How Things Really Get Done

New York City mayors get the most glory and the biggest headaches, but they don’t govern alone. Supporting every successful mayor (and every struggling one) are deputy mayors whose job is to translate vision into reality, manage crises, negotiate with Albany, wrangle the budget and ensure the massive machinery of City government is actually accomplishing the people’s business. 

Though incredibly powerful, the job of deputy mayor is largely invisible to the public. Most New Yorkers couldn’t name a single one from any administration. Yet these are the people who actually run the City, who generally decide which problems get attention and which get deferred, and who ultimately determine whether ambitious policy goals become operational realities or remain just aspirational rhetoric.

With New York soon to be led by a 34-year-old legislator with no direct experience in the executive branch, we gathered four veterans of City government — Stan Brezenoff (deputy mayor under Ed Koch), Marc Shaw (budget director and first deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg), Meera Joshi (deputy mayor for operations under Eric Adams) and Maria Torres-Springer (first deputy mayor under Adams) — to distill their hard-won lessons. Their advice is candid, practical and occasionally sobering. 

Here is what they told us about how to govern New York City — not in theory, but in practice. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Vital City: Imagine Zohran Mamdani comes to you. You have 10 minutes to give him your insight on the most important thing to understand about governing the city. What do you tell him?

Marc Shaw: To me, the most important thing is to understand Albany. Running the City, you need to understand how Albany works because it’s where policy and budget decisions get made. All the things he is fighting for require cooperation and working with Albany. Having an Albany strategy is probably the most important thing for implementing the specific agenda items he’s run his campaign on.

Maria Torres-Springer: I would remind him that personnel is policy — that an administration’s success hinges not just on whether you hire and retain the right people, but whether they are in the right formation and empowered to advance an agenda. That’s about agency heads and deputy commissioners. It’s about relying not just on the heroics of a handful of people but on systems that allow those individuals to do their best work over a long stretch of time.

VC: Can you talk about the last few mayors and how that worked well and where it didn’t?

Torres-Springer: For me, the ball game is all about reducing friction among people trying to advance the agenda. A structure, where the chain of command is clear. Everyone knows what they are accountable for because governing is not an episode of “The View.” You can’t just have 20 people chiming in. It all has to be about forward motion.

The Bloomberg administration set a standard for hiring the best people and then empowering them to do their work, even if sometimes that means you fail. The de Blasio administration modeled a way of structuring so that priorities are clear. It was always exceedingly clear what Bill de Blasio wanted to get done, which allowed everyone to mobilize around it.

Meera Joshi: The first thing is really about the money. Follow the money, because there’s no policy or service that will come to fruition unless there’s funding. Hiring your OMB (Office of Management and Budget) director is the most critical thing that has to happen.

Second, hire subject matter experts. They can sometimes be hard to bear because the facts and the policy don’t actually align with what you want, and they’re giving you the sober truth. So it takes the fortitude to listen to the truth that experts are providing you, then the fortitude to follow through on those recommendations.

Who decides — the mayor or his minions?

VC: How does the mayor make clear what he wants final call on versus what he wants you to have final call on?

Torres-Springer: One of the most important decisions a mayor needs to make at the beginning is what the decision-making protocols are, because the volume of decisions is legendary in New York. You have to set up a system. In my mind, it’s the 51-49 types of decisions that go to the mayor. Over time, you want senior leaders who can make decisions that are aligned with your values, because if you have to be the daily arbiter of conflicts and decisions, that does not lead to forward motion of your agenda.

Stan Brezenoff: This mayor is going to face a pretty unique world. He is entitled to a high degree of paranoia because they will be out to get him. The only thing that comes close to this is the often brutal attention that David Dinkins had on criminal justice.

Secondly, this is a mayor who has no (preexisting) team. It’s hard to imagine that his years in the legislature in a small political enclave have given him even the beginnings of a large collection of steady, knowledgeable, experienced people with whom he shares values and approaches.

