Neither side of City Hall appears willing to engage in serious exploration of triage despite a federal administration unrelentingly hostile to cities (especially blue ones), let alone willing to take the politically difficult steps necessary to achieve excellence in delivery of city services.
Apr. 2, 2026 – New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had an explosive reply yesterday to the budget response of the City Council (focusing his ire on Council Speaker Julie Menin). For some of the flavor, read Annie McDonough and Holly Pretsky in City & State and Katie Honan in The City.
I don’t take exception to the (perfectly reasonable) political question: Why was a more measured approach not taken? For example: “We have a number of concerns about the Council’s assumptions, and we do think more attention has to be given to the revenue side. Nevertheless, we’re hoping we can join with our partners in the Council to move forward priorities that both sides agree are important.” That is language that would not have prejudiced the Mayor’s substantive positions, and that would have been much more likely to bring in Council allies instead of driving them away (and unnecessarily alienating the Speaker).
But the more important questions that tend to get lost in assessing the (orchestrated) confrontation are: (1) is either side prepared to go beyond the entirely conventional approach to “budget savings”; and (2) is either side prepared to recognize and fix the fact that we are a long way from excellence being the standard in the delivery of city services.
Schizophrenia about Trump
On the one hand, both Mamdani and Menin have correctly acknowledged that President Trump poses an existential threat to the well-being of U.S. cities in general and to the well-being of New York City in particular. On the other hand, they both either believe or pretend to believe that that services can be delivered not only unimpaired, but with enhancements. (The Council quickly fired back a response to the Mayor, posting on social media that, “It may be April Fools’ Day, but the Council wasn’t kidding when we said NO CUTS to any services or staff.”)
The two thoughts can’t both be right. That is true both as a matter of immediate and anticipated fiscal circumstances and as a matter of philosophy. The financial resources of a city (which has to balance its budget) are dwarfed by those of the federal government (which does not). Some temporary patching? Sure. Lost federal billions not having an impact? Not possible by definition.
The need to do better and pay more
Even before one gets to brand-new initiatives, there are worthwhile City programs that haven’t existed at the proper scale. 3-K is one obvious example; adequate staffing in Emergency Departments (a big problem at private, not-for-profit hospitals, too), is another.
Everyone has his or her own wish list, so the number of potential, an potentially worthwhile, initiatives is large.
Moreover, there are existing functions (as with disease surveillance) that the City, given the Trump administration’s wholesale retreat, must beef up (in this example, as a matter of the basic preservation of public health).
And then there is the issue of what City employees are paid. Take EMS workers, for example, whose wages, as Errol Louis argued this week, are “abysmally low” (“Even in a tough budget season, he added, it would be a scandal if City Hall doesn’t fix this pronto.”) But the pay problem is a much broader one. You cannot effectively recruit and retain the best personnel if you pay them poorly. That’s true for attorneys in the Law Department; for auditors in the Department of Finance (see Ben Schneider’s recent reporting in Remapping Debate on why the City may well need to step up scrutiny of local tax returns in the face of the Internal Revenue Service’s turn to profound under-scrutiny of federal tax returns); for those in the Administration for Children’s Services entrusted with protecting children from familial abuse and neglect; and, indeed, for most of those who work in city government.
So, with the idea of making existing programs more robust, plus the idea of making pay more competitive, plus normal contract negotiations, plus the expectation that the federal funding squeeze is not going away anytime soon, we are in more of a hole than is generally imagined. Again, that is before one gets to the new initiatives, which, generally speaking, have initial budgets far lower than what they would be with full implementation and, perhaps, with the potential future loss of what is now start-up funding from New York State (as with 2-K).
The likely (and depressing) short-term answer
“Savings officers” – whether agency-specific, as the Mayor is implementing, or supplemented with a citywide savings officer, as the Council is proposing – will find some tweaks to make here and there. Relatively minor savings. Some positions – without real consideration of how across-the-board-vacancies can have quite different impacts on different functions – will be left open. More savings, negative effect on service delivery.
