Mayor Mamdani has moved forward with his first real Program to Eliminate the Gap (PEG) cuts, even if he doesn’t seem super keen on that acronym or its history. Regardless of the name, we commend him for doing it.
In office for seven months, Mamdani has seen, as we all have, looming city budget shortfalls, which the mayor’s office predicts will reach some $6.4 billion in fiscal year 2027, which is already on the lower end of estimates. The directive for city agencies to uniformly find some 2.5% in reductions in each of the next two fiscal years will dent that gap and help put the fisc on the path towards stability.
The important thing here is not just that the savings are happening but how they’re happening.
Bad managers come in assuming that they already know what’s best for every part of their bureaucracy and start slashing away where they see fit, assuming that everything can keep chugging along more efficiently in the aftermath. Good managers have the humility to listen to their subordinates about where costs can best be cut to eliminate wastefulness without degrading the output, whether that happens to be a toothpaste or services for more than 8 million New Yorkers.
Mamdani is smartly taking the latter tack, allowing individual workers at city agencies to recommend where cuts can be made without impacting service delivery to New Yorkers, an issue that has long vexed mayors. These recommendations will be reviewed by the agencies’ chief savings officers, a position Mamdani created in the run-up to the budget just adopted, and who were charged with finding efficiencies, along with high tax receipts and assistance from the state, helped at least temporarily plug the city’s budget holes.
Still, those recommendations are just that. Someone needs to make the call on what to scale back or reduce when it comes down to the wire. No municipal supervisor or employee is necessarily going to want their agency’s budget to be cut, even if those cuts impact things that aren’t critical to their mission. The mayor and his savings officers should hear out city employees about where cuts would be best applied, but commit to following through on their targets regardless of expected hand-wringing from workers.
While the intent is good and we’re hopeful that the execution will be both rigorous and thoughtful, that is not something the agencies and the mayor should determine themselves in secrecy. Mamdani had promised that there would be openness about the trims that his chief savings officers were identifying when he first put in place reduction targets, but they never were published and now his administration is refusing to honor legally-enforceable Freedom of Information Law requests from the press for the reports. Mamdani should live up to his word and release the records.
Ultimately, every new mayor — and governor, and president — promises that theirs will be the most transparent administration ever, and for the most part these are empty promises. We get it; the more information is out there, the more surface area there is to criticize decisions, whether in good faith or bad, but sunlight is still the best disinfectant.
While mayors might be annoyed by second-guessing, this is the best way to enact policy that benefits everyone, because no administration is infallible or omniscient. Make the cuts, and let the public know.