I think he has to strike first and early and go with his signature issues. Put together teams that will take on the mentally ill homeless, the criminal justice system, the expansion of pre-K and after-school. Hit the ground running, with clear evidence that you’re pursuing these things in time frames that can demonstrate seriousness and effectiveness. Honestly, this is a mayor who may not have a honeymoon.

Which priorities should take precedence?

VC: Does Mamdani stage these priorities — rent, childcare, buses, Department of Community Safety — or fire on all cylinders at once?

Brezenoff: On the issues you’ve raised, he should be firing on all cylinders at once. This is what has defined him in the campaign. They will give him no peace, and most of it will be nonrational, biased kinds of attacks. They are going to sensationalize and trivialize and divert the mayor and his key people from focusing on what’s truly important.

Shaw: Before you even get to priorities, the first issue he has to face is: What kind of mayor does he want to be? There’s the issue of being an inside mayor and an outside mayor. He’s a natural communicator — that’s his skill set. That’s going to help define what kind of people he brings into the administration.

The most important thing is to have a structure for how you’re going to run City Hall, who you’re going to have in charge of that. You have to separate the issues of running the day-to-day of City government versus going out and being the mayor who runs around town.

He’s going to have one good thing going for him: There’s right now a governor and two legislative leaders in Albany, and all three are very supportive of him. But the governor is going into an election year, and she’s already made clear her positions on taxation. So you have to start thinking about the finances of the City and the State from a multiyear perspective.

VC: What ought the next mayor’s posture be with respect to the Trump administration?

Torres-Springer: There’s both the art and the science. New Yorkers want to feel, hear and see that they have a leader who is protecting New York City values. Then there are the real nuts and bolts of defense — who the corporation counsel is, how you look at all the levers of government to defend the city, how the budget is going to work. You need to be able to understand how those numbers work and determine what the response is going to be, hopefully in consultation with the State.

Leave the possibility that there are areas for common cause. That might be heretical to some, but I think it’s important to also operate in that gear. It’s both about the defense and the offense, and they both have to be ready on Day One.

Joshi: We are intertwined with the federal government on so many financial aspects, especially with infrastructure. So there are two things that are important. One, who are your surrogates? Who are the businesspeople in New York who have relationships in D.C. and can advocate for New York City without Zohran Mamdani’s face on those conversations? And two, we have to partner with the red states that have the same problems as us. Texas has hotter summers. There’s flooding in red states. All of these things can bring us together on existential threats to work on getting more resiliency funding.

VC: Are there quick wins Mamdani could deliver to demonstrate that he gets the mechanics of governing?

Joshi: Street order is always important. He can leverage the good work that happened under the Adams administration and bring home some wins on scaffolding. That’s very visual. People see that, and everybody complains about it.

Shaw: There are no easy wins for saving money. Saving money comes from the really hard work of figuring out efficiencies in government. That happens when you understand your labor issues and how to deal with your labor unions. Because at the end of the day, the vast majority of money spent is on people’s salaries.

Torres-Springer: I’d like to make a case not for the quick wins, but for the hard wins. And by that, I mean fixing the plumbing of government. So many great ideas, bold ideas, crash into the machinery of government. The fixing of the plumbing — how you hire, how you procure, how you leverage technology — is the unglamorous stuff that takes a long time and a lot of painstaking work. But in my mind, it’s critical over time.

For example, the process for becoming a City employee is not for the faint of heart. At a time when a new mayor is coming in with a huge coalition of people who want to help and want to be public servants, the stumbling block cannot be that it takes too long to get hired. You commit to fixing it. That allows you to bring in the talent you need and retain them. Maybe government can finally be an employer of choice.

VC: How flexible should a mayor be on the how, not the what? We saw de Blasio wanting to do pre-K through a particular tax hike that the governor wasn’t willing to do.

Shaw: He needs to figure out how to move forward and show progress. But sometimes you need a multiyear mindset. I can’t imagine him getting the taxes in his first year, but I can imagine structuring something so that the taxes remain on the table in his second year.

