reluctant to sign onto the idea but didn't rule it out. Sen. Jeff Klein, who leads a faction of rebel Democrats allied with the Senate's Republican majority, said Tuesday morning he didn't expect the talks to come to an extender, as he stocked up on coffee for the day. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, leaving a meeting at Mr. Cuomo's office Tuesday afternoon, said "we haven't really agreed to anything."

Mr. Heastie, a Democrat, has previously suggested legislators come back to Albany after the legislative session to handle changes from the federal government if necessary, a position that Mr. Heastie reasserted on Tuesday. The federal budget is expected to pass in fall 2017.

Mr. Cuomo's concerns about how Mr. Trump and a Republican Congress could affect New York's budget come on the heels of his feud with New York's Republican congressional delegation. New York congressmen John Faso and Chris Collins had pushed a measure in the Trump-backed U.S. House's health-care proposal to shift Medicaid costs from counties to the state, which Mr. Cuomo lambasted.

While that health-care bill failed before it even came to a vote last week, Mr. Cuomo has continued to publicly criticize Republicans in Washington as trying to hurt New York, a break from years when the governor largely left federal lawmakers alone.

"It's Chicken Little again," Mr. Collins said of Mr. Cuomo in an interview Tuesday, referring to the cartoon character who proclaims that the sky is falling. "He's trying to scare people."

Because the state budget includes not only spending agreements but whole new policies, the status of some of this year's controversial issues was fuzzy on Tuesday amid the talk of an extender. The new policies include loosening criminal penalties against minors and a new college-affordability push.

Mr. Cuomo proposed some of those measures after the election of Mr. Trump and a new Republican Congress, but said Tuesday the landscape changed since Mr. Trump's legislative proposals and "skinny budget" emerged.

Gerald Benjamin, a New York historian at the State University of New York, said the governor was right that there is an unusual level of uncertainty around New York's finances amid federal proposals that may merit holding off on a state budget.

"This is not the same level of uncertainty you usually get with a transition in the national government," he said. "So the extender would buy time to see what the feds do, but it would upset the apple cart with regards to budget deals."

Mr. Cuomo has played hardball in budget negotiations before. Last year, amid budget battles, he suggested that if state legislators didn't pass an on-time budget then they didn't deserve a pay raise. At the time, a state panel was weighing the first legislative salary hike since 1999.

The budget ended up on time last year, but Mr. Cuomo's appointees to the pay panel voted against the raise anyway.

Write to Mike Vilensky at mike.vilensky@dowjones.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 28, 2017 19:36 ET (23:36 GMT)

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