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Mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani unveiled a vague new proposal Tuesday to cut waste at the city Department of Education — just days after announcing a $12 million teacher hiring scheme.
The left-wing Democratic nominee joined City Council Member Julie Won and State Senator Robert Jackson on the Upper West Side to release a new arm of his education policy eyeing the DOE’s bloated, $46 billion budget.
“The costs of this agenda are minimal; they will be dwarfed by the immense savings,” Mamdani said, without providing specifics.
The socialist Queens state assemblyman declined to give a hard number, while insisting his three-pronged approach would net a 10% reduction in wasteful spending.
But any public funds spent would seem to be earmarked for Mamdani’s other new plan to hire 1,000 new public school teachers a year in the aim of meeting the state’s mandate reducing classroom sizes.
When announcing the $12 million-initiative last week, he said it would be paid for by slashing wasteful contract spending.
“We’re going to pay for it by actually taking on the close to $10 billion a year that we are currently spending within our education system on contracts and consulting,” he said at the time, “much of which is not only not standardized, not only duplicative, but also there are a number of those contracts that seem to have more in common with who the vendors know than what the work is that they’re actually doing.”
On Tuesday, he said his DOE reform plan, coined “curing procurement,” would consist of annual audits of the top 50 vendors and the 25 largest contracts within the department, as well as an overhaul of infrastructure by opening a procurement hub in each of the five boroughs.
When pressed on examples of the specific types of contracts he was seeking to weed out, Mamdani cited hundreds of millions of dollars in technology deals struck by the DOE during the COVID-19 pandemic, when schools went online.
“These were contracts that the DOE entered into without any kind of a system coordinating inventory,” he said.
Won — who chairs the council’s committee on contracts — backed the Democratic Socialists of America candidate’s plan and noted it could help him pay for some of his freebie-filled agenda.
“Say you just say $5 billion — that’s going to be enough to cover universal child care,” Won said.
Mamdani’s lack of details when it comes to his education platform — and his support of doing away with mayoral control over the public school system — has drawn criticism, including for his election opponents, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa.
Cuomo, during an event earlier Tuesday, repeated his own proposal for the city to take over management of the MTA’s multi-billion dollar capital plan.
“In many ways, a place is just too big to effectively manage that capital construction component that is a time intensive, tedious function. I think in many ways it’s better to be handled outside of the department, just from a conflict of interest point of view,” he said in an address to the Association for a Better New York.
Mamdani seized on the comments, calling out Cuomo for his notorious handling of the MTA while governor, including the notorious “summer of hell” transit service in 2017, driving out beloved transit chief Andy Byford and using $5 million of the cash-strapped agency’s funds to bail out upstate ski resorts.
“We’ve seen what Andrew Cuomo’s control over the MTA has resulted in for New Yorkers; he delivered the most expensive single subway mile in the history of the world,” Mamdani told reporters, referring to the long-delayed and overbudget Second Avenue Subway expansion.
“He defunded the MTA to send money to upstate ski resorts. He presided over the ‘summer of hell’ — and did all of this while denying that the state had any control over the MTA,” Mamdani railed.
Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi fired back at Mamdani, hitting the 34-year-old assemblyman over his thin political resume.
“Mamdani hasn’t even got the experience to run a coffee shop, much less the MTA,” Azzopardi said.
“Gov. Cuomo built projects that politicians have spent decades talking about.”
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