Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s early picks for his top staff offer a pretty clear picture of what the final product will be: A City Hall run by a combination of supposedly moderate veterans of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s crew plus an all-star team of outright radicals drawn from the nationwide hard-left movement.
The Blas alums are not actually moderates; they’re just not as obviously radioactive; consider two he tapped last week.
Jahmila Edwards, who’ll head the Mayor’s Office of Intergovernmental Relations, spent a decade at municipal-worker union DC 37: That means his operation working with state and local officials will run through the prism of what’s best for city employees.
Meanwhile, his pick for director of appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, suddenly withdrew after her record of antisemitic and anti-police tweets surfaced: Service under de Blasio, in other words, is no sign you’re not actually toxic.
On Friday, he named Julie Su to the new position of deputy mayor for economic justice: She’s a pro-union progressive who allowed billions in fraud when overseeing California’s unemployment benefits, and couldn’t win Senate approval to serve as President Joe Biden’s Labor secretary as moderate Democrats found her too radical.
Plus, Mamdani is reportedly eyeing lawyer Ramzi Kassem to be his top legal adviser: His notable achievements include defending an al Qaeda terrorist and a radical, anti-Israel Columbia agitator Mahmoud Khalid.
And Mamdani’s other option for that post is reportedly Steven Banks, a self-described “social justice attorney” who as de Blasio’s homeless czar doubled spending to “address” homelessness even as the ranks of city homeless also soared.
Meanwhile, rumors that the new mayor might retain city-planning wonk Dan Garodnick from Eric Adams’ team has faded, while the likes of Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro (who was key to Adams’ major achievements of the last year) have been told in no uncertain terms to pack their bags.
The only sign of hope for sanity so far is that Mamdani has convinced Jessica Tisch to continue as police commissioner — yet he hasn’t remotely disavowed his longtime anti-cop and anti-policing agenda; most betting is that she’ll either get fired or feel obliged to quit before 2026 is out.
At the very least, it’s plain that the City Hall braintrust will be far to the left of the crew that ran Gotham under de Blasio, until now New York’s most left-wing mayor ever.
With the whole rest of the administration looking to build a socialist utopia (or break the city in trying), it’s hard to see how a practical centrist like Tisch can last.
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