Reflections from 17 months spent working to get New York City to pay its nonprofit partners on time
Last November, at the SOMOS conference in Puerto Rico, where New York’s elected officials, agency leaders and nonprofit organizations gather each year to talk about the future of the state and city, a veteran government executive, who takes pride in her arcane procurement expertise, pulled me aside.
“You’re not a procurement expert,” she said.
I was offended. By then I had spent years leading some of the City’s largest procurement-related management initiatives: clearing billions of dollars in delayed contracts, coordinating citywide nonprofit-contracting reform, and serving as executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Nonprofit Services (MONS). Procurement had become the defining issue of my professional life. Who was she to tell me I wasn’t an expert?
But she was right. I am not an expert on procurement. New York City already has thousands of them: attorneys, budget analysts, contract managers, auditors, spread across dozens of agencies, who understand the intricacies of the City Charter and the Procurement Policy Board Rules far better than I ever will.
Government’s problem was never a shortage of expertise. It was getting all that expertise aligned and moving in the same direction.
That idea shaped how I thought about one of the City’s most stubborn, least glamorous problems: paying the thousands of nonprofits that regularly deliver $15 to $20 billion worth of essential human services on behalf of the City each year. Shelters where individuals and families without access to a home bed down. Meals for older adults. Legal aid for immigrants. After-school programs. Mental health counseling.
After decades of inaction, the City finally moved. During the 2021 transition, Mayor-elect Adams and Comptroller-elect Lander convened a task force. Six weeks into their terms, Adams and Lander released their findings under a pointed title: “A Better Contract for New York: A Joint Task Force to Get Nonprofits Paid on Time.” The City, Adams admitted, had not been “holding up its end of the bargain.” It was still climbing out of the pandemic, and nearly $12 billion in nonprofit contracts sat unregistered. The City, as thousands of providers will attest, cannot pay a provider on an unregistered contract, even when the provider is already providing the services and incurring the costs, and no matter how badly a provider needs the money.
To cope with this, providers delayed hiring. Executive directors spent their weeks negotiating bridge loans instead of running programs. Staff worried about payroll while still showing up for people who could not afford an interruption in care.
Everybody blames the rulebook
For those who rolled their eyes and gritted their teeth, the instinctive explanation for the problem was always the procurement system itself: too many rules, too much paperwork, too many approval steps. There is truth in that. New York’s contracting system reflects decades of efforts meant to protect taxpayer money and guarantee fair competition, and to some extent, these rules act as roadblocks — both to a seamless process and corrupt actors.
In 1989, the New York State Commission on Government Integrity spent a year investigating the City’s contracting system and published its findings under a title that, let’s just say, is apt: “A Ship Without a Captain.” The commission found a system that was, in its own words, “a crazy quilt of inconsistent policies and procedures,” chaotic enough to scare off vendors and invite corruption. But tellingly, when it came time to recommend fixes, four of the commission’s five recommendations were not about process at all. They called for a nationwide search to recruit real procurement experts, a deputy mayor whose sole job was owning the reform, a chief contracting officer in every agency, and serious training for the staff already doing the work. Only the fifth recommendation touched process itself, and even that one was about who got to review what, not which form they filled out.
A commission staring straight at chaos still concluded that the fix was mostly about people.
I came to essentially the same conclusion in 2022, when I ran the City’s Clear the Backlog initiative. To attack the nearly $12 billion dollars in unregistered contracts, we did not rewrite a single rule or add a single form. Rather, we asked commissioners to assign a point person who would lead their agency’s charge, gave them a deadline, tracked their data every week, and made sure City Hall was visibly watching the whole time. After the 12-week sprint, we had unlocked $6 billion in unregistered contracts — real relief for providers who needed it months earlier.
Unfortunately, the progress didn’t stick. After the initiative, City Hall’s attention moved on, understandably, to pressing matters like the asylum-seeker crisis that would consume much of the next two years. Meanwhile, the nonprofit backlog crept back up, eventually climbing past where it had started, because the only thing that had ever been holding it down was people paying attention to it, and the people paying attention had moved on to something else.
That is when I started to suspect all of us in the policymaking class were misdiagnosing the disease. The procurement process was not delaying payments. People were. Not out of malice, but because each one was carrying out their essential role in the process. Budget analysts reviewed budgets. Attorneys reviewed contract language. Procurement staff checked compliance. Comptroller staff registered contracts. In the Clear the Backlog initiative, the same reviewers did the same work under the same rules, only faster, because City Hall was tracking their progress every week and everyone doing the work knew it. Once that attention moved on, the steps did not change and the people staffing them did not get worse at their jobs. They simply stopped being watched, and work nobody above you is tracking quietly slides down the list.
Anthony Shorris, the new head of the New York City Economic Development Corporation and a former first deputy mayor, said on a panel last fall: “The power of government comes from alignment. And you have to send those signals of alignment … we at City Hall have to send that signal what matters, what we’re trying to achieve.” Staff in any large bureaucracy read signals about what matters from what leadership is paying attention to, and for a while, City Hall was paying attention to something other than nonprofit payments.
We call this “bureaucracy,” as though it were some machine operating beyond anyone’s control. It is not. Bureaucracy does not answer emails. It does not build trust. It does not decide whether to pick up the phone and call a nonprofit back and help solve a problem.
People do.
