Expert Advice for Mamdani’s Commission on Government Efficiency

How should COGE change the City Charter? Eight people who’ve seen it all weigh in.

Zohran Mamdani's Commission on Government Efficiency, known as COGE, has a deceptively modest mandate: put proposals on the November ballot that will speed up infrastructure projects, deliver city services faster and give agencies room to do their jobs. The harder question underneath is whether any of that is achievable — whether a big, blue, heavily regulated city like New York can be governed well, and whether the machinery of government can be bent toward a mayor's priorities instead of swallowing them. The commission expects working recommendations by the end of July and proposals before voters in November. That's a short runway for a large ambition.

So Vital City convened people who have actually run and studied that machinery up close. Moderating was our founder, Elizabeth Glazer, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw criminal justice policy for a New York mayor and governor. Around the table: Sarah Feinberg, who led New York City Transit through the pandemic; Robert Gordon, a federal budget and government-performance veteran; Maria Torres-Springer, a former first deputy mayor now president of the Revson Foundation; Polly Trottenberg, the city's former transportation commissioner and now dean of NYU's Wagner School; David Schleicher, a Yale Law scholar of city governance and finance; Michael Samuelian of Cornell Tech's Urban Tech Hub; and Carl Weisbrod, a veteran of city government — founding president of the Economic Development Corporation and head of the Department of City Planning, as well as a member of two recent charter commissions.

We weren't after consensus or a tidy reform agenda but unglamorous ideas that might really move the needle: the procurement fix, the data-sharing rule, the civil-service hiring fix. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript of the conversation.

Elizabeth Glazer: I almost feel we could spend the whole hour on today's news — the indictment of former Mayor Eric Adams' chief of staff, Frank Carone — and it bears directly on our topic, because it makes the questions at stake for COGE so vivid. Are blue cities governable? Can governance and operations actually drive a leader's priorities, or are we condemned to performance politics? And can anything make cities resistant to corruption, given the real price we already pay, in layers of regulation, for the pursuit of absolute integrity? The charter is hardly the only place to make a city more efficient, but it's where we'll start. David, take us in.

David Schleicher: My first question is simply: What problem is COGE addressing? I'd argue New York City government is, in many ways, the worst in America at translating tax dollars into services. It isn't true of every service, and the services aren't low-quality — but in terms of the tax price of services, New York is at or near the bottom. So one idea: build comparative effectiveness into the comptroller's audit function and every agency's reporting — require agencies to report how they're doing relative to other cities. Call it a pushback on New York's parochialism. Of course we're different — a costlier labor market, a costlier housing market — but forcing officials to ask whether they're doing as well as Philadelphia or Boston, and encoding that comparison in the charter, would make government study its own effectiveness. If the point is to show whether government is excellent, in Mamdani's word, that's where I'd start.

Elizabeth Glazer: So the charter is singularly lacking in any mechanism or standard for performance. David's idea fits a bigger question: how do you drive performance at all? Polly, you ran a capital-intensive agency — reactions?

Polly Trottenberg: Without passing the buck, I'd say that so many of the factors driving our costs sat a level of government above us. City and state procurement law drove much of the cost bloat, as did an extraordinarily convoluted, redundant oversight structure. So I wouldn't leave the report card only at the agency level.tI has to be owned at the city and state level too. I wouldn't want agencies hit with "Why aren't you as cheap as Boston?" — and I don't even know that Boston is cheap. "What can the Council, the mayor and Albany do to help city government operate efficiently?" is at least as deep a question.

New York City government is, in many ways, the worst in America at translating tax dollars into services.

Sarah Feinberg: I'm with David on where you get the most bang for the buck, and with Polly that if we try to solve it where it can't be solved, we'll just frustrate everyone. My idea is close to David's: be far more transparent about what the city spends and where the money goes — post the labor contracts, make them searchable, do a genuine deep dive on where specific taxpayer dollars land. And it's so rare to get something on the ballot. We don't get many bites at this apple, so we should ask what we actually want voters to see.

Elizabeth Glazer: Maria — as a former first deputy mayor who's held nearly every job — what do you make of how the city can drive performance?

