One of the core claims of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for New York City mayor last year was that government can and should work effectively and efficiently for the people it serves, with “public excellence” as one of the thirty-four-year-old democratic socialist’s guiding principles. Mamdani has repeatedly stressed the need to boost efficiency, enhance public services, and reduce waste within city government. The surest way to rebuild trust in government and push back on the Right’s assault on the public sector, he has argued, is to strive for a clean and efficient government “where excellence is no longer the exception.”
As Corey Robin has pointed out, this focus on “democratic excellence” marks a significant innovation for the Left, which has long “ceded this rhetorical ground to the Right.” In the same way, Mamdani’s commitment to public efficiency reclaims territory that was long treated as the province of conservative or neoliberal governance.
This emphasis on efficiency has been front and center in Mamdani’s first fifty days in office, particularly in his handling of the city’s fiscal crisis. During his recent budget presentation, the mayor detailed his administration’s ongoing efforts to identify savings by “reducing bureaucratic waste and rendering agencies more efficient and cost-effective.”
At the center of this effort is an initiative launched by Mamdani late last month when he signed an executive order calling on each city agency to appoint a “Chief Savings Officer” (CSO) to “review performance, eliminate waste and streamline service delivery.” Issued one day after the mayor claimed a projected $12 billion budget gap left by the prior administration, the order instructed all agencies to equip their CSOs with sufficient staff and access to data to conduct detailed operational and spending reviews within forty-five days, with the aim of enhancing “long-term quality and efficiency of City government.”
According to Mamdani, CSOs across the city government have targets of 1.5 percent savings in fiscal year 2026 and 2.5 percent in FY 2027. “They will consolidate redundancies, insource programs that have been outsourced to bloated consultant contracts, and eliminate extraneous programs,” said Mamdani during his budget presentation, in which he claimed $1.77 billion in projected savings already identified.
Mamdani’s announcement of his efficiency drive last month predictably invited a number of superficial comparisons in the press to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with the New York Post suggesting that the mayor was borrowing from the “DOGE playbook.” In reality, Mamdani’s project is close to the exact opposite of Musk’s, differing not only in method but also in their fundamentally clashing goals.
From its launch early last year, DOGE’s rhetoric about “government efficiency” was rooted in its billionaire founder’s libertarian belief that government is an inherently inefficient “operating system.” The basic aim of DOGE was not to improve the federal government but to dismantle it and shift as many functions as possible to the ostensibly more efficient private sector (while eliminating many other functions altogether).
“I’m not saying that there aren’t competent people in the government, they’re just in an operating system that is inefficient,” averred the billionaire at a panel shortly before the 2024 election, where he insisted that once government employees moved to the private sector — stripped of all civil service protections and union representation, of course — their efficiency and “output” would soar.
Unlike the world’s richest man, the new mayor of New York has made it clear his goal is to actually improve government and strengthen public services. Indeed, Mamdani’s ambition is not just to restore faith in government but to demonstrate that the public sector can match or even surpass the private sector in excellence.
“For too long, we have turned to the private sector for greatness, while accepting mediocrity from those who serve the public,” he declared in his inauguration speech, pointing to the erosion of public services as a key factor in declining public trust over the last half century.
In a conversation with journalist Derek Thompson last year, Mamdani suggested that “any example of public inefficiency is an opportunity for the argument to be made against the very existence of the public sector.” Noting his frustration with the Left’s tendency to cede concerns about government waste and bureaucratic inefficiency to the Right, Mamdani has described the issue as “the most paramount left-wing concern, because it is either the fulfillment or the betrayal of that which motivates so much of our politics.”
While last year’s “efficiency” crusade inside the federal government was driven largely by a zeal to cut as much as possible — budgets, staff, regulations, etc. — Mamdani’s push for efficiency is ultimately motivated by the opposite impulse: to prevent austerity measures that inevitably degrade services and hurt working people. Noting the difference between “pursuing savings and efficiencies and pursuing austerity,” the mayor has emphasized that his administration will exhaust all options before resorting to cuts and reject the austerity measures that most of his predecessors in recent decades adopted.
Beyond opposing austerity, Mamdani’s efficiency drive also challenges the neoliberal assumptions that have underpinned most cost-cutting efforts over the past several decades, from Musk’s DOGE to Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s “reinventing government” initiative to Ronald Reagan’s “Grace Commission.”
Since at least the 1980s, most efforts to “reinvent” government and find savings have been shaped by the basic belief in the superiority of the private sector to deliver efficient and cost-effective solutions. From this truism, it has invariably followed that public reformers should adopt private-sector principles, metrics, and management techniques to achieve a more efficient and “entrepreneurial” government.
Of course, in practice this has usually just meant outsourcing and shifting basic government responsibilities to private companies and nonprofits. Across all levels of government, neoliberal reforms have favored shrinking public-sector workforces, outsourcing core responsibilities to contractors, and expanding public-private partnerships that proponents insist bring private-sector efficiencies and savings into the delivery of public goods.
These “reforms” have predictably eroded the capacity of governments to carry out basic functions while increasing their dependence on profit-driven companies and contractors that often cost significantly more than government employees.
At the federal level, this trend can be seen in the emergence of what political scientist John DiIulio has termed “Leviathan by Proxy,” which he defines as a “superficially anti-statist form of big government” where contractors now outnumber federal employees by more than two to one (the size of the federal workforce has remained largely unchanged over the last half century, even as federal spending has quintupled and the population has grown by 70 percent). Despite claims of private sector savings, federal contractors have been found to cost almost twice as much as government employees for comparable functions.