What actually moved the needle
If the diagnosis was ownership, the treatment had to be too.
Flash forward to January 2025, when I was appointed to lead MONS, where we started by fixing who owned the problem. In January 2025, then-Mayor Eric Adams signed Executive Order 47 (thankfully repromulgated by Mayor Zohran Mamdani on his first day in office). It required every agency with substantial nonprofit contracting to name a chief nonprofit officer, someone whose job was, in part, to wake up each morning thinking about how nonprofits experience City government. Eighteen agencies now have one. It sounds bureaucratic. It is bureaucratic; that was rather the point. It turned “someone should really look into this” into an actual person who owned their agency’s relationship to its nonprofit providers.
Ownership needs a feedback loop. Beginning in 2025, MONS started running a quarterly Provider Sentiment Survey, essentially asking nonprofits a question government far too rarely asks the people it serves: How are we treating you? Scores climbed steadily. Government usually measures what is easy to count: contracts registered, invoices processed. This measured what actually mattered.
Then came the part that keeps people honest: a quarterly performance-management convening called ContractStat, which tracks key nonprofit payment indicators citywide and by agency and puts the results in front of people with the authority to fix them. In calendar year 2025, when ContractStat was launched, the City reduced its nonprofit contract backlog by 52%. Not by changing the process — but by paying attention to it, and to the people who have a role in carrying it out.
None of this works if the people doing the paperwork do not believe it matters, so we trained them, literally. I led contract managers and budget analysts through a customer service training built around treating nonprofits like customers instead of vendors. In a pretraining survey my team conducted, 40% of trainees viewed their job as customer service. Afterward, nearly 70% did — an increase of 29 percentage points. And in August 2025, the office held the City’s first Excellence in Human Service Delivery Awards at Gracie Mansion, honoring the contract managers and nonprofit staff who go above and beyond to deliver excellent service delivery to their clients. Some colleagues called the ceremony purely symbolic. They were right. It was symbolic. Organizations become what they celebrate, and we sent a signal that we celebrate excellence from people within the bureaucracy.
The hardest fix left: Council-allocated discretionary awards
None of this work is finished, and the numbers say so plainly. Over the four years of the Adams administration, the City’s nonprofit contracting backlog fell from $11.8 billion to $2.3 billion. Real progress, but there is much more work to do. Earlier this year, for the first time ever, MONS successfully led the push to add human service contracting indicators to individual agency chapters in the Mayor’s Management Report, the City’s operational report card. I invite you all to closely follow the City’s progress.
Before I go any further, a concession. In this essay, I argue that the focus should be on people, not process. I genuinely believe that as an overarching management principle. However, there is one place in nonprofit contracting where a process fix really is the whole answer, a silver bullet if ever such a thing exists in government.
By far, the single most common issue we tracked through MONS’s constituent service inquiries was not about the City’s largest contracts. It was about the smallest ones, and it fell hardest on the smallest nonprofits, many of which are new to City contracting.
At the start of each fiscal year, the City Council releases what’s known as “Schedule C”, which lists the nonprofit organizations that have been granted discretionary awards from the City Council.
These awards regularly make up two-thirds of the City’s nonprofit backlog because they are backlogged by definition: Schedule C comes out about the same day the services are meant to start. Then, after both the Council and the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services (MOCS) complete their consecutive (duplicative?) vetting processes, the lucky mayoral contracting agency (more often than not, the Department of Youth and Community Development) gets to start the registration process, which takes more than a year to complete on average and is largely no different for a $10,000 award than for a $10 million competitively bid contract.
In short, thousands of tiny contracts are consuming the same scarce administrative attention the City’s most complicated procurements need.
This fiscal year, the City piloted a fix: certain discretionary awards under $25,000 were processed as grants instead of contracts, cutting 13 steps out of the process. Under the grant model, which the Department of Cultural Affairs has been using for decades to process its Council-allocated discretionary awards, providers get paid 100% of the award upon grant agreement. Moreover, these grants no longer must go through the registration process required for higher-dollar, competitively procured nonprofit contracts. Expanding this model to all discretionary awards would take a huge chunk out of the City’s remaining backlog and would free up agencies to focus on more complex transactions.
Mamdani’s new Commission on Government Efficiency, led by the indefatigable Ann Cheng, attempts to bring a solution to nonprofit payment woes in its final report; unfortunately, it missed an extraordinary opportunity to formalize the grant pilot and give agencies the Charter authority to process Council discretionary awards as grants. As a result, the pilot expansion will be left to the whims of and ability to align internal bureaucrats both within the administration and at City Council to align on a path forward. That was a big mistake.
I think often about that conversation in Puerto Rico. The bureaucrat who told me I was not a procurement expert probably does not remember saying it. I do, because she gave me a gift: a reminder that expertise and leadership are different things. Government does not lack people who know the rules. What it has lacked, at times, is enough people who could see a clear signal from City Hall that this work mattered and that it was core to service delivery rather than an afterthought.
The longer I worked in city government, the less interested I became in fixing bureaucracy, and the more interested I became in helping the people inside it succeed. Because when enough people start working differently, the bureaucracy changes too, not because the rules disappeared, but because thousands of people stopped seeing themselves only as custodians of their own piece of the process and started seeing themselves as stewards of one shared job.
Bureaucracy was never the main thing standing in our way. It was mostly just people.
