Progressives Need Good Managers, Not Idea People

I am worried about Zohran Mamdani. If you don’t know him, Zohran is a progressive New York City council member running for mayor with an ambitious platform that includes, among other things, eliminating fares on city buses, opening city-run grocery stores, and building 200,000 units of affordable housing. What worries me is not that these are bad ideas; what worries me is that there is no chance that he or the people who are likely to staff his administration will execute any of them well. This is for a simple reason: progressives are bad at management.

Politicians like Zohran run campaigns on the premise that existing government is woefully inadequate, and what is necessary is a slate of serious reforms and big new ideas. They do not run on the idea that current government programs are sound at base but hobbled by bad management. For example, Zohran’s website prominently features a pledge to build 200,000 new units of affordable housing but buries his relatively modest plans for NYCHA (double the city’s spending on renovations and increase staffing levels). Fighting for exciting new projects and reforms is what catches fire in organizations like DSA; working diligently to expose and solve specific bureaucratic bottlenecks and incompetence does not. For Zohran and his staffers, good management is simply not a relevant skill. Solving bureaucratic bottlenecks and incompetence, furthermore, means clashing with the public sector workforce—including unions—and weighing tradeoffs between pay, benefits, and pensions for public employees and delivering public goods and services cheaply and efficiently. It also means acknowledging some truth in the conservative critique of government, and that can be uncomfortable.

This is a shame because, at least in New York City’s case, the municipal government oversees a vast array of worthy programs that fall short of their potential. I used to represent poor tenants facing eviction, and a surprisingly large portion of my job involved helping my clients apply for or maintain some kind of public assistance. I had to do this for my clients partly because the process required some technical know-how and partly because some clients would not do the necessary work on their own,¹ but mostly because the people running these programs—that is, the ones processing the paperwork and disbursing the benefits—were colossally incompetent. Zohran’s website points out that CityFHEPS, a rental voucher for low-income tenants, has a utilization rate of 21 percent. (That is, out of roughly 50,000 eligible households that were invited to apply, just over 10,000 were approved.) This bespeaks serious bureaucratic hurdles to receiving benefits. Few people will brave a welfare agency when their experience resembles the worst aspects of going to the DMV. The linked report finds long application processing times (averaging ten months), poor data reliability, lack of landlord verification and other necessary program monitoring, and lax oversight of subcontractors.

Fixing CityFHEPS requires willingness to hold employees to account. It also demands the kind of technical work that makes for uninspiring campaign promises and that activists essentially never engage in. (This is not to blame the activists: doing activism simply isn’t the same as managing a large-scale bureaucratic enterprise.) Again, this is tremendously unfortunate. If CityFHEPS delivered benefits to more people, and did so quickly and efficiently, and did not arbitrarily stop payments because the people staffing it are stupid, that would represent a major progressive achievement—far more important than building city-owned grocery stores or subsidizing bus fares. And CityFHEPS is hardly the only program like this.

Mamdani—assuming he wins—will do very little to improve the CityFHEPS bureaucracy because he and the people he will appoint lack the necessary skill set. But the problem goes further. The lack of managerial skill will hobble most of his boldest proposals too. Does anyone seriously think that a city government that runs public housing that looks like NYCHA’s will be able to maintain a decent portfolio of grocery stores? I will bet anyone at better-than-even odds that within three years of their opening (if they ever open), they will be stocking rotten produce and plagued by operational problems. No one above the poverty line will shop there, and they will decay into another ambitious and neglected program that the New York City government has added to its budget—a budget that has swelled from $87 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars in 2015 to $112 billion in 2025 without producing much to show for it.

These are serious problems. They are serious problems even—especially—from the standpoint of progressives who want government to produce material improvements in people’s lives. Which is why it’s so disappointing to see almost no progressives taking them seriously, and why I find myself unmoved by progressive candidates’ bold visions for new public programs. I am even more disappointed by the progressive turn, in the face of these difficulties, towards simply giving up. Mamdani, for example, would rather spend huge sums of money subsidizing bus fares across the board than on improving bus service or building transit infrastructure. This, to be sure, reflects a certain set of priorities,² but I can’t help but see an implicit admission that Mamdani does not think he can oversee major improvements to the bus system.

Something has to give. For progressivism to succeed, it cannot continue to accommodate such inefficiencies in public spending. The public purse is not bottomless, and every dollar we allow bureaucracies to cannibalize—often for a negative payout—is a dollar that is stolen from the public and, in particular, stolen from the poor. The problem is that I don’t know that anything can give. The only recent city mayor with much skill at management (according to people I know in city government) was Bloomberg, and he was decidedly un-progressive. Given the dynamics, we may be forever doomed to choose, in the best case, between a moderate who runs things well but pushes no reforms³ and a progressive who pushes bold reforms that fail and decay alongside previous generations’ bold reforms.

1. This is a bit heretical to acknowledge in some circles, but poverty has cultural roots. For a meta-analysis, start here.

2. These priorities are also bad: low-quality and free is better than high-quality with user fees; welfare is better if it goes to everyone rather than only poor people; and welfare is better delivered by subsidies for specific goods and services rather than direct cash assistance. Progressive candidates’ poor understanding of tradeoffs in public spending is another mark against them.

3. NOT CUOMO. He’s also terrible at management, for different reasons.