Everything you need to know about Zohran Mamdani's first year as mayor

Today is the day that Zohran Mamdani turns from the sweeping grandeur of campaigning to the vulgar realities of governing, though I will allow for the idea that tomorrow is actually that day, since Inauguration Day is about as easy a day as you will have as mayor. Mamdani has promised a lot, even on top of the usual business that one goes about when they’re the mayor, and while he has four years to do his job, his first year is going to set the tone for what he can actually do in City Hall.

You might be unfamiliar with how city government works, you might be plugged in but just need a reminder of what’s on deck, but either way it’s time to preview the new mayor’s first year. Not unlike my Mets previews in 2024 and 2025, I am definitely going to get a bunch of stuff here wrong, because the real world is just so unpredictable. And just like in my Mets previews, I won’t apologize for what I get wrong here. I’m not a prophet, I’m just a guy who reads a bunch of stuff.

So, when do I get my free bus ride and state-provided babysitter for little Aidan?

Hold on now, youngster. It’s gonna be a long road to free buses and universal daycare, and those are hardly the first things that the mayor will get to. It all starts with the budget.

I hate math.

You hate math? Imagine all the nerds who have to balance a $120 billion budget. I guess they like that kinda thing actually, you don’t take a job doing that if you hate numbers. The Independent Budget Office has a good breakdown of the entire budget process, which starts with a preliminary executive budget and then City Council hearings through the spring.

The preliminary executive budget is an important first look at how the mayor plans to spend money, deliver on a bunch of his policy promises, and how he balances a number of loud and competing interests. 

For instance, the new mayor promised to give one percent of the city budget to the Parks Department, or about $1 billion per year. The department hasn’t been funded to that level since before you were alive, provided of course you were born after 1976. “One percent of the budget for parks” sounds like some kinda Pawnee-ass layup, and yet Eric Adams promised to do this too, and then just didn’t.

But you know what else will cost $1 billion? The Department of Community Safety, which is Mamdani’s proposal to create a new way of dealing with non-criminal emergency calls, something he’ll need to build on the fly while criminal justice advocates are calling for a variety of other non-police interventions to get funding as well. You know what costs half a billion dollars? Expanding Fair Fares to create a combination of free and half-price transit for three million New Yorkers. That’s less than the $1 billion per year that free buses cost, but that’s still very real money.

Oh also the mayor is also going to have to figure out how to fill thousands of city workforce vacancies, which make it harder to do everything from processing basic applications for government services to designing and installing bus lanes. Eric Adams left Mamdani a little poison pill there as well, budgeting $300 million to hire 5,000 more police officers. Which Mamdani can of course decline to follow through on, just at the cost of being accused of defunding the police.

Heading into his first budget, the state Comptroller and the budget hawks at the Citizens Budget Commission are warning Mamdani that the city has some pretty massive deficits ahead of it, something that could kneecap the new mayor before he even starts to type “DraftBudget1” in the title of an Excel spreadsheet. More left-wing analysts, though, have pointed out that for years now, the executive budget has consistently predicted terrible deficits that never seem to come to pass, because the city’s economy has remained relatively strong. 

By the start of April, the state budget is usually finished, so when that process is all done the mayor comes in with a new, more permanent budget proposal and the Council has another round of budget hearings. The state budget is pretty important here actually, possibly even more than it usually is, so let’s go back a minute.

What.

Right, so just imagine we’re doing like a dream sequence or doing a brief flashback to show how the movie got to where things are at the beginning of it, it’s fine.

On January 13, Governor Kathy Hochul will deliver the State of the State address, a silly spectacle of pageantry in which we learn everything is going GREAT but more importantly we get a preview of what her own spending priorities will be in the state budget. This will be important for New York City and Zohran Mamdan. 

Federal budget cuts to New York have slashed two big programs that the state oversees, Medicaid and food stamps. Having to fill those holes could mean that the state has less interest than usual in sending money to the city, or could even mean that the state engages in some budget gimmickry to pass more costs on to cities.

Also, Mamdani is going to need to find revenue for a number of his proposals, and that means raising taxes. But New York City can’t levy its own taxes, the city instead needs to persuade Albany leaders to pass laws creating those new taxes or higher rates. 

