Speaking at the Urban 20 Mayors Summit, Zohran Mamdani complained that government “efficiency has been taken on as a right-wing concern” — with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency as the vile example. Ceding that ground, he argued, is what actually assists the right. Liza Featherstone’s Jacobin piece takes the argument seriously and follows it through the Mamdani administration’s own version of the idea: a charter commission called the Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE).

What COGE is actually doing:

  • A charter commission whose amendments go before voters in November, drafted with ten public hearings across the city
  • Aimed at shoring up the city’s rainy-day fund and cutting red tape in new construction, procurement, city property use, and street safety
  • Part of a wider 2026 record: a chief savings officer in every city agency, fifty-plus reforms to help small businesses, a technologist team to make city services easier to reach
  • Explicitly built in contrast to DOGE — city workers are treated as partners in efficiency and its best experts, not as the enemy of the public good

The political logic is the interesting part. Mamdani will eventually have to ask more of the citizenry, and he will need to raise taxes — certainly on the superrich, probably also on single-family homes, which are vastly undertaxed in New York. As former Citizens Budget Commission president Ray Horton puts it, if the mayor can show he is improving municipal services, the argument for higher taxes becomes much easier to make.

There are real tensions the piece doesn’t hide. Much of the agenda is granular — an entire amendment simplifying outdoor dining permits — while hundreds of pages of municipal contracts complicate things like education, and none of that gets addressed until union bargaining next year, when the socialist mayor becomes the boss across the table. Meanwhile, commission member Susan Kang worries the left underestimates the stakes: the ballot measures will be read as a verdict on whether left governance can be effective at all.

Mamdani’s own framing is the one worth keeping: “The smallest concerns are oftentimes the most important concerns, because that is where you can build those early blocks of trust.” Eighteen months into a socialist mayoralty, efficiency is not a concession to the right — it is the precondition for everything else.