Maria Torres-Springer: What I struggle with in every charter commission is that the charter can only do so much to fix very large problems. We should still spend time on tangible things that can go on the ballot. But the idea I keep coming back to is a recurring government capacity review — a charter-level mechanism to answer one question: can government actually deliver? We spend enormous time debating what government should do and far too little on whether it has the capacity to do it. There's precedent: a past charter commission created a racial equity commission and a cost-of-living index, setting a permanent management discipline in the charter. Could we do the same for capacity? Every four years, review and publish on our core operating systems — to my mind, procurement, workforce modernization, technology and capital project delivery. It wouldn't judge whether the policies are good; it would force government to say whether it can deliver, and to own plans to close the gaps. This isn't novel — the U.K. ran cabinet-level capability reviews starting in 2005, focused not on policy but on execution and management quality. The fair critique is that there are already too many plans and commissions, and I live that. But we measure so much in government — what we spend, where, how long it takes — and none of it tells us whether government is getting stronger or weaker.

Elizabeth Glazer: Put more flesh on it — take one area. What would you actually measure? And is every four years too slow?

Maria Torres-Springer: Maybe every three. Four at least guarantees no administration finishes a term without answering for its capacity to execute. For workforce, you'd track vacancy rates, time-to-hire, critical-skills shortages, retention. On capital delivery, schedule performance and cost overruns. On technology, legacy-system modernization and digital-service quality. You'd have to do the painstaking work of defining the measures and the staffing, and there isn't time before the end of July — so what goes to voters is the larger discipline, not the metrics.

Robert Gordon: I'd pick up on workforce, where there's a nearer-term item for voters: a body focused specifically on building the workforce to deliver for New Yorkers. New York is an outlier, and not in a good way. Vacancy rates are about double what they were before the pandemic. Time-to-hire for civil service runs 14 to 15 months from exam to job. The city still leans on dated civil-service exams for a huge range of white-collar positions, a restrictive "rule of three" that limits hiring managers, and thousands of job classifications — far more than other cities — which makes moving up needlessly complicated. And pay for jobs the city desperately needs isn't competitive. The usual fix is workarounds for your top priorities, which gets you those priorities but not a well-functioning city. A time-bound commission, with labor at the table, could get a lot done.

We spend enormous time debating what government should do and far too little on whether it has the capacity to do it.

Michael Samuelian: To build on Robert and Maria: How does the city embrace the gig economy? How many of your kids want to work anywhere for 30 years? We created the Urban Innovation Fellows program, placing talented people in government for two years — Cornell could hire and place them in four months, which is mind-boggling, because it's a workaround, and the city has relied on workarounds for two decades. When I worked for City Planning, I was hired through the Economic Development Corporation because City Planning couldn't hire me fast enough. Imagine a corps doing two- or three-year tours, like Teach For America for government — better talent, quickly and nimbly. And think about a digital-first charter: every agency offering a fully digital option, so no one's forced to show up in person. One more, from a report we put out five years ago — "tell us once" government: a shared database so residents aren't giving the city the same information over and over, which forces agencies to share data and strips out friction that falls hardest on the most vulnerable.

Carl Weisbrod: Maria and I may be the only two here who've run both a city agency and an off-budget agency, and the difference is enormous. An Economic Development Corporation's (EDC) ability to handle procurement and capital delivery simply doesn't compare to a city agency's — which is exactly why city agencies turn to EDC to deliver their capital programs, faster and cheaper. That's not about personnel; it's about process. So one big question is how you migrate the strengths of an off-budget agency into the on-budget ones. A lot of people here have touched on how: civil service and work-rule reform, and procurement change to the extent it can be done at the city level. The third goes to Maria's point about measurement — take the Mayor's Management Report (MMR) and give it real teeth. The MMR began in the 1970s, and it began with teeth: a permanent, essentially apolitical staff of technocrats who used it to reform agency processes. Today it tells us police or fire response times went up or down, and that's about it. It's used to report, not to manage — and the only way to change that is with serious, permanent staff that transcends administrations.

The Mayor's Management Report measures activity, not outcomes — it's like a lamp that isn't plugged in.

Polly Trottenberg: I'll be the procurement and capital-delivery person, since that's where I lived. People constantly said to me as transportation commissioner, "If only you could do what the School Construction Authority can do." My question was always: why can't I? Rather than slowly migrating powers to the other capital agencies, we should start from the premise that every agency should be able to procure and hire and do what an EDC or School Construction Authority can — and note both of those still have plenty of checks; they're not as freewheeling as you'd think. On the Mayor's Management Report: I think we track far too many things. My old agency had something like 80 indicators, and there were real perverse incentives in how they got tracked. The classic is miles of roadway paved: because you had to hit an annual target, it pushed my crews toward the roads easiest to resurface — which is why the Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) Drive went unpaved for years, since it took forever and cost five times as much. It's an important tool; I just don't want to fetishize it.

