Two Speeds of Government

Speed is the word of the summer in New York politics. In the city, Mayor Mamdani has made speed and efficiency a defining theme of his first year in office: his first executive orders included the creation of a SPEED task force to expedite affordable housing development. His Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE) set out to “find ways for our city to work smarter, faster, and more effectively for working people” (more on that below). And the administration recently launched its Public Interest Technology “PIT Crew” (which Mamdani announced, with characteristic showmanship, at a go kart track): four teams of in-house technologists building digital tools that government usually outsources. The first crew is already working with the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection on a portal so New Yorkers can escape hard-to-cancel subscriptions.

Albany is having its own version of this moment. Governor Hochul recently launched a “Regulatory Reset,” using an AI tool built with Stanford researchers to comb through 18 million words of state regulatory code looking for rules that are outdated, duplicative, or not worth the paperwork they require. The state says an initial wave of 50 changes across 22 agencies alone will save New Yorkers tens of millions of dollars and over a million hours of time a year.

These efforts reflect a welcome shift toward treating government efficiency as a prerequisite for delivering on ambitious policy goals. That shift, though, hasn't reached every corner of city government. Below, we look at a government running at two speeds: COGE, which just proved reform can move fast when the political will is there, and civil service hiring, where an equally fast fix already exists and still isn't being implemented.

As we’ve previously discussed, the Mayor announced a commission in May to explore changes to the city charter that would make government work better and more efficiently for New Yorkers. The timeline to get this done was intimidatingly short: ballot questions need to be finalized by early August, so the Commission had just weeks to hold ten public hearings across all five boroughs, release two substantive reports, and draft ballot language.

We jumped in, taking several policy recommendations from our abundance agenda and identifying specific changes to the city charter that would help achieve our goals. Our ten recommendations for the commission included creative ideas about workforce planning, centralizing permitting for housing and clean energy, streamlining procurement, expediting the ULURP for public infrastructure, property tax assessment, and more. Beyond submitting live testimony and sharing this memo, we met with Commissioners, published op-eds in Vital City and Searchlight, and held a COGE testimony training to help members of our community weigh in.

This week, the Commission issued their final report and proposed ballot questions, which we break down here:

• Question 1 streamlines the application process to use public space for ramps, planters, and outdoor dining. Today, applicants must navigate the DOT’s costly and confusing “revocable consent” process. This amendment would save applicants $1800 and two months of time.

• Question 2, along with reforms outside the charter, reduces paperwork for city contractors and requires quarterly meetings of the Procurement Policy Board (PPB). Contractors and vendors currently go through lengthy application processes and wait months to years to get paid. This amendment would simplify the pre-contracting questionnaire for smaller vendors, so that—as COGE points out—a hot dog vendor and a large commercial bank don’t have to answer the same questions. It would also require the PPB, which has no meeting requirement and meets infrequently, to convene quarterly, improving transparency and, hopefully, the timeliness of procurement policy decisions.

• Question 3 would expedite three processes related to city infrastructure: street safety projects, disposition of unused city land, and office leasing. Today, any bike lane or project affecting 1,000 consecutive feet of roadway or four consecutive blocks is classified as a “major transportation project” that requires consultation with four separate agencies. This amendment would simplify interagency consultation, speeding up street safety projects by 33%. It would also create an expedited review process (ELURP) for sales or leases of city land and transfers of air rights over city-owned landmarked properties (which currently require the city to meet more burdensome standards than private landlords). Finally, it would simplify the City’s multi-step office leasing process in similar ways.

• Question 4 would simplify building permitting by creating a single permitting hub. Currently, builders and renovators need 40 approvals from 18 offices and agencies before starting work. This amendment would keep the permitting processes within their current agencies but create a one-stop shop for builders to understand the sequence and status of the permitting process, saving time and headaches.

• Question 5 would require contributions to the rainy day fund to ensure sufficient budgetary reserves. The rainy day fund has existed since 2020, but the City has never had a required savings target or contribution formula for it. This amendment would require the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget, in consultation with the Comptroller, to develop a formula mandating regular contributions. The Commission’s report sets a target of holding 12% of the City’s tax revenue in reserve. It would also cap withdrawals the same way state law already does, requiring the Mayor to certify an immediate fiscal need before pulling more than half the fund.

We’re proud that four out of COGE’s five proposals were informed by our recommendations. We'd asked for sidewalk cafes and roadway dining to be merged into one application, flagged the PPB's infrequent meetings as a real problem, called for an ELURP-style process for public infrastructure, and pushed to centralize permitting within DOB—which earned us a direct citation in the final report's permitting section. We did not weigh in on rainy day fund contributions, but believe the proposal is a sensible one, especially given recent challenges with the budget deficit.

Of course, there are areas we wish the Commission had gone further. Each of our recommendations was more ambitious than where the Commission ended up; we wanted EV charging covered by the revocable consents amendment, not just cafes, and DOB empowered to update the construction code by rule rather than through the Council. Still, the Commission’s proposals are a solid start—and carefully balance ambition and likelihood of passage.

We also floated ideas that didn't make the ballot but did make it into the Commission's final chapter on future work—most notably our proposal for a five-year government workforce plan, modeled on the charter-required capital strategy, that would force the city to tie its hiring strategy to its actual policy goals.

We were grateful that the Commission cited this idea in their report, and we’re excited about what COGE can inspire beyond the specific ballot proposals. COGE has a symbolic role in this administration: it signals the Mayor’s seriousness about public sector excellence, and it is starting a long-overdue conversation about where government needs to get unstuck.

