On New Year’s Day, Zohran Mamdani will be officially sworn in as Mayor of New York City — first by New York Attorney General Letitia James in an abandoned Subway station, then by Senator Bernie Sanders on the steps of City Hall.
That carefully choreographed launch is meant to convey the same message that Mamdani rode to Gracie Mansion: that he’s different, a renegade, someone who’s going to inaugurate “A New Era” for city politics.
But a look at the team he’s bringing with him suggests that this new era may be a lot like the old. Though Mamdani’s team boasted that they reviewed tens of thousands of resumes following November’s victory, the mayor-elect has chosen to surround himself with veterans of New York City’s Democrat machine.
Nowhere is this clearer than his second-in-command. Mamdani will be the second mayor for whom Dean Fuleihan serves as deputy, having held the post for Mayor Bill De Blasio just a few years ago. During the 73-year-old’s time with Hizzoner, the city’s budget grew from $73.9 billion to $85 billion. Fuleihan says it will grow again under Mamdani.
“There are needs that have to be addressed for New Yorkers and we have to find the resources,” he said.
Fuleihan’s former de Blasio administration colleague, Sherif Soliman, will join him and manage the city’s $115 billion dollar budget. Soliman is a long-time political operative whose career spans three administrations, including those of mayors Michael Bloomberg and Eric Adams. Most recently, he served as senior vice chancellor of the City University of New York, a plum job for an old political hand.
Soliman’s budget will have to account for a new role Mamdani created for Julie Su. The Stanford and Harvard graduate, who served as Labor Secretary under President Joe Biden, joins the team as Deputy Mayor of Economic Justice.
Su, whose record in California was so disastrous that the Senate never actually confirmed her to the top Labor Department post, could be joined by Biden’s Federal Trade Commissioner, Lina Khan. Khan, who earned a reputation for her aggressive antitrust enforcement, is currently heading Mamdani’s transition team. Whether or not she joins the team full time, her onetime deputy, Sam Levine, will serve as Commissioner of the New York City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.
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The preponderance of former Biden staffers is curious for Mamdani, who is already being hailed as the future of the national Democrat Party. Though Khan and Su are certainly radical in their own right, their presence does seem to suggest that Mamdani isn’t quite ready to dispense with party luminaries.
And while Mamdani made headlines last week with the news that he tapped Lillian Bonsignore, who has never been a firefighter, to serve as the first openly gay FDNY chief, the mayor was less creative when it came to the rest of the city’s public services.
Mamdani has thus far chosen to retain Jessica Tisch, Adams’s choice to lead the NYPD, as well as Sanitation Commissioner Javier Lojan, a career sanitation worker who joined up with the department 26 years ago.
Of course, while Mamdani’s early staffing decisions may belie his “new era” rhetoric, there’s still plenty of evidence that he will make some radical decisions as mayor.
Look no further than the “mastermind” of his political operation, Elle Bisgaard-Church. His former chief of staff and campaign chief, Mamdani has credited Bisgaard-Church with one of his most radical ideas, replacing police with mental health professionals in a billion-dollar Department of Community Safety.
But even she has begun to play nice with the bosses, telling NY1 shortly after the election that she and Mamdani have been convening with “various Democratic leaders in Congress and others around the city to seek their advice on how to walk in.”
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