Elizabeth Glazer: It measures activity, not outcomes — it's like a lamp that isn't plugged in.

Maria Torres-Springer: The MMR tries to answer "What did agencies do this year?" rather than "What are the biggest problems, why are they happening, and what will we do about them?" To make it a management tool, it needs to focus on the real cross-agency priorities — if every administration named the 20 things that truly matter and explained why they weren't working, it becomes something a senior leader might actually wrestle with. And it still has to cover the plumbing: procurement, technology, workforce. Maybe the tool we already have just gets reformed rather than replaced — but there has to be a mandated review, so the plumbing isn't left to a few people's heroics.

David Schleicher: There have been two silos of ideas here: information-forcing and executive authority. On information-forcing — the MMR — two things. It should focus on outcomes, not effort: the greatest information-forcing tool the city ever produced is CompStat. Whatever the cheating around the edges, I know how many murders happen each day and whether they're rising or falling — that's good for the public, good internally, and it creates the right incentives. And it should focus on cost: how much are you spending to achieve these ends? On executive authority — what Carl and Polly raised — one idea, which I think was raised at a public meeting, is increasing the mayor's rulemaking authority: writing a strong, Chevron-style deference into the charter for rules created by city agencies, so courts can't as easily second-guess them. Two buckets, and you can design either one in different ways.

Carl Weisbrod: Polly's idea — taking all construction out of the city agencies, EDC and the School Construction Authority and putting it into one big construction agency, in effect abolishing EDC — would save the city enormous money and time, if it's run as a genuinely efficient entity. We don't appreciate how little we know about the value we get for our capital dollars. Putting it all in one place — which under current law would have to be off-budget, but mayor-controlled — would add real efficiency.

Elizabeth Glazer: It would also put every project in one place — $18 billion for jails, billions more for housing — so we could finally see what we're spending our capital budget on, and how we decide.

David Schleicher: It also hits something the transit-construction reports keep finding: agencies effectively taxing other agencies. The Marron Institute's report on the Second Avenue Subway found a huge share of the cost overruns came from inter-agency fighting over who's responsible for what.

Polly Trottenberg: The other bite at the apple is simply that whatever off-budget agencies are allowed to do, there's no reason on-budget agencies shouldn't. There's no underlying logic to the distinction — people accumulated all these complicated steps that, as the School Construction Authority shows, aren't necessary.

Carl Weisbrod: But that requires changes in state law on so many levels.

Polly Trottenberg: It does — and this is something I hit constantly at the Department of Transportation (DOT). A lot of it runs through Albany: civil service, procurement. I fought a lonely battle in Albany for years just to get the city a limited amount of design-build on bridge construction. A preposterous waste of time and energy.

Every agency should be able to procure and hire and do what an EDC or School Construction Authority can.

Maria Torres-Springer: That's where I'd push. When I was a policy analyst — my first government job — a construction commission recommended a super construction authority, so this idea is 25 years old. You'd have to believe whatever gets stood up off-budget would survive the Albany gauntlet and not end up a watered-down version only marginally better than the Department of Design and Construction (DDC). But built with the right tools and flexibility, it would obviate DDC and the separate construction arms of every agency.

Robert Gordon: The point about the powers off-budget agencies have, which the rest of government lacks, is powerful and true at every level. On the transportation thread: that Second Avenue report also has an extended discussion of reliance on outside contractors as a driver of huge costs — tied directly to the inability to hire inside government. You end up paying three, four, five times more for a contractor's time than to bring that talent in-house. That's both a striking fact and a rationale for fixing government hiring.

Polly Trottenberg: Picking up the Albany thread: I'd make a strong pitch for bringing Albany colleagues into this conversation. It's a great moment — the mayor arrives with a lot of popularity and influence. It isn't charter reform, but it would be the moment to circle back on procurement, capital projects and civil service. The city owns a piece and the state owns a piece.

Elizabeth Glazer: Let me put in my own two cents on the river running through several of these. There's data — the access within every agency to see where the problems are, whether it's serious mental illness or crime. The time spent hacking through a jungle of internal data-sharing agreements is absurd; it's been solved elsewhere. Another: Should the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issue a standing instruction that whenever money is set aside for a pilot, there's an assessment of how it went? Otherwise you get a barnacled accumulation of projects you can never pull back and never replicate. And one more: we spend billions settling claims, and no one ever asks what the Law Department is doing. Some kind of ClaimStat — do all those claims add up to systemic failure? — so the department isn't simply making the donuts.