In an interview last year with the New Yorker, Mamdani pointed to this “strange history where we have hollowed out public capacity [and] replaced it with [outsourcing] in the name of saving money,” even as studies show that outsourcing often “diminishes quality without substantial cost reduction.” In the context of New York City, the mayor has frequently criticized wasteful spending on contractors, whether it’s paying millions to McKinsey to design a trash can or spending more on consultants than construction during the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway project.
In their own pursuit of savings, the mayor and his team have flipped the neoliberal script on private-sector efficiency and instead pointed to contractors as the major source of waste. Last October, Mamdani previewed this approach when he put forward a plan to overhaul the procurement infrastructure of the city’s Department of Education (DOE), which spends roughly $10 billion a year on contracting.
In response to the DOE’s poor record of monitoring and coordinating that spending in the city, the candidate’s proposal called for audits on the department’s top fifty vendors and its twenty-five largest contracts, the consolidation of procurement offices, and the creation of a contracting hub in each borough. The plan also mandated “fiscal training and certification” for all staffers working in procurement. Since taking office, Mamdani has essentially moved to implement this approach throughout city government, explicitly targeting wasteful spending on consultants and outside contractors.
The great challenge for Mamdani and his administration in the months ahead will be to find significant savings without sacrificing the quality of public services. The city can ill afford budget cuts, as many agencies are already severely understaffed and resource-constrained, with vacancy rates still above pre-pandemic levels. These constraints inevitably erode capacity and diminish service delivery. They also lead to increased waste and fraud, as revealed in a 2023 report by the Department of Investigation.
Mamdani has made it clear that his administration will resist calls for austerity, arguing that the “excellence in public services our city depends on should not be sacrificed” because of past fiscal mismanagement. Instead of slashing services, he has attempted to leverage the crisis to push for higher taxes on the city’s wealthiest residents and most profitable companies.
During his recent budget presentation, the mayor announced that the $12 billion budget gap that he projected last month has since dropped to $5.4 billion thanks to the administration’s savings measures, updated revenue from Wall Street, and additional funds from the state. Mamdani has faced skepticism over his projection numbers, with critics arguing that he inflated the figures to pressure the state into raising taxes on the wealthy. While there’s no doubt some truth here, Mamdani has clearly decided that his best shot at extracting concessions from Albany is to present tax hikes as a fiscal necessity.
On Wednesday, the mayor doubled down on this strategy when he laid out two very different paths forward to close the remaining budget gap. The first path, described by Mamdani as the “most sustainable and fairest,” is to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and corporations and to rebalance the fiscal relationship between the city and state (the city currently contributes 54.4 percent to the state’s revenues yet only receives 40.5 percent in return). The second, “more harmful” path is to raise property taxes and tap into reserves, placing the “onus for resolving this crisis on the backs of working- and middle-class New Yorkers.”
The power to hike income taxes ultimately resides at the state level. By laying out these two markedly different courses of action, however, the mayor has escalated his pressure campaign on Governor Kathy Hochul and lawmakers in Albany to adopt the popular policy of taxing the rich. This somewhat indirect approach has started to attract some gripes from the Left, especially after the New York Times reported last week that the mayor wouldn’t be attending the upcoming “Tax the Rich” rally in Albany. Yet with limited leverage and a structural dependence on Albany, Mamdani has (so far) opted for a less confrontational strategy, with some success.
Whether Mamdani’s gambit ultimately pays off is uncertain, but it is essential to understand what he is trying to accomplish. In pressing for progressive revenue measures and a reordering of the city’s fiscal relationship with Albany, Mamdani is attempting to chart a very different course from the austerity-driven consensus that has dominated New York fiscal policy since the 1970s. If successful, it would mark the first serious break in decades from the idea that every budget shortfall must be resolved on the backs of public employees and working-class New Yorkers.
Its broader significance comes into focus when we recall that New York City was an early proving ground for neoliberal governance half a century ago. As David Harvey recounts in his influential history on the subject, the management of the 1975 fiscal crisis “pioneered the way for neoliberal practices” domestically and internationally and helped establish an elite consensus that government’s role was to “create a good business climate rather than look to the needs and the well-being of the population at large.”
While that consensus is still with us today, the cracks are starting to show with the rise of left-wing economic populists like Mamdani. In his call for “public excellence” and rejection of “austerity politics,” the mayor seeks to overturn the status quo of the last forty years and revive the social democratic tradition that existed in New York before business and financial elites leveraged the fiscal crisis to remake the city in their own image.
In her excellent book on the fiscal crisis, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, Kim Phillips-Fein vividly documents how austerity measures forced on the city by Wall Street financiers in the 1970s led to the rapid erosion of basic public services, from garbage removal and fire protection to public education and health care. Once an urban social democracy, the city that emerged from the ruins of the fiscal crisis prioritized the interests of financial elites and real estate developers like Donald Trump over the city’s working- and middle-class residents. “Key to the rise of this new city was the rejection of an earlier style of social politics,” notes Phillips-Fein. “Public hospitals, free tuition, cheap transit, and a city that ran in the interests of its working class belonged to a past best forgotten.”
If Mamdani is to succeed in reviving that earlier style of politics, his administration will first have to demonstrate that government can work efficiently and meet the everyday needs of ordinary New Yorkers. In this task, the mayor and his team are off to a promising start.
Great Job Conor Lynch & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