I’ll give you an example from the Bloomberg administration. It was right after Sept. 11. Michael Bloomberg came into office, and in his State of the City speech said he wasn’t going to raise taxes that year. Fast forward: We raised taxes 18.5% on Jan. 1 of the second year, and it turned out to be an enormous success. 

Organizing for accountability and results

VC: What is good and bad about the current organizational chart at City Hall? Do we have the right number of deputy mayors?

Joshi: I do think we have more deputy mayor positions than we need in the current administration. I think of the deputy mayor as the person who is driving the priorities at the agency level. Often, that manifests itself in weekly meetings with deputy commissioners, getting into the nuts and bolts and seeing where there are hiccups.

Every role has to have a purpose, and nobody should have a role where they have no one reporting to them. So “senior advisors,” those kinds of positions — if you can’t answer what purpose that role has, then it probably doesn’t need to exist. Mamdani’s going to come in with an unprecedented amount of pressure, and he’s following a one-term mayor. So anything that’s kind of working already, my advice is to leave it alone. Keep moving. But I would certainly get rid of what I’d call accessory positions that have populated City Hall over recent years.

Brezenoff: The history of deputy mayors tells you a lot about the way bureaucracies can grow. In the early days of the Koch administration, there were more deputy mayors than secretaries in City Hall, culminating in a kind of Kochian night of the long knives in which many were removed through no fault of their own. Nobody could quite figure out what each one of them was doing.

It’s important for Mamdani to show that he is in control and to be very careful about retention. Because he is running as a change agent, retaining people means he has to be absolutely sure that they’re in accord with his vision and with his zeal to make change.

But if he’s careful in his most important selections — OMB, first deputy mayor, his economic development person — those people can help fill those gaps. Just a quick anecdote: When I went back to government to improve the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, I applied a model to each of the hospitals that looked at the numbers of vice presidents. I found across the system between 75 and 100 individuals. We couldn’t figure out what they were doing. And ultimately, I’m the only person who convinced de Blasio there is such a thing as a good layoff.

I think it’s really important that in the transition, you press hard on the Adams people to be very restrained in hiring anyone on their way out the door and even employ a kind of hiring control board. It’s a good message to send for a guy who’s running on ideology to demonstrate some toughness here.

Parting words

VC: You gave a lot of affirmative advice. What negative advice do you have, if you had to crystallize one “Don’t do this” for Mamdani?

Joshi: Don’t give away your power. This is a huge CEO job. The temptation to be pressured into saying yes becomes a floodgate. Whereas having the strength to say no allows you to retain that power, and at the end of the day that is your greatest tool. Externally, be prepared to disappoint. There are going to be elected officials and people who supported you on the campaign that you cannot please. And that’s OK. Because if you start focusing on pleasing them, you’re going to give away your power.

Shaw: Don’t try to run City Hall. First and foremost, because you’ll spend your whole day there, and that’s a mistake. You need to be an outside person. This guy is a natural outside person. He should do that. When I first came to New York from Albany, Stan Brezenoff and his relationship with Paul Dickstein were my role models. Ed Koch didn’t make all those decisions every day. Stan Brezenoff did, and he did it with his budget director. New York City is an enormously complex place to run, and this guy’s coming in with very little experience. He needs to find somebody he’s comfortable with that he can delegate to and have a strong deputy mayor structure.

Torres-Springer: Don’t mistake activity for direction. Because the job can happen to you. If you don’t have clarity of vision and you don’t make sure your team has a maniacal execution of the things that are important to you, it’s easy for the job to just swallow up your time, which is the most valuable currency of a mayor.

And the second thing is, don’t sleep on culture. A big part of a mayor’s success will be whether he can actually create what I’ve described as a kind of low-drama City Hall where it’s very clear from Day One that what is prized is quiet, effective execution and not political theater, not game-playing, not obsession with intrigue. Set a tone from Day One about what is valuable, what is prized and what won’t be tolerated.