Hochul is not likely to back any proposals to allow Mamdani to raise taxes on city residents. She seems genuinely ideologically opposed to income tax hikes and, on top of that, she’s going to be running in a gubernatorial election against Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman this year, and he would like nothing more than to paint her as a tool of the wild-eyed Marxist mayor of scary New York City. I mean he’s gonna do that anyway but it will be easier for him to do if the state passes a law to allow the city to raise taxes on millionaires.

Following Hochul’s big speech, she’ll release a state budget proposal by late January. The governor and both houses of the state Legislature (which are controlled by Democrats) spend a few weeks arguing about it and trying to hit the April 1 deadline to pass the new budget.

Anyway that is your state budget experience in brief.

Okay so what happens after the second budget proposal?

There’s a bit more arguing, and the mayor and Council have to come to an agreement by late June. Then there is a literal handshake between the mayor and the Speaker of the City Council to seal the deal. The handshake really happens, but it lacks legal power. It’s actually symbolic, a moment to show that the Council will then vote to pass the budget before the start of the fiscal year, which begins on July 1.

And then six months of vacation?

Well no, then you need to do other mayor things, like make sure that your various city agencies are running well, responding to various crises, smoking cigars with Amber Rose and well-known anti-Semites, things of that nature. 

Look, I know he doesn’t take a six-month vacation. Can you just tell me about his three big campaign promises now?

Sure, let’s get to it. Mamdani ran an incredibly disciplined campaign that kept coming back to three things: freeze the rent, make the bus fast and free, enact free universal child care. So what will happen with those?

Freezing the rent for rent-stabilized tenants
This is seen as the easiest of the big Mamdani promises. However! It’s not as easy as snapping his fingers and making it so. 

Rent increases for rent-stabilized apartments are set by the Rent Guidelines Board, a nine-member panel that meets every year to grapple with the question of how to balance the needs of rent-stabilized tenants and landlords. The mayor appoints all nine members, which in theory gives Mamdani a good deal of power here. But Eric Adams appointed four members of the Rent Guidelines Board late this month, which he was allowed to do, and will also have a fifth member serving through the end of 2026. Mamdani can’t fire RGB members, so it’s unclear what he’ll do to sway the five members who owe him no loyalty at all. 

That being said, a rent freeze was never exactly guaranteed, because before the board hands down allowable rent increases, the RGB is supposed to independently assess the various factors that go into living in and owning a rent-stabilized apartment. It may be hard to believe, but the government is not actually allowed to just make arbitrary decisions unless of course it wants to lose a bunch of lawsuits. Still, Mamdani has been confident a rent-freeze is possible, and will obviously be making his case to the public.

Fast and free buses
Did you know that you can see me discuss this very topic with friend and competitor Clayton Guse? Well there you go. If Mamdani wants to make the bus fast, he has a lot of power to do something about it, because the Department of Transportation has control of the city’s streets and can put down bus lanes in plenty of places, at least if the mayor wants to make that happen (the recent history of that stuff is not great).

But if he wants to make them free, well that’s a whole other story. Mamdani needs to find something like $700 million to $1 billion in annual recurring revenue if he wants to responsibly make the buses free, and he seems to want to do that since he hasn’t just said “Well the MTA can get by without it.” Finding $1 billion would mean a tax increase though, and a tax increase means getting Albany legislators and the governor to pass a law that would allow New York to raise or levy a new tax. 

Hochul has not been very receptive to a big tax increase, even one solely focused on the city. She also has MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber on her side here. Lieber has had nice things to say about Mamdani, but he has had nothing nice to say about free buses. Additionally, state legislators from everywhere that is Not New York City are not super enamored of the idea. 

“New York City got $1 billion for free stuff and you didn’t” is a tough message to sell to the rest of this dumb state in the best of times; it is basically impossible to sell it during a big midterm election year. Mamdani does have some Albany support for the proposal, notably the state Senate’s number two Democrat, Michael Gianaris, but this does not feel like a Year One victory.

Universal childcare
I know what you’re thinking here: How is Mamdani going to deliver on a $6 billion promise that would require permission from Albany to raise the tax money if the capitol isn’t interested in a $1 billion promise? Well, it’s simple really. Kathy Hochul wants to do this one as a big statewide program and if the governor wants to do a big statewide program, she has huge powers under the state budget to make that happen. This is the one policy that Hochul and Mamdani are extremely aligned on, and as such, look for universal childcare to be the thing that state Democrats are pretty excited to deliver on, even if it means Hochul has to do something like raise the corporate tax rate to pay for it.

