Zohran Mamdani Should ‘Project 2026’ New York City
by P. K. Gandakin and Nik M.
Dec. 30, 2025
Introduction | What is Deliverism?: Key Issues | Additional Examples | Conclusion
People are going to question what we are doing and how we're doing it. All of that is fine, but there is only one thing you need to understand: I'm the mayor.
Eric Adams, during a press conference in Long Island City in 2021
Introduction
While millions of New Yorkers have celebrated Zohran Mamdani’s victory, it has also left the NYC Democratic Socialists of America—the organization that helped incubate his political emergence—faced with a fundamental question: What comes next? How do we prevent the coalition of a million voters and 90,000 volunteers from dissipating into the ether come inauguration? How do we ensure that Mamdani’s administration does not settle into a familiar pattern of progressive municipalism—of delivering modest reforms while leaving the traditional structures of power untouched?
So far, the responses have been fragmented. Some in NYC DSA launched “Our Time,” a nonprofit that appears to mimic the campaign’s canvassing infrastructure but without a clear strategic horizon beyond maintaining presence. Jacobin proposes “popular assemblies”—local deliberative forums meant to give residents direct input on policy. In other words, more deliberative procedures–as if we don’t already have a democratic mandate to enact a bold socialist vision. Others—the “left” or the electoral-skeptical wing of the DSA activists—have doubled down on recruitment and calls for “accountability,” hoping to pressure the mayor-elect through external agitation (e.g., demanding the removal of Commissioner Jessica Tisch): the tried and true methods of marginal socialism. Others had pinned their hopes on a primary challenge to Hakeem Jefferies, viewing it as the natural next front in the left’s war of position within the Democratic Party. With that door now closed, DSA seems adrift—throwing out various ideas without a unifying theory of how to convert electoral energy into durable power.
Meanwhile, Mamdani himself is assembling a transition team of policy technocrats, preparing to roll out an “affordability agenda” with precision and visibility. There’s no doubt he’ll succeed in part, and his honeymoon period will likely last longer than most. We can already picture the Instagram reels: Mamdani walking through Jackson Heights, explaining in crisp soundbites how his administration cracked down on Ticketmaster price gouging, slashed fees for halal cart vendors, or fast-tracked public housing permits. These are good things. But they are not enough.
David Dinkins delivered greater police accountability. Bill de Blasio delivered universal pre-K and rent freezes. Both were, by every count, competent, progressive mayors. Yet neither disrupted the oligarchic order. Neither shifted the balance of class power. And within a single electoral cycle, both were succeeded by figures—Giuliani, then Adams—who deepened the city’s subordination to capital and rolled back every won gain. The lesson is clear: governing well is not the same as building power. Competence without counter-hegemony is ultimately reversible.
This is why socialists must stop thinking in terms of campaigns and start thinking in terms of long-term political strategy. We need not just a policy vision but a political vision that can restructure who holds power and how it is exercised. The right understands this. While liberals obsess over optimal policy and focus-group messaging, the American right has spent the last several years building “Project 2025”: a detailed, multi-institutional plan to seize state power, repopulate the bureaucracy with ideologically committed rank-and-file, and permanently embed reactionary ideology deep within the machinery of the federal government.
Mamdani’s transition team already shows signs of grasping this logic. His appointments—many drawn from movement-aligned circles—signal the first stirrings of a political rank-and-file strategy: the deliberate restaffing of bureaucratic agencies with personnel committed not just to competence, but to anti-oligarchic, democratic socialist values.
We propose Project 2026 as the necessary expansion of this strategic rationale. It recognizes that even the most popular policies will be rolled back unless they are anchored in new institutions, new personnel, and a new common sense about who the city belongs to and who it serves. Beyond institutional defense, Project 2026 serves a second, equally vital function: sustaining and scaling the political energy that elected Mamdani in the first place.
As we head into the 2026 midterms and, afterwards, the 2028 presidential election, the movement that Mamdani activated and carried him to power cannot fade into passive spectatorship once he is inaugurated. It must deepen its roots in civil society and city agencies, turning every policy win into a political opportunity. Mamdani’s national profile, already amplified by his unapologetic socialism and anti-imperialism, gives New York City a rare chance to become not just a model of municipal governance, but a launchpad for national political realignment.
To do that, we must first confront the limits of deliverism.
I. What is Deliverism?: Key Issues
The primary approach that the Mamdani administration has signaled so far is ‘Deliverism’—the notion that by fighting hard on increasing affordability and expanding public services, the socialist mayor will prove he can ‘deliver’ the economic demands and improvements that an electorate is supposedly primarily concerned with. At the same time, Mamdani has flirted with a more aggressive approach to politics, too: militant anti-Zionism (including his famous threat to arrest Netanyahu), his frequent signaling of staunch opposition to Trump and ICE, and, of course, his expressly socialist and Muslim identity that cannot help but read as intrinsically ‘radical’ to the American population.
This contradiction is not an antagonistic one: Mamdani can only achieve his goal of delivering on his pro-people agenda in New York City if he also decisively acts to build a New York City administration that is itself pro-people. The attempts to significantly change prices for New Yorkers lack teeth so long as the same class of bureaucrats that have consistently dug their heels in on progress, decisiveness, and action–the managers of decline–are not replaced by a personnel set that takes progressive socialist values and goals as a priority.
