New York City is crumbling under failing schools, surging homelessness, and unsafe streets. But Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, in his time as a state legislator, decided to sink the state even deeper—by wasting another $1.3 billion on ideological vanity projects with no measurable benefit for ordinary New Yorkers.
As a co-author of the so-called “People’s Budget” proposed by the Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic, and Asian Legislative Caucus, Mamdani has backed spending proposals that read more like activist wish lists than responsible fiscal policy. Every dollar demanded in the name of “equity” is a dollar stripped from basic needs—needs that millions of New Yorkers, especially working-class families, continue to go without.
Take, for example, Mamdani’s push for an $8 million recruitment and training initiative to make New York’s teachers “more diverse.”
The irony here is hard to miss. In New York City’s public schools—the largest district in the country—Black teachers already make up roughly 42% of the workforce, despite the city’s Black population being only 22%. The goalpost for “representation” has shifted away from proportionality and toward performative politics.
What Mamdani labels as reform is, in practice, just another unnecessary layer of bureaucracy driven by race-based metrics instead of educational ones.
Mamdani’s caucus also proposed spending $250,000 to promote “racial and cultural inclusivity” in K–12 classrooms—without ever explaining how this helps students learn to read, write, or do math. Another $351,500 was allocated for conventions supposedly designed to help “underrepresented” educators, which is another way of saying the funds will go toward political networking events with no tangible classroom results.
Mamdani also supports an additional $8 million for a Fair Housing Testing Program—money that would go toward “paired testing” for housing discrimination that is already illegal under both state and federal law.
New York already invests billions in housing and tenant protection. If discrimination occurs, there are legal pathways for enforcement. This new testing program is redundant and unnecessary.
Meanwhile, New York City continues to face a staggering homelessness crisis. That $8 million would be far better spent building shelters or expanding emergency housing than funding an academic experiment in bureaucratic redundancy.
One of the largest items in Mamdani’s wish list is the $1 billion proposal for climate mitigation and adaptation over five years. This includes $75 million for electric school buses and another $80 million for centralized procurement of zero-emission buses and infrastructure.
Hellbound and Down 