Okay well great now I’m all depressed. Didn’t he promise a bunch of other stuff too? Is any of it going to happen?

Come on, free childcare, that’s big. Also these are just my dumbass predictions. But yes, he made many more promises and proposed plenty of stuff that you might not even remember. There’s a $30 minimum wage proposal, which again may be stymied by Albany. Also his plan to directly fund the construction of 200,000 rent-regulated apartment units across the city, which would also require Albany to allow the city to raise the city’s debt limit to $70 billion. 

On education, Mamdani has to figure out how to meet the requirements of a state law that puts caps on class sizes. Also the pilot program for city-owned grocery stores, which the two Trader Joe’s veterans on staff here are particularly excited for. That one doesn’t need any kind of permission slip from Albany.

Good! I hate Albany!

It’s a nice city, but yeah I get it. The other day someone told me that New York City basically is a legal fiction created by the state and it sucks to constantly run up against that reality. When society falls apart and we build a new world, maybe we can figure out a way to have New York City Plus or something.

Didn’t he also say he was gonna like, tax white people more? When does that part happen?

Ah yes, property tax reform. I could write 3,000 words alone on the various mayoral failures to create a property tax system that taxes truly wealthy property owners at the correct rate, but Tim and Virginia would hire a contract killer to remove me from this Earth if I put it in this post (also Gotham Gazette has a whole history of being all over that shit). Mamdani wants to be the guy who gets it done, but he has explicitly said it won’t be a Year One thing. 

Okay then. Tell me more: who are Mamdani’s haters going to be? Like his foils?

People are definitely going to talk about the country’s most famous municipal socialist like he’s some kind of unhinged Leninist dictator, but yes, in fact the mayor will be constrained by having to balance a number of relationships with people who don’t see eye-to-eye with him.

President Donald Trump
So okay we all saw the weird press conference where Trump treated Mamdani like the son he never had (one whom he respects and has affection for). That being said, the president is still Donald Trump which means he could wake up one day and just start wilding out on the city in many ways. The Supreme Court has said that Trump can’t send the National Guard into cities without their consent, but ICE and the Border Patrol are a different story, so expect more raids on Canal Street and elsewhere. And even if various threats to cut off different kinds of federal funding don’t make a huge impact on the budget, every dollar counts. We can take some solace in knowing that Mamdani himself is a charmer and Trump is as unpopular as ever, with various rats fleeing the sinking ship into the welcoming arms of soft-focus New York Times profiles. But the people surrounding the president are also losing touch with reality at an alarming rate and there are still very few powerful people willing to stand up against Trump.

Gov. Kathy Hochul
For my money (I do not have a lot of money) this is the most fascinating relationship of 2026. Mamdani needs Hochul to help him get a bunch of his ideas over the line, but she is obviously not a DSA member. Hochul needs New York City to succeed and that means she needs Mamdani to succeed. But since she’s gonna be in an election against Bruce Blakeman, the screaming suburban id of New York State, a man who reacted to Mamdani’s election with a promise to blanket the Queens/Nassau border with security cameras, she can’t get too close to the mayor. But Hochul can’t stay that far away either because her own former lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado, is running a primary against the governor from her left and even if Delgado can’t get a Mamdani endorsement you can bet he is going to loudly say he’s the one who’ll tax the rich to get Mamdani’s agenda done.

City Council Speaker Julie Menin
Technically, Menin hasn’t been elected Speaker just yet, but in November she said enough City Council members pledged to vote for her when the Speaker vote happens this month to have effectively wrapped up the whole thing. Representing an Upper East Side district that went mostly for Cuomo, Menin is expected to be an ideological counterweight to the left-wing mayor, though she’s said she wants to find ways to work together to tackle the whole affordability crisis thing that catapulted Mamdani into Gracie Mansion. 

She has failed her first major test though. When Queens City Council Member Vickie Paladino started tweeting about how it’s time to denaturalize and deport Muslims from New York City, Menin decided it was more important to hold on to Paladino’s support in the Speaker’s race and gently asked her to take the tweet down instead of showing even a hint of outrage. How you think you have the moral authority to approve the choice for DOT commissioner while failing to promise consequences for using your government perch to call for literal ethnic cleansing is something that is beyond my understanding. 

Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch
Tisch was Eric Adams’ sanitation commissioner before she became his fourth (fourth!) police commissioner. Mamdani promised during the campaign to keep her in her post if he won as a sop to the city’s counter-revolutionary elements, some proof that he was not the fanatical radical they all conjured up in their group chats. It was a compromise on his part, but probably a necessary one. 

Tisch is widely admired by the city’s wealthy institutions because, as a Tisch family heir (yes as in the NYU Tisch School of the Arts), she is one of those wealthy institutions. The way that Mamdani and Tisch align, or don’t align, as she runs the NYPD is going to be a storyline to watch as the first year moves along. So far, it’s definitely a little weird. Tisch herself has continued to insist that statewide criminal justice reforms that lowered the age of criminal responsibility are responsible for a non-existent youth crime wave. Additionally, her brother gave an inflammatory speech about how Mamdani was an “enemy to the Jews,” and instead of simply telling her boss “Sorry about my dipshit brother” Tisch added a bit about how she understood why Jews are freaking out that Mamdani is about to be mayor.

Instacart/DoorDash/The Larger Treat Mafia
Mamdani ran as someone aligned with New York City workers, and some of the most-abused workers in the city today are the people who have to deliver treats all across the city. In order to actually do something about these working conditions, Mamdani hired former Biden administration Federal Trade Commissioner Sam Levine as his head of the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, who, at his introductory press conference, said “Gone are the days when companies like Instacart and DoorDash can bully their way into record profits on the backs of workers and consumers.” 

Do not underestimate the tech companies when cornered. One reason we have so many Lyfts and Ubers on the street today is because when Bill de Blasio first had the temerity to suggest there should be a cap on the number of professional drivers on city streets in 2015, Uber and Lyft unleashed its customer base, as well as Kate Upton and Ashton Kutcher on the mayor to ensure they would never have to follow a single rule. Only three years and multiple cabbie suicides later did the rest of the city’s political establishment realize an unlimited amount of for-hire vehicles might have some downsides, and jumped on board the idea of actually regulating the industry.

The Anti-Defamation League
This once-admired organization has turned itself into an arm of the Trump administration and has accomplished what every neo-Nazi in America has worked so hard to do: tie every action Israel takes to American Jews. Thanks guys! The ADL’s hysterical opposition to any criticism of Zionism meant that when New York elected a Muslim sympathetic to the Palestinian cause the organization would leap into action to paint his every breath as an anti-Semitic one. Expect the dullest people alive to wave around the ADL’s various “reports” and “findings” as something we should care about.

The New York Post/Various right-wing influencers and podcasters 
There’s going to be plenty of stuff to criticize the mayor for. Not all of it will be racist, insipid or without value, but you can be sure that the clubhouse leaders in that kinda shit will be the Post, the Viral NYC Crime Twitter account or the ugliest podcaster you’ve ever seen in your life. 

Case in point: the Post just put its two best minds on the shocking story that the landlord of Zohran Mamdani’s old Astoria apartment is charging more money for it than Mamdani paid. And just in time for Mamdani’s push for universal childcare, the right-wing echo chamber is working itself into a froth over how the country’s childcare industry is actually just a front for some kind of nefarious Somalian plot against America. Of course, right-wing freakouts over childcare are nothing new: we almost had national childcare back in 1971 before President Richard Nixon vetoed the creation of the program because of its "family-weakening implications.”

It sounds like you don’t think he’s gonna get much done. Will he?

I don’t know! I don’t mean to be down on the whole idea of Zohran Mamdani yet, it’s pretty early to just suggest the mayor must drink piss. We’re in pretty uncharted territory here, the mayor is shares an age cohort with Timothee Chalamet. He’s younger than Max Scherzer. He’s younger than LeBron James. Age teaches you wisdom (allegedly, I haven’t learned shit) but it also grinds down your ambitions. Mamdani has ambitions as big as the New Deal-era New York City, but that New York was built as much by FDR as it was by LaGuardia and Moses, so where does that kind of attitude go when the federal government would like to wipe cities off the face of the Earth?

What’s gonna happen to me this year?

You’re gonna find love, or break up with that person all your friends say you should break up with but they just won’t tell you they think so. Or you’ll finish that novel you’ve been working on.

What’s gonna happen to you?

Nothing good.