Even if Mamdani is able to achieve minimal wins of his agenda under the current political paradigm, these reforms will be insubstantial, impermanent, and be unable to break through to the American people, who are hungry not only for relief but a fighter who carries with him or her the assured self-confidence of an individual with a plan and who is willing to commit to a decisive course of action. The notion that Mamdani will implement these reforms with the energy they require is obviously minimal. But the gamble is that Mamdani is not doing so because he is ‘betraying’ the left, or because of personal political opportunism, but because–in the face of a sum history of retreat, failure, and ultimately defeat–the standpoint of caution unsurprisingly seems exceedingly rational.
What Mamdani will find is that, unlike de Blasio or Dinkins, he will not be afforded the privilege of simply being a good and progressive mayor who does his best to improve the quality of life of New Yorkers. Instead, Mamdani is a socialist—he has already been identified as, and elected as, an out-and-out open socialist, during an extremely intense period of class warfare. He is staring down the barrel of Trump’s federal pistol. He is caught in the sweep of radical economic and political changes that are already irreversibly transforming the possibilities of action, and which are rendering in a matter of years old styles of politics irretrievably anachronistic.
The worst case scenario is that, just like Dinkins and de Blasio, Mamdani is determined by history to be nothing more than an ephemeral phenomena and ultimately a footnote. But history often has greater expectations of its charges: despite Mamdani’s intentions, he will have no choice but, over the course of the next four years, to confront the enemy and fight him—he will be forced into realizing that he must, because of his position, do more than ‘deliver.’ The hope is merely that by emphasizing the essential elements of political governance and sketching out its potential practical form, the radical left, and perhaps Mamdani, will be better prepared for the gauntlet when it is inevitably thrown down.
The essential institutions that Mamdani should target in New York City are those that are especially central to political conflict and social reproduction. There is no socialist transition in the United States without direct grappling and transformation of these institutions not merely in form, but in their content—and not merely in terms of the inevitable aim of our movement, but also in terms of the existing and immediate class war engulfing the nation.
Education
Education is the central site of ideological and social reproduction, a fact the Right has identified since William F. Buckley and exploited to their gain. Then and now, the Right has used the academy to push anti-social, destructive and hateful ideologies on youth in the name of ‘open debate’ and ‘free speech.’ Figures like Charlie Kirk prey on young students as targets for indoctrination, and farm outrage to create extremists by loudly and consistently targeting vulnerable individuals and communities. As the Right has risen in power nationally, their pernicious educational program has spread its tentacles accordingly: right-wing universities are creating hostile environments for progressives and marginalized people, even firing individuals for not appeasing right-wing ideology, and Donald Trump is all but waging an open war against progressive thinking and higher education.
What the Right shows is that education is not neutral: fighting for a progressive, democratic and socialist society means fighting for those values in the classroom and campus, too. The Mayor of New York effectively controls the NYC Department of Education. He sets curriculum priorities, appoints leadership, and guides administrative culture. Specifically, the mayor has the power to appoint the Schools Chancellor and the majority of the Panel for Educational Policy. In addition, the mayor has significant control over the educational budget. A Mamdani administration should immediately appoint a Chancellor and a majority of PEP members with explicit commitments to advocating for racial equity, social responsibility, and other fundamental values of caring, productive and progressive American citizens. There needs to be an expansion of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and curriculum, codified protections for inclusive education, and a reallocation of resources towards schools in historically disinvested neighborhoods. All of this should be done in close contact with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), which should also be negotiated with to secure class-size reductions and expanded arts and humanities staffing. Let’s not forget that an expansion of investment in schooling also means an expansion of some of the most progressive and militant public sector unions, as well.
Police
The New York Police Department is an institution controlled by the mayor, who has the power to appoint and remove the Police Commissioner, set enforcement priorities, and shape disciplinary policy. Mamdani’s proposal of the Department of Community safety is already a brilliant move breaking the monopoly of the NYPD over law enforcement and disempowering it institutionally, but there is no reason he should stop there. A socialist administration must replace the current commissioner with leadership aligned with democratic oversight and progressive values, expand civilian control by appointing critics of policing to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, and make clear that police unions and senior command structures do not possess veto power over public policy–and that their traditional hostility to oversight and regulation will not be tolerated by socialists.
What about the notion that Mamdani should keep Tisch as a symbol of compromise and to avoid ruffling feathers in the NYPD? To this, we can only answer that retreating does not win you ground, but just loses it. Every New York City mayor in history has appointed their own commissioner (Adams appointed two!), a job that is notoriously seen as part of the mayor’s policy platform. Mamdani has won the election. Hedging here is a voluntary ceding of territory with no real discernible gain. Further, coddling the committed Trump Republicans in the NYPD is not an effective means of winning them over anyway: a substantial transformation of the NYPD is the only means of combatting its infestation of extreme Right ideology.
Immigration
New York City’s long-standing sanctuary city policies have been slowly eroded and undermined by the Adams administration. Mamdani must not only reaffirm these policies, but strengthen them: limiting federal access to non-public data and New York prisons like Rikers, following