Speaking of civil service reform, it was recently reported that Mayor Mamdani will not opt into NY HELPS, a successful program started by Governor Hochul during the pandemic—and recently extended through 2028—to make it faster and easier to hire public servants.

Before jumping into the details of that program, it’s worth zooming out to review the state of civil service hiring in New York City. Despite a $125 billion budget, and frequent accusations of having a bloated public sector, the city is actually understaffed relative to the positions it has budgeted for. The result is slower, worse delivery of the services New Yorkers pay for and need. The city currently has nearly 13,000 staff vacancies, a combined vacancy rate of over 4%; in some agencies, though, the rate is significantly higher.

As NY Focus reports, “a 12 percent vacancy rate in the city’s housing agency has contributed to slower project reviews and increased building costs.” The Department of Homeless Services has a 20% vacancy rate, impacting the speed and quality of service delivery for New York’s most vulnerable population; the Department of Finance maintains a 12% vacancy rate, influencing collections and costing the city money. Recently, the Legionnaire’s outbreak on the Upper East Side has shown the life-or-death stakes of insufficient staffing; it’s been reported that the health department has only 35 water ecologists out of a budgeted 56, and 14 are stuck in the purgatory-like process of onboarding.

These persistent vacancy rates exist in part because of a well-intentioned but byzantine hiring system, originally designed to promote meritocracy, that now gets in the city's way. In a November Vital City piece, Robert Gordon and Gabe Paley walk through exactly how convoluted civil service hiring is—starting with how former Comptroller Brad Lander described the process of getting hired:

A noncity employee with appropriate qualifications must first wait for an exam period (which sometimes do not exist at all) to be advertised, qualify to take the exam, wait several weeks for their examination date and then again wait for a ranked list of test takers to be certified, which includes a time for a mandatory appeals process. Once the list is certified, only then can agencies begin assembling applicant pools, and they must start at the top of the list and call at least one in every three candidates, in order. The median time for releasing scores from an exam is 290 days. Including time for test development and hiring, city agencies must often wait well over a year to onboard qualified employees.

In other words, as Gordon and Paley put it, “hiring managers with vacant roles are only allowed to hire the top three scorers on the exam for the job they’re hiring for. Under this ‘Rule of Three,’ managers must regularly call individuals about tests they took years ago, often for jobs they never wanted. And then hiring managers can take weeks continuing one by one down the list until they find an interested candidate.”

Beyond the Kafka-esque application process, they detail how the system fails technologists specifically, from outdated titles (there are three types of “computer associate,” but no “software engineer” or “web designer” positions in city government) to policies that discourage bringing talent in from outside government. Ironically, the very system designed to prevent favoritism has resulted in a kind of incumbent protection that turns away fresh talent and stifles meritocracy.

In 2023, Governor Hochul launched NY HELPS (New York Hiring for Emergency Limited Placement Statewide) to address state government staffing shortages. The program modified qualifications for hundreds of state job titles, from waiving civil service exams to allowing hiring managers to consider equivalent experience as an alternative to college degrees. The Governor allowed counties and municipalities to opt into this program, and 52 out of the 57 counties outside of New York City opted in—resulting in the expedited hiring of 60,000 government employees.

New York City had an opportunity to benefit from this program—but under pressure (and a lawsuit) from public sector unions, Mayor Adams decided not to opt into NY HELPS in 2024. The Adams administration then worsened the city’s staffing issues by maintaining a “two out, one in” approach to filling vacancies (a result, in part, of chronic underbudgeting and misforecasting).

In June, the Governor announced she would be extending the program another two years—presenting a fresh opportunity for the new Mamdani administration to opt into the program. Unfortunately, the administration seems disinclined to join this program, despite a desperate need to fill vacancies.

Last week, we sent a letter to the Mayor, as well as the Commissioner of the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), urging the city to opt into NY HELPS. Signed by a coalition of leaders across housing, transit, technology, and good government, it underscores the importance of efficient public sector hiring across issue areas—and the centrality of this issue to the Mayor achieving his own agenda.

Here's how we made the case directly to him:

On the night of your election you said excellence will become the expectation across government, not the exception. We write to recommend one discrete action that could help you realize that goal: opt New York City into the State’s NY HELPS program and designate positions critical to your agenda for expedited, exam-free hiring. The State extended the program through June 30, 2028 recently, meaning the door is still open.

Too often, New Yorkers wait too long for services because the City cannot fill vacancies quickly enough. Nearly 13,000 positions, or roughly 4.2 percent, sit vacant citywide, well above the pre-pandemic level, with agencies central to your priorities—the Department of Buildings and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development among them—running vacancy rates above 10 percent. The hiring machinery cannot close that gap on the timeline your agenda demands. Roughly 80 percent of roles require one of 400 exams, some only offered every few years. Once an applicant takes an exam, they need to wait nine months to a year for the results. Then, once identified, it can take another nine months to onboard a candidate. Fast buses and your Block by Block housing plan will not move at the speed you promised if HPD, DOB, and DOT cannot onboard needed staff.

COGE shows what’s possible when there’s political will to modify the charter, making small but critical adjustments to land use processes and interagency consultation. NY HELPS shows the opposite case. Here, the fix doesn’t require a ballot question; it already exists, sitting unused, waiting for a mayor to opt in.

We’ll be leading on both of these issues. COGE’s five questions are on track for the November ballot; our job now is to galvanize popular support for them. On NY HELPS, we’re following up with DCAS in the coming weeks and looking at more permanent fixes at the state level.

New York City still runs at two speeds. It’s time to pick the faster one.