Meet Mamdani’s Biden Expats
Today, Zohran Mamdani will be sworn in as the 111th mayor of New York City. This would have been scarcely thought possible just one year ago. The spirit with which Mamdani organized and beat an avatar of the state political establishment—twice—sustained progressives during the long winter of 2025 and provided some hope that charisma, expert use of modern communications, and a laser focus on the cost of living could produce a winning formula.
But as campaigning shifts to governing, those skills in isolation are unlikely to enable Mamdani to solidify public goodwill. The experience of the past several years, with presidents of both parties, has reinforced that delivering tangible results that people can feel is the only thing that earns chief executives lasting support. Taking on fights and naming villains and demonstrating who you care about can get you far, but that must be accompanied by follow-through.
That reality makes Mamdani’s choices of people implementing his agenda quite interesting. Increasingly, he has turned to refugees from the Biden administration who (too quietly) carried out some of the more effective pieces of the former president’s agenda. New York City will have a Biden cabinet member in a deputy mayor role, and a top consumer protection official leading a local agency. Lina Khan, the former Federal Trade Commission chair, co-chaired Mamdani’s transition team and may have a role in his government; that is to be determined, sources tell the Prospect.
The more conventional trajectory for these kinds of public officials after a presidential term is congressional or statewide elected office, or in the worst-case scenario, a high-paying position at one of the entities they used to regulate. That these individuals would step down from the U.S. executive branch to municipal management speaks to how much left-wing populists want to help Mamdani succeed and are thrilled by a government that leads with concern for its working-class constituents.
“It’s something I really felt like I had to do,” said Julie Su, the acting labor secretary for nearly two years under Biden, who will serve in the new position of deputy mayor for economic justice, something she relished. “Not economic development, not economic growth. Justice! The idea that you can care about just outcomes is huge, and that it’s the responsibility of government to make that happen.”
The Biden expats have an important role in the Mamdani administration. Much of his first-term agenda, from universal child care to faster fare-free bus service, hinges on getting the necessary funding through higher taxes on the wealthy. Functionally speaking, that battle will be fought in Albany, against a skeptical governor and the bureaucracy of the legislature. But existing laws on the books give Mamdani the opportunity to make immediate progress through rigorous enforcement, buying time and building momentum for the bigger fights to come.
Take Sam Levine’s new role as head of the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP). Levine was the lead consumer protection official at Khan’s FTC, and since that ended he has engaged in research about the increasing sophistication of technology-fueled pricing, including an excellent report about how companies use loyalty cards to entice customers and scrape their data to use in maximizing profits.
No state in America has instituted a surveillance pricing ban, but New York has a just-implemented disclosure law that requires companies to admit when they use algorithms and personal data to set prices. Expanding those disclosures to the actual prices people pay and how they differ from one another could be powerful in provoking consumer demand for fairness. New York can also enforce anything deemed a deceptive practice, which could cover a wide range of price-setting and other behaviors. More critically, New York City has an “unconscionability” standard that can be activated through rulemaking. This underused tool could be put to use in a variety of ways, like cracking down on concession vendors at entertainment venues who exploit the lack of competition by jacking up prices.
Khan has been active in scouring old New York City statutes for options that can net Mamdani quick victories, as The New York Times has reported. That includes the unconscionability statute.
New rules would be subject to legal challenge, of course. But merely amping up enforcement for rules already in place would represent an advance. City laws requiring food delivery companies to properly pay and protect drivers, along with another law that took effect in June to bar brokers from charging exorbitant fees to find apartments for tenants, would be among those Mamdani is looking to enforce.
The current DCWP doesn’t announce its consumer cases unless there’s a major resolution. In a year-end release, the current DCWP commissioner acknowledged that the city recovered nearly three times as much restitution for worker violations as for consumer violations over Eric Adams’s four-year term. There’s room for stronger enforcement, in conjunction with other state agencies like the New York attorney general’s office and the state Department of Financial Services, which has a large portfolio of consumer financial protection laws.
In her role, Su would oversee the DCWP, as well as the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission, some small-business initiatives, economic development efforts, and even management of one-time events like the World Cup matches coming later this year. The idea is to put working people at the center of these efforts, ensuring that they share the benefits of a thriving economy. “New York City can present an alternative vision in which economic growth and economic justice go hand in hand,” Su said. “That’s only a radical notion because we’ve become so accustomed to economic injustice as the norm.”
On the worker protection side, the city council and state legislature have passed several strong laws in recent years that Mamdani’s team can monitor and enforce, rather than find authorities buried in the rulebook and excavate them. “New York City is a union town, and we need to make sure that city government is doing what it can, especially in the absence of federal leadership, to breathe life into laws that protect working people,” Su said.
Mamdani has asked for greater resources for enforcement measures. But he might be the greatest resource by himself. The Biden administration did many important things that were not fully publicized. The White House press secretary’s office had a standing rule not to discuss ongoing cases, which make it impossible to identify efforts against alleged bad actors like Ticketmaster or RealPage. Mamdani, by contrast, is a gifted storyteller who is able to explain complex subjects with humor and make everyone understand who he sides with. People involved in the nascent administration tell me that can be an invaluable tool to focus attention on unfair treatment or set up narratives about who his administration is fighting for.
It may sound silly to say that the stakes are high when talking about a city government, even a city as big as New York. But progressives have invested a lot in Mamdani’s success, and his detractors are quite invested in his failure. The noise surrounding his every move can be disrupted by legitimate results that bring real benefits to residents.
It seems reasonably clear that the Biden expats want a chance to make good policy with someone who can better articulate why it matters. “Power is a muscle,” Su said. “You strengthen it by exercising it. There’s power that cities have, that has not always been exercised for the good of the people who have been forgotten.”
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