New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has removed every member of the advisory board for the Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City. Dozens of corporate and civic leaders received polite emails thanking them for their service and then learned their access to one of City Hall's most important public-private partnerships was over.
From the Daily Signal:
When New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he intended to govern as a socialist, he meant it. And he is doing what any dedicated communist does when he rises to power: purge the kulaks, promote the apparatchiks.
On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Mamdani had eliminated all the businessmen and other various other civic leaders on the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City board of advisers.
The Mayor’s Fund is a nonprofit organization that aids public-private initiatives in the city. According to the city website the organization, “partners with 50 City agencies and offices, philanthropic organizations and community leaders to invest in the most urgent challenges facing New Yorkers.”
Bloomberg reported that Mamdani sent them an email thanking them for their service while informing them they would no longer be needed.
“I commend you for your dedication and the benefit you have brought to our City as you conclude your tenure on the Mayor’s Fund Board of Advisors,” the email read according to Bloomberg.
The fund has a practical role. It works with 50 city agencies, 300 institutional funders, and 100 community partners. Private money helps launch programs, meet emergencies, and support projects that taxpayers may not be able to fund quickly. Its latest federal filing listed $17.5 million in assets and $16.4 million in net assets.
From the Daily Signal:
The mayor’s office hasn’t announced who specifically will replace the business leaders on the board, but his selection for the first of the two Mayor’s Fund boards that he liquidated in April is a good clue.
“Under Mamdani, the Mayor’s Fund will look different from past administrations — centered not on corporate leadership, but on working New Yorkers and advocates who organized and fought for bold and progressive action on picket lines, protests, and public forums in their communities,” the mayor’s office said at the time.
So, the board will almost certainly be stacked by community organizers, union leaders, and other leftist loyalists, of course.
As many pointed out, purging all business leaders from an organization that ultimately must work with business and mobilize resources and replacing them with professional activists is bad city management.
“Mamdani is removing Job Creators from the Mayor’s Fund while still expecting private donors to help pay for city programs,” Republican Bruce Blakeman who is running to be the governor of New York, wrote on X. That is not a partnership. It is another attack on the employers, jobs, and investment New York needs.”
Critics are right that this is bad urban policy.
Mamdani began changing the fund months ago. In April, he installed his chief of staff, Elle Bisgaard-Church, as chair of a new seven-member governing board.
Statement from Mamdani's office:
Under Mamdani, the Mayor’s Fund will look different from past administrations — centered not on corporate leadership, but on working New Yorkers and advocates who organized and fought for bold and progressive action on picket lines, protests and public forums in their communities. From Christina Cover, a Bronx public school teacher to Tony Perlstein, a UAW union organizer who built a career as a longshoreman, the board reflects the working people at the heart of this city — and the center of this administration’s mission.
The administration views the Mayor’s Fund as a complement to, not a substitute for, public investment. While advancing major government-led efforts to lower costs – including the first municipal grocery stores and a historic expansion of free child care – the Mayor’s Fund will help accelerate progress on core commitments to the movement that brought them to City Hall.
“I am honored to appoint my Chief of Staff, Elle Bisgaard-Church, to lead the Mayor’s Fund into a new era, one where philanthropy is not about who has money, but about whether that money delivers for working people,” said Mayor Mamdani. “We have assembled a team of principled, focused leaders who will build on the work this administration is doing to lower costs, keep New Yorkers safe and make our city’s public infrastructure the envy of the world.”
City Hall said the fund would be centered on working New Yorkers and advocates who fought for progressive action through protests, picket lines, and community organizing.
The board's formal duty includes keeping the fund aligned with the mayor's policy goals.
Now the separate advisory board is gone, too. Among those removed were Alex Katz, Blackstone's senior managing director of government relations; Jeffrey Gural, chairman of GFP Real Estate; and James Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board of New York.
Mamdani plans to name replacements later this year.
A mayor has the legal authority to choose his advisers. Mamdani also campaigned openly as a democratic socialist and continues to promote that ideology nationally.
New Yorkers can't claim he hid his beliefs. Clearing an entire advisory board still sends a message beyond personnel: business experience is welcome only after City Hall decides which voices fit its political mission.
Mamdani's administration says people affected by government policy should help shape it.
They should.
Teachers, workers, tenants, organizers, and neighborhood leaders belong in the room. A capable administration would add those voices without expelling every business leader already there.
The fund depends on voluntary partnerships with donors and employers. Those employers create jobs, build housing, manage property, finance development, and supply much of the tax base behind Mamdani's plans.
Removing them may please activists who view corporate influence with suspicion. It also strips the mayor of advice from people who understand how investment responds when taxes rise, regulations tighten, and political hostility becomes policy.
Mamdani has also named Economic Development Board Chair Lina Khan, a former FTC chair, to lead the board overseeing the city's economic development agency.
From The Guardian:
Khan earned her JD from Yale Law School in 2017 and currently works as an associate professor at Columbia Law School. She also played an early role in reviewing candidates for the EDC president position.
Khan described her new role as a “deep honor” at a Wednesday press conference.
“I know from my own time in government that you need the right people in key roles if you want to get anything done. You need people who can be maximally resourceful and innovative, using the full scope of an agency’s tools to fully deliver for the people we serve,” she said, adding that she was excited to begin working “to make sure that the EDC can deliver an economy for our city that is affordable, efficient, and resilient”.
The EDC, a non-profit that serves as New York City’s official economic development agency, oversees more than 60m sq ft of property as the city’s largest landlord. Its capital division is responsible for roughly 100 active projects representing about $6bn in construction investment.
The appointments represent a significant leadership shake-up at the EDC, an agency that has faced criticism over the years for being too closely aligned with business interests. Its board is responsible for approving major projects and deals, including Hudson Yards, the High Line, the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island, and the city’s ferry system.
Rather than appointing a deputy mayor for economic development, Mamdani had established the city’s first deputy mayor for economic justice, signaling a different approach to city hall’s role in economic development.
The new appointments also come as New York City is battling an outbreak of legionnaires’ disease, with a fifth person having died in connection to the illness in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, according to a briefing issued on Tuesday from the city’s health department.
He replaced the traditional deputy mayor for economic development position with a deputy mayor for economic justice.
Each decision can be defended on its own merits. Together, they reveal an administration steadily placing economic power under leaders committed to Mamdani's political program.
New York's government has long included competing voices from politics, labor, business, neighborhoods, and reform groups. Mamdani appears more interested in selecting which groups may speak than in hearing competing judgments.
A city as vast and economically vulnerable as New York needs independent advice near the mayor, not a room filled with nodding heads.
We witnessed the failure of an echo chamber with President Barack Hussein Obama's administration, something New Yorkers either didn't remember or didn't care about.
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