Tascha Van Auken runs the operation. On January 2, his first business day in office, Zohran Mamdani signed an executive order creating the Office of Mass Engagement and installed Van Auken, the DSA organizer who built his campaign field machine, as its commissioner. The machine she built: 100,000 volunteers, 3 million doors knocked, 4.5 million phone calls. City Hall’s own press release promised she would bring “the same urgency, discipline, and principles” to government. The same operation. Different letterhead. The taxpayer now covers the rent.
The office costs $53 million a year. This is not an engagement office. It is a political machine with a city seal, and the evidence is in the city’s own documents.
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EXHIBIT A: THE ORG CHART
The executive order consolidates existing city offices under Van Auken’s command, including the Public Engagement Unit, NYC Service, the Civic Engagement Commission, and the office that handles the faith communities, along with City Hall’s ethnic and community media operation. One commissioner. One political organization. Every official channel between the mayor and a community’s newspaper, clergy, and civic leadership.
Then the job postings. The office hired “Campaigns Directors,” on the city payroll, at $140,000 to $150,000 a year. The word campaign appears in the taxpayer-funded job title. There is also a deputy director of “co-governance,” a $150,000 post built around a term that appears nowhere in the city charter and everywhere in DSA’s organizing documents. Van Auken’s salary is $250,000.
Headcount went from 14 to 40 in roughly a month. The original payroll estimate was $1.6 million. The actual figure: $5.1 million. The City Council spent this week asking what “political guardrails” exist around the office. The hearing was unnecessary. The guardrails are the politics.
What has the office produced in five months? Canvassing operations for the mayor’s rent freeze agenda. A political machine normally buys its reach with ads, mail, and organizers, disclosed in filings and paid by donors. This one broadcasts with the seal of the City of New York on every door knock, billed to the people being canvassed.
EXHIBIT B: THE COMMISSIONER’S OWN WORDS
Van Auken has stated the mission on the record: “We can and must play a critical role in defeating the Republican right and the neoliberal center.” The neoliberal center is the mainstream Democratic Party, roughly seventy percent of the city. The official who decides which community voices reach the mayor has announced that her project is defeating most of the community.
Her description of the job at the office’s launch: organizing participation “at scale” and building the relationships and systems, human and digital, that make long-term co-governance possible. Decoded: the office decides what counts as input, builds the loop, and the loop tells the mayor whatever the office puts into it.
EXHIBIT C: THE METHOD
Van Auken’s first deputy commissioner is Jagpreet Singh, a DSA member and former political director of the activist group DRUM Beats, one of the first organizations to endorse Mamdani. Singh is on video describing how community leaders were pressured to line up behind Mamdani: they had “no other choice,” and refusing would “end up being a problem.” From a campaign volunteer, that is hardball. From the number two official of a $53 million city office that controls a community’s access to City Hall, its press channels, and its faith portfolio, it is a business model.
The office’s first initiative, Organize NYC, was announced by the mayor with Van Auken at his side. Its first task: bringing tenant “feedback” to Rent Guidelines Board hearings. The office insists it is “not advocating for any specific outcome or position,” on behalf of a mayor whose signature campaign promise was a rent freeze. A city office run by one political party selects the voices, delivers them to an official proceeding, and presents the output as the will of the people. The office stands at both ends of its own feedback loop.
EXHIBIT D: THE FILTER, ALREADY RUNNING
The faith portfolio sits inside OME. The office’s official faith liaison to one million Jewish New Yorkers is Rabbi Miriam Grossman, a member-leader of Jews For Racial and Economic Justice and a veteran of Jewish Voice for Peace’s rabbinical council, whose record includes protesting outside Chuck Schumer’s house against military aid to Israel. Out of a million Jews, City Hall selected the rabbi whose career is built on opposing what most of them feel connected to.
At the mayor’s Jewish Heritage event, held after major Jewish communal leaders stayed away, the people who run the actual schools, security networks, and social services of Jewish New York stood outside. The activists who knocked doors for the mayor stood inside, holding the microphone, photographed as “the Jewish community.” A government office that decides which voices are legitimate has an older name: a censorship office. Every community in the city will pass through this filter. The Jewish community went first. We documented the JFREJ activist infrastructure behind this coalition in a previous investigation.
EXHIBIT E: JUNE 23
On June 23, NYC-DSA runs seven Assembly candidates and one state Senate candidate, what the chapter itself calls “the largest slate of socialists for a state legislature in history,” plus two congressional candidates, with campaigns multiplying donations through public matching funds. DSA does not endorse candidates; it staffs them. Its electeds coordinate through a body named Socialists in Office, and decisions are made in the chapter, not the district. The mayor confirmed the arrangement himself, telling an audience his signature free bus policy “was not my idea.” The ideas come from the organization. The officeholders deliver them.
Several slate candidates are not running for open seats. They are running to remove sitting Democrats whose offense is insufficient compliance. Every winner becomes another terminal of the machine that holds City Hall, runs the $53 million engagement office, and controls the official pipeline to every community’s media and clergy. Our full network map of the Mamdani administration’s DSA appointees shows how the terminals connect.
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