New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, is ordering 15 percent cuts across the board, in part to fund an influx of migrants. Amidst this austerity, it’s also implementing a law that bans discrimination based on weight and height, expanding a government so big it’s on the verge of collapse.

Government bureaucrats cannot pursue every act of unfairness even when flush with cash, and New York City is broke. It’s cutting police, shuttering libraries, defunding schools, and even removing trash bins from the streets to save a buck.

Despite a looming $12 billion budget hole next year with no sign of a state or federal bailout, New York City is prioritizing non-citizens — and, now, those who say they’re being treated unfairly because of their size.

“Body size discrimination affects millions of people every year,” the City Council wrote in its announcement of the legislation on Monday, saying it “prohibits discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations based on a person’s height or weight.”

In a bow to reality, the law exempts jobs where height and weight can impact job performance, including the FDNY and NYPD. But expect many other positions to be subject to government action and counter lawsuits, costing the city more in legal bills.

In April, I wrote in the Sun that the proposal for a size-discrimination law was “a sharp departure from the tenure of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who sought to slim the city down by force of law and shame.”

Removing City Hall from dieting choices gave hope that it would limit the scope of its reach, balancing the scales between individual liberty and government intrusion. Fighting the stigma from being overweight or below average height would be left to others better equipped to handle it.

Instead, heavy-handed regulators just changed their target, empowering the New York City Commission on Human Rights with enforcement. In the City Council’s statement, the commissioner and chairwoman of the commission, Annabel Palma, said her agency “is dedicated to promoting and protecting the rights of individuals and groups that have faced discrimination because of who they are or how they identify.”

The commission will do this by stretching a budget that was $14.7 million in 2022 before being reduced by Mr. Adams’s cuts. That means doing more with less, vetting complaints about the new classes of prejudice along with those against race, disabilities, and gender.

Each allegation of discrimination based on size or height will have to be vetted by the commission. When it chooses to pursue allegations deemed valid, expect the targets of their action to fight back in court, costing the city even more money that it just doesn’t have.  

As with all government expansions, this one will come at a cost to individuals, which is why President Jefferson is often quoted as saying, “That government is best which governs least.” Although his home, Monticello, doubts he ever said it, they write it’s “in line” with his “opinions to some extent.”

The maxim has endured because it crystallizes a Revolutionary Era desire for small government, one that’s fast falling out of fashion. In 2021, the city — in a budget hole even then — paid to remove Jefferson’s statue from City Hall, saying the slaveholder’s likeness made some “uncomfortable.”

The rise in anti-Jefferson sentiment coincides with the Biden Administration’s drive to increase the scope of federal power. Earlier this month, at the Western Governors Association meeting, the education secretary, Miguel Cardona, gave an unwitting example of this change, truncating another Jeffersonian-style quote.

“As I think President Reagan said,” Mr. Cardona told the attendees, “‘We are from the government; we are here to help.’” The quotation eliminated the first part of Reagan’s joke where he called those the “most terrifying words in the English language.”

A city or state, unlike Congress, cannot print money to pay its bills. As Massachusetts and New Jersey weigh replicating New York’s new law, they might consider if Jefferson and Reagan are better examples. 

Citizens are best served by a lean government, one that chooses only those items off the menu of social causes that their budgets — and taxpayers — can afford.