Last week, progressives received more good news in their quest to retake the Senate. Former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper and insurgent Texas state Senator James Talaricosoaredthrough their respective primaries. To the extent that betting markets’ predictions mean anything, they now place the odds of Democrats flipping the upper chambercloser than everto even money.
But these elections aren’t the only stories offering hope in these times. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has hit the ground running—advancing a path foruniversal childcare, introducing a fairerbudgetand a plan to balance it, and continuing tocivically engagethe public with his magnetic social-media presence and charismatic interviews.
Underpinning it all has been a quiet, methodical effort: building out his administration.
Three recent appointments demonstrate Mamdani’s commitment to that long-cited political adage that personnel is policy. He and his team are drawing qualified, visionary, sometimes unconventional talent from the best of previous administrations—all deployed to pull on as many levers as possible to make New York a more just and affordable city.
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Mamdani struck fear in the hearts of Wall Street and Silicon Valley in November when he appointed formerFTC chair Lina Khanto head his transition team. Now he has taken a natural next step in tapping one of Khan’s former deputies, Sam Levine, toleadthe city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.
For all the buzz around Khan, Levine has more than demonstrated his potential to serve as the people’s tribune. At the FTC, he worked on rules that banned certain hidden and deceptive charges, won money back for defrauded car buyers, took on tech companies—including the cesspool formerly known as Twitter—for abusing consumer data, and sued Amazon for “trapping” people in subscriptions, leading to a $2.5 billion settlement.
Levine has brought that same bold approach to New York. In January, the Mamdani administration banned hotels across the city from charging junk fees, estimating that this new rule will save consumers more than $46 million by the end of this year. After a January ruling that guarantees delivery drivers the same minimum pay rate as restaurant workers, Levine said: “We want companies to be on notice that there’s a new sheriff in town.”
But as laser-focused as that sheriff has been on putting money back in people’s pockets, Mamdani is also expanding the scope of what it means to make New York livable. The mayor has said that his “vision is not limited to the homes that we live in,” but a city where working people “afford lives of joy, of art, of rest, of expression.” This comes as no surprise from the son of filmmaker Mira Nair—and from a man whose shirtless rap videos as Young Cardamom continue to resonate with viewers despite his best efforts.
The now-mayor is bringing his vision for a truly arts-forward city to life through last week’s appointment of Diya Vij to lead New York’s Department of Cultural Affairs. Vij has spent over a decade in the world of public and community-based art, and is returning to DCLA after a four-year stint under Mayor Bill de Blasio, during which she launched a program that embeds artists into city agencies.
Vij’s appointment comes at a critical time. As the federal government guts arts and culture—an estimated one-third of museums have lost funding and hundreds of NEA grants have been canceled under Trump 2.0—New York is the largest municipal funder of arts in the country.
After five years of shrinkage in New York’s creative sector and with artists increasingly priced out of the five boroughs, Vij and Mamdani will also be working to ensure artists can afford to live in the city whose global influence is defined by their creativity—a breath of fresh air given that New York has not built dedicated new housing for artists in over a decade.
Finally, few of Mamdani’s policies have been as hotly debated as his positions on policing and public safety. As a candidate, Mamdanipledgedto keep Jessica Tisch—originally appointed by Eric Adams—as police commissioner, which was viewed as a pragmatic step.
In naming Stanley Richards commissioner of New York’s Department of Correction, however, the mayor made it clear that he aspires to lead a new era of criminal justice. Richards is the firstformerly incarcerated personto hold the position. After serving time for robbery in the late 1980s, he went on to climb the ranks of the Fortune Society, an organization that provides re-entry services to formerly incarcerated people.
Richards’ perspective is urgently needed. The notoriously deadly Rikers Island jail complex is slated for closure in 2027—and last spring, a federal judge ordered control of it to be temporarily transferred to a third-party remediation manager. This has left the city without control of its own jails for the first time in 400 years. The takeover was the culmination of years of litigation following reports of staff brutality, medical neglect, squalid living conditions, and dozens of deaths inside the jails.
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Richards himself was once held at Rikers. Now he vows to “prioritize the safety of staff and incarcerated people,” and increase access to community services.
In an oft-dispiriting era of politics when so many doubt whether elections matter, Mayor Mamdani is working overtime to prove that they can. Less than 100 days in, his administration is already demonstrating what change looks like at the most granular level: putting competent people in strategic positions to enact idealist policy.
In other words, they are embracing a philosophy once articulated in the simplest of terms by Franklin D. Roosevelt: “pick smart colleagues.”
From illegal war on Iran to an inhumane fuel blockade of Cuba, from AI weapons to crypto corruption, this is a time of staggering chaos, cruelty, and violence.
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