Mamdani Betrays Inaugural Promise in Failure of Public Accountability

“I promise you this: If you are a New Yorker, I am your mayor. Regardless of whether we agree, I will protect you, celebrate with you, mourn alongside you, and never, not for a second, hide from you.” —Zohran Mamdani, inaugural address, January 1, 2026

The buses may not be free yet, but talk is still cheap.

Now approaching eight months into his tenure as New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani has frequently insisted that he wants to be a mayor for all New Yorkers, but when it comes to those who lost City jobs under the 2021 COVID-19 vaccine mandates, his unspoken message has been “I didn’t mean you.”

The day after Mamdani was elected, outgoing mayor Eric Adams made a surprise announcement: Things had changed, he said. It was time for the fired workers to come back, without having to sign away their rights in legal waivers, as reinstatements had required in the past. They would have a “right to return” to their old job titles and salaries.

The Adams administration got the ball rolling by proposing a personnel rule change required for some of the workers to come back. The Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) held a virtual hearing about it on November 19. More than 244 people attended, and many workers testified.

Union leaders representing FDNY firefighters and EMS workers called in to back their reinstatement. Phyllis Inserillo, chief of staff for City Councilwoman Joann Ariola, showed up to say the City should take it further and bring back workers who had been forced to resign and retire early.

The hearing was meant to be a prelude to sending the proposed rule amendment to the state Civil Service Commission in Albany for approval, a step required by state and city rules, along with the approval of the DCAS commissioner and the mayor.

That step was never taken. Mamdani took office, and Adams DCAS commissioner Louis Molina was replaced by Yume Kitasei. The workers, who had been instructed to email their former agencies to request reinstatement by December 5, waited. And waited.

One large group of former workers didn’t need the rule change to be reinstated. Teachers and other former Department of Education (DOE) employees fell under different employment rules and could in theory be reinstated under the Adams offer right away. They too sent their emails by December 5 and waited. DOE acknowledged receipt of the emails. Then nothing.

Share

On January 12, Oren Barzilay, then president of the union representing FDNY EMS workers and fire inspectors, took City Hall to task for letting the reinstatement process languish, urging the Mamdani administration to prioritize it.

At a January 15 press conference, a journalist from Cafecito Break asked Samuel Levine, Mamdani’s new Department of Consumer and Worker Protection commissioner, if he would be addressing the workers who wanted their jobs back. “We are going to work throughout the year during my tenure, and I know the Mayor’s tenure, to make New York the most worker-friendly city in the United States,” he declared, sidestepping the actual question.

On January 19, I asked the mayor himself about the reinstatement offer at a press conference in the Bronx. Would he expedite sending the rule change to Albany? Would he expedite the reinstatement process? Would his administration let workers who had met the December 5 deadline to request reinstatements know when they would move forward? “I appreciate you flagging this issue,” he responded, as if it was the first he was hearing about it. “This is something that we’ll follow up on.”

He didn’t. Mayor Mamdani did not follow up, did not send the rule change to the Civil Service Commission, did not advance the reinstatement process, and did not give the New Yorkers who were waiting an ETA. He did not communicate with the former teachers and firefighters and EMTs who were waiting tables and painting houses to make ends meet, wondering if the City might actually give them back the careers it had cut short because they wouldn’t take the shot.

Mamdani did not follow up, and his administration did not reply to subsequent inquiries from Firsthand Media about the status of the rule change and the reinstatement process. Councilwoman Ariola’s office responded, though, when I asked if they knew anything about the status of the reinstatement process. Ariola herself had brought it up with Mamdani during a December call, they told me, before he even took office. Apparently he and his administration knew all about it when questioned in January. They were just giving any press who asked about it the brush-off.

Months passed. Nothing happened. I checked in periodically with DCAS and the Civil Service Commission to see if there was any movement on the rule change, and always got the same reply: No update at this time.

Then last week, a bunch of firefighters and EMS workers who had been terminated by FDNY finally got an email response from the department:

The proposed rule hadn’t been withdrawn, but FDNY was effectively declaring the Adams reinstatement offer dead. I can only speculate as to why, since the department spokesperson wouldn’t explain it to me. Either FDNY has been told the rule change will never happen or they just read the writing on the wall and decided to get real with their former employees and let them move on.

Here’s what the writing on the wall says:

If one year after the date of the public hearing held to consider approval of a change of a rule of the commissioner of citywide administrative services (as provided for by section 20 of the New York State civil service law) either the commissioner of citywide administrative services or the mayor of the City of New York or the state civil service commission has not acted upon the matter, the resolution shall automatically be deemed withdrawn . . .

That’s from the personnel rules DCAS was following when they held the November 19 hearing. It means the proposed rule change will automatically expire in a few months. It can take that long for the Civil Service Commission to get through the approval process once they’ve received a proposed rule amendment from DCAS. DCAS itself is no longer even responding to my inquiries about the rule change with a “no update” message. Now I just get good old-fashioned stonewalling when I ask for a status update.

Undaunted, the affected workers have made their own effort to communicate with the mayor about the reinstatement offer. On July 27, they sent this open letter to Mayor Mamdani, requesting a meeting:

They tell me he hasn’t written back yet.

It would appear that the Mamdani administration is just running out the clock on the proposed personnel rule change so that after November 19 the Adams reinstatement offer will be invalid for all of the workers who required it. For those that didn’t, the former DOE employees, there is simply no path to reinstatement.