Carl Weisbrod: You touched on OMB. I give it enormous credit for keeping the city's fiscal house in order for half a century. But it's also a priesthood, especially on the capital budget, which has never been properly analyzed from the outside. The starting point is always the baseline — there's no notion of zero-based budgeting on the capital side.

Elizabeth Glazer: A thousand percent. There's a micro penny-pinching that sidesteps the real question: what does an agency actually need to be effective, and are we allocating people and money to get there? OMB could be a real force for good.

Michael Samuelian: Agencies are not good at sharing data with one another, and we have a frontline view of forcing that sharing. Standardize the data, share it, and you can do almost anything with it. New York's open data law was ahead of its time on sharing data publicly, but it's been frozen in amber since. Marry that to David's point on the MMR and make it about service delivery: the MMR shouldn't be about the mayor; it should be about whether residents are getting services on time. We build our systems to protect bureaucrats, not to serve residents — we should be thinking about the user experience (UX) of government. And if someone successfully pilots a service, they should be able to sell it to other agencies immediately.

Elizabeth Glazer: It's all about the plumbing, and the charter is about the bones. So many of the results you want depend not on how one agency operates but on how agencies operate together — and cross-agency coordination is exactly where the performance work has to live.

Polly Trottenberg: One more on the Law Department. A huge source of payouts is trip-and-falls on sidewalks. At one point the Law Department wanted us to shave tree roots and patch bumpy spots. My answer was: can I see the data? — both for the places that genuinely needed repair and to spot patterns, certain neighborhoods or certain lawyers bringing trip-and-fall cases the city just settles. Their answer was, essentially, "No data." I was ready to roll up my sleeves and find savings — the city pays out hundreds of millions on these — but I couldn't without data. There's a desperate need for transparency and actionable data across city agencies.

Elizabeth Glazer: And think about bad-actor employees — the enormous claims now coming in, the assaults at Rikers, the police-misconduct cases, much of which might have been caught in advance.

David Schleicher: One theme here is that it's good when the mayor has more control and there are fewer rules — that's the separate-agencies point. But information can constrain as well as formal rules: requiring you to report on things is a different kind of check than making you follow complicated procedures. So there's a natural pairing — a more powerful mayoralty combined with strong information-forcing. You remove certain checks, but add ways for the public to do the checking. That's how a lot of governments work; Britain has both a lot of executive authority and a lot of information-forcing.

Polly Trottenberg: We keep picking on the Law Department, but the city does produce a lot of now-searchable information — I was there when we were aggressively digitizing and trying to make things findable.

David Schleicher: The city is actually one of the best in the world at producing information — crime data especially. That was one of the great Bloomberg innovations.

Polly Trottenberg: I wouldn't describe all of this as mayoral power. Some of it is, but a lot is just encrusted process and over-lawyering. Clearing that out doesn't let the mayor get away with more; it just makes things easier to do. I used to joke, though I meant it: if you wanted to build something major in New York and let the natural processes run their course, it would never get done — you had to be in hands-on problem-solving mode the whole way. It's less about giving the mayor grand new powers than clearing the gunk so he can do what he's supposed to do.

David Schleicher: But the gunk is legislative — it's laws passed by the legislature.

Polly Trottenberg: Some of it. Some is legal, some procedural, some City Council, some Albany.

Elizabeth Glazer: And Carl, and maybe many of you, would say that if you actually want to get something done as an agency head, you keep your head down and avoid City Hall.

The Council has nothing like a Congressional Budget Office to score legislation.

Polly Trottenberg: On policymaking, maybe — but to build a major bridge, City Hall mostly just wants you to do it competently. Let me toss in one more idea, picking up Carl's point about OMB: I have a student who wrote a piece on the City Council's unfunded mandates, and it blew my mind. The Council has nothing like a Congressional Budget Office to score legislation. At the federal level, contentious as it is, every bill gets a nonpartisan, permanent group of professionals doing its best to estimate long-term costs. The Council has nothing comparable.

David Schleicher: That might be the single best piece of civic infrastructure — and we lack it outside government too. You get occasional reports from the Citizens Budget Commission, but Washington has the Congressional Budget Office, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Yale Budget Lab, a dozen others. There's nothing comparable at the local level.

Polly Trottenberg: It's Tal Roded, one of my most brilliant students, who wrote it. It resonated because the Council passed the streets master plan, and I had to testify endlessly: you didn't give me the money, the people I could hire quickly or the facilities, you didn't clear the community-board process — and now you're mad I didn't deliver. That might be a charter reform: a serious, permanent, nonpartisan group, at the Council or city OMB, to score this. Social services is another area drowning in unfunded mandates. It's better for everyone to understand the math of what they're asking for, because too often they don't have to own it.