Going after the huge administrative bloat in both the Department of Education and the Police Department that has been an open secret for many, many years? (There’s bloat in other agencies, but those are the largest two examples.) Would yield major savings that could either help balance the budget or help make existing programs more robust or help fund new programs, but I’m highly skeptical that that the will exists to make this happen.
The unconventional thing to do would be to take a fresh look at all programs – even those that have been fully funded for many years – and actually identify some to eliminate altogether. For all the talk of New York City having emerged into a new day, there is no indication that is happening. (See bottom box, next page.)
What about excellence in service delivery?
It is certainly has played a key rhetorical role in the early months of the Mamdani administration, with the administration citing its value of “government excellence” and the Mayor at various times saying the City needs to “deliver on a standard of excellence”; that “we’re always looking to hold ourselves to a standard of excellence”; and that “[d]elivering public goods requires public excellence,” a part of which is “making city services work.”
Good deputy mayors and good commissioners can certainly get their ships going in the right direction and set the right tone, but there are currently nearly 300,000 full-time City employees. They are the ones who ultimately count.
Many City workers are excellent. But unless one insists on governing with a staggeringly romanticized view, one has to recognize (like non-pol New Yorkers do) that many are not. Doesn’t matter the agency; doesn’t matter the title.
It could be the elementary school teacher who, you realized early in September, was going to mean a wasted year for your child. Or the paraprofessional in that room who was not providing the assistance both the children and the teacher needed. Or the 3-K teachers who under-stimulate and don’t set appropriate boundaries for the kids.
It could be the employee in the Department of Buildings who won’t respond or (just as irritating) tells you, “Well this is what my screen is showing,” and has no interest in trying to find out why the information on the screen is wrong.
Or the nurse who thinks there’s no reason for you to be upset about an hours-long wait, who seems angry about something, and who is, unfortunately, neither skilled in drawing blood nor willing to take standard hygiene precautions.
Or the sanitation worker, who, on a street wide enough for the sanitation truck to be double-parked and for a lane of traffic to be able to pass nonetheless, gratuitously blocks entire side street.
Or the worker (pick your agency) who drags out each encounter so much that the line barely seems to move.
Or the ACS employee who, ignoring that the safety and wellbeing of children are at stake, transmutes the job into one where cases are just “processed.”
Sometimes, external factors are at play, and sometimes remediation is possible. But, other times, the reality is that the employee ranges from mediocre to worse. it is time to put away childish things and stop pretending that isn’t true.
The consequences
Not having the willingness to fire such employees has yielded – from a progressive point of view — a series of awful consequences. Sometimes, there is a direct budget impact: the employee who is slow and inefficient has lower productivity than a better replacement would have, meaning the agency gets less done than it otherwise would.
But the other impacts are just as important. First and foremost, the public is not getting its work done well.
That this reality is well understood by the public is powerfully debilitating beyond its immediate impact. It saps support for the idea that the public sector can get things done (and that more things need to be restored to the public sector, both from the private sector and from the not-for-profit industrial complex). It hardens opposition to tax increases (that the increases might only fall on the wealthy does not mean that the argument “what are we getting for our money?” doesn’t resonate more broadly).
Last, a workplace where mediocrity and worse is tolerated is not one that invites the best of the best to come work for the City.
Give the unconventional a try
“What functions can we do without (what functions do we need to do without) in the face of competing priorities that are more compelling?” The exercise of posing these questions has not been engaged in over a very long period of time, even as the City’s budget has risen considerably faster than inflation, and even as the fiscal consequences of Trumpism are now beginning hit home. If it’s too politically toxic for the Mayor or the Council or the Comptroller or the Independent Budget Office or the Borough Presidents to do this (sounds like property tax reform, doesn’t it?), then perhaps create the equivalent of a “Base Closing Commission” to take much of the heat.
As for the question of improving the quality of the workforce, the Mayor has an unusual opportunity. He has been saying, as he should, that he wants to give workers more. It’s not such a crazy idea to demand something more in exchange.