They no longer have access to the department’s internal job market, and the vacancies they left have long since been filled. The DOE would need to actively find positions where they could be reinstated to their previous job titles and salary levels to follow through on the Adams offer. They’re not doing that, and like the mayor and DCAS, they’re not talking about it either.

Share Firsthand Media

It looks a lot like Mayor Mamdani and his administration have decided to just hide from any pesky questions about reinstatement from reporters and New Yorkers who were promised a “right to return” to work, until the proposed rule change expires and the issue goes away. It probably seems pretty easy to sweep under the rug. After all, none of the dozen or so major news outlets that covered the Adams announcement in 2025 have followed up in 2026 to report on how things turned out.

Of course, that’s just how things appear. As a reporter, I don’t want to make claims I don’t have evidence for, and I have no evidence since my inquiries go unanswered. All I know is that whatever is going on behind the scenes, the result is a failure of public accountability and government transparency.

But it’s possible the mayor has just been tied up with other business and will rectify the situation before time runs out. He is obviously a busy man, weighing in on international law, developing new grocery stores, and putting out documentaries. It’s possible there just hasn’t been room on the mayor’s calendar to follow through on a promise made by the mayor of the City of New York to a group of New Yorkers who spent years of their lives serving the city. Maybe he’ll find an opening soon.

In the meantime, advocates for those New Yorkers have things to say:

Oren Barzilay retired recently as union president, but after hearing about the FDNY email, he commented on the City’s inaction on the reinstatement offer:

The city's refusal to change its position is shameful. They know firsthand that doing so would be an admission of guilt and an acknowledgement of wrongdoing by both the Adams and de Blasio administrations. As time passes, it becomes increasingly clear that this was an abuse of power by our leaders.

The COVID-19 mandate was a massive fraud that caused far more harm than good, allowing some to enrich themselves while no one is held accountable. No one should ever be forced to put something into their body against their will just to keep their livelihood.

Politicians pushed these ridiculous rules to outplay one another, and humanity paid the price. As a result, people lost their dignity, homes, families, and livelihoods, some lost it all, their life.

City Councilwoman Joann Ariola also commented on the Mamdani administration’s failure to proceed with reinstatements and the FDNY email:

Eric Adams repeatedly failed our civil servants, and now Mayor Mamdani is continuing the failure by not moving this issue forward to the state civil service commission. The administration wants to simply pretend that these men and women who are still being impacted by the unjust vaccine mandates don’t exist, and it wants to move forward without them. But these are people who dedicated their careers to this city, and they deserve to be reinstated, not just brushed off and made to feel invisible.

I would like to know if other agencies also received the email informing employees that there “is no mechanism” to return them to work as the FDNY members did, or if those other civil servants are still waiting in limbo.

And Matt Connor from Bravest for Choice, the organization that advocates for FDNY workers adversely affected by the mandate, had this to say:

Last week, at least six former FDNY employees received an email response to their most recent request to be reinstated to their jobs after being terminated for non-compliance to the COVID-19 Vaxx Mandate nearly five years ago. These most recent requests were made by members of Bravest For Choice, reflective of the ongoing opposition to the illegal terminations in question, and of the coordinated effort to reverse the outcome. The requests were submitted more than eight months ago in response to the “Right To Return” policy announced by the defeated and outgoing mayor Eric Adams, whose administration had been fighting tooth and nail in court to obstruct our efforts to reverse the mandate and its fallout. However, Eric Adams never followed through by sending the DCAS Rules and Regulations language to the NYS Civil Service Commission for an approval vote, which would create a return pathway for uniformed members of service, since they have been separated for more than one year. We can only speculate as to why Adams never sent the rule change for a vote: one last knife twist into the backs of “the unvaccinated” on the way out the door, administrative incompetence, PR rebranding as an advocate for labor, an effort to distance himself from the crumbling lies of the COVID era?

Speculation aside, the failure of the Adams administration to follow through on their own policy announcement has left the fate of the DCAS Personnel Rules and Regulations change referral in the hands of our current mayor, Zohran Mamdani. While still on the campaign trail, he was interviewed on the Finest Unfiltered Podcast and told NYPD (ret.) Lt. John Macari that he would not reinstate members terminated under the mandate. The communication received by Bravest For Choice members last week is significant because it is the first indication from the Mamdani administration that it will keep its campaign promise. The author of the email, Stella Xu, the FDNY’s Chief Workforce Strategist, who serves under the Deputy Commissioner of Human Capital, Barbara Dannenberg, apparently sees no irony in dismissing the collective human capital of these members who stood up against an illegal mandate after years of committed service, and remarkably still wish to serve the people of New York City after nearly five years of torment perpetrated by their former employer. The dismissive response feigns empathy, and on its face contradicts the “right to return” that was promised to these members.

The FDNY response, albeit belated, is at least an acknowledgement of the request, which is more than any other city agency has done, and the Office of the Mayor remains silent on the issue, failing to follow through on its promise to circle back. The incoherent position the City of New York on vaxx-mandate reinstatements stands in stark contrast to the progress that has been made at the federal level with the recent efforts by the Dept. of War to acknowledge the mandate as unconstitutional, offering an apology, back-pay, and incentive for those who wish to continue service. Bravest For Choice will continue to advocate for the reinstatement of these members and all former employees of the City of New York terminated for non-compliance. We are seeking parity with the terms of the military reinstatements as we continue to call for a COVID reckoning that is long overdue.