David Schleicher: You could do it inside an agency, or give it to one of the other charter entities — require the comptroller, say, to issue a cost report before any legislation passes. It's not strange to have an independent entity do the scoring, at some remove from the legislative process.

Polly Trottenberg: I have a lot of issues with how the comptroller's office is set up — it's highly politicized, and I don't think it's a good model. In other governments, the financial-oversight agencies aren't run by people who aspire to run for president. It creates real political misincentives.

David Schleicher: Separate local executives are probably a bad idea in general — we arguably shouldn't have a comptroller or a public advocate at all. But if we're going to have them, we can at least give them real responsibilities, because right now they're jobs without clear purposes.

Polly Trottenberg: We do need serious scoring of city legislation; how you do it is the question. I won't claim the CBO produces fiscal discipline — we're the government with a multi-trillion-dollar deficit — but it produces fiscal knowledge. People find ways around it, but to some degree they have to own what things cost.

David Schleicher: I agree. The hard question is whether a scoring agency sits with the mayor or apart from him — an executive agency or a legislative one. That's the complicated part.

Polly Trottenberg: Rereading the charter, I keep thinking: so many agencies, so many offices. Don't create anything new — merge some, and make better use of what you've got.

David Schleicher: One principle should be to make the charter shorter. Being efficient includes cleaning up the charter itself.

Elizabeth Glazer: Love it — the same way one way to reform the MMR is to cap it at 15 pages, no more than three results per agency.

Polly Trottenberg: For DOT, maybe you track 15 or 20, but 85 is goofy.

Elizabeth Glazer: Ridiculous. Thank you all — a rich discussion, and we'll torture you again soon.

Ideas that surfaced in this session

Comparative-effectiveness reporting. Require the comptroller's audit function and every agency to report their performance against peer cities, forcing New York to confront whether it's actually delivering value for its tax dollars rather than assuming its scale and complexity excuse underperformance.

Radical spending transparency. Post labor contracts and city spending data in searchable form so voters can actually see where their money goes.

Recurring government capacity review. Add a charter-mandated review (every 3–4 years) assessing whether government has the operational capacity to deliver — covering procurement, workforce, technology and capital delivery.

A workforce modernization commission. Create a time-bound commission, with labor included, to fix outdated civil-service exams, the restrictive "rule of three" hiring rule, excessive job classifications, and noncompetitive pay.

Gig-economy/rotational talent pipeline. Build a Teach-For-America-style rotational corps for short-term government tours, make every agency service available fully digitally.

Migrate off-budget agency powers to on-budget agencies. Since off-budget entities like the EDC and School Construction Authority can procure and deliver capital projects faster and cheaper than city agencies, extend those same procurement and hiring powers citywide.

Consolidate construction authority. Merge all city construction functions (EDC, School Construction Authority, agency-level construction arms) into one off-budget, mayor-controlled entity, an idea with 25-year-old roots in a prior charter commission proposal.

Reform the Mayor's Management Report. Give the MMR real teeth again by staffing it with permanent, apolitical technocrats (as in its 1970s origins); focus it on outcomes and cost rather than activity counts; and cap its length to avoid perverse incentives.

Create stronger mayoral rulemaking authority. Write language into the charter clarifying the precise role of agency rulemaking, reducing the ability of courts to second-guess executive rules.

Centralize data-sharing across agencies. Resolve the tangle of internal data-sharing agreements between agencies (e.g., on mental illness, crime) and standardize open data practices, which have stagnated since New York's early leadership on the issue.

Write an Office of Management and Budget pilot-program accountability rule. Require OMB to mandate an objective assessment whenever it funds a pilot program, preventing an unreviewed accumulation of one-off projects.

Create "ClaimStat" for the Law Department. Systematically analyze the city's legal settlement claims (which run into the billions) to detect patterns of systemic failure rather than treating each claim in isolation.

Move to zero-based capital budgeting. Challenge OMB's practice of always starting from prior-year baselines on the capital budget.

Create an independent legislative cost-scoring body. Create a permanent, nonpartisan entity — modeled loosely on the Congressional Budget Office — to score the fiscal impact of City Council legislation before passage.

Shrink and consolidate the charter itself. Rather than creating new offices or commissions, merge redundant existing ones and shorten the charter document as a matter of principle, treating textual bloat as its own inefficiency.