NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams on Wednesday announced a restoration of his budget cuts — a move with far more political benefit than fiscal consequence.

Due to lower cost projections for managing an influx of migrants, the city will restore a canceled police academy class set to start in April and will also cobble together enough funds to keep a fifth firefighter on trucks at 20 engine companies — reversing some of the service cuts that had become toxic to Adams’ political brand.

“I have to make sure our police officers are on the streets, continuing the success that [NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban] has put in place,” Adams, a retired police captain with a law-and-order focus, said at a press briefing.

In reality the mayor is only restoring a minuscule percentage of a budget cut he announced in November — $37 million of $3.7 billion — and doing so before annual negotiations have even begun with his legislative counterparts in the City Council.

City budget director Jacques Jiha acknowledged as much, saying, “this is not a big-ticket item” during the briefing Wednesday.

Nevertheless, the lawmakers celebrated the reversal after months of characterizing the planned spending reductions as draconian. And with Adams’ announcement, lawmakers have likely gained stronger ammunition to call City Hall’s bluff during this year’s budget cycle, set to kick off Tuesday.

“The mayor is doing a budget dance with himself, and his rhetoric is out of step with the math,” Council Member Justin Brannan, who chairs the body’s finance committee, said in a statement. “All of a sudden, the mayor has found money, with irrationally shifting explanations and numbers, cutting into the credibility of his narrative that the City has an insurmountable budget gap that demands overly broad cuts.”

Adams said the rollbacks were possible because of rosier revenue projections and reductions in estimated migrant costs — the total price tag has shrunk from $12 billion to around $10 billion through the summer of 2025, according to a new calculation from City Hall.

However, officials declined to divulge key fiscal details about how the city’s budget picture has changed enough to allow cuts to be reversed. The November spending reductions, for example, were already insufficient to close a projected $7 billion budget gap for the upcoming fiscal year beginning July 1.

“It’s great they are reducing migrant spending and revenues are strong,” said Andrew Rein, head of the fiscally conservative Citizens Budget Commission, adding that the city is also right to protect critical services. “But there should be no illusion here. The city still needs to reduce planned spending significantly to truly close next year’s budget gap and stabilize the future.”

Budget cuts announced by Adams in November have proven very unpopular with New Yorkers, with 83 percent of respondents to a recent Quinnipiac University poll saying they feared the reductions would affect them personally. While Adams praised the restorations to the NYPD and FDNY, he did not commit Wednesday to restoring any further cuts. In the same poll, Adams’ approval rating hit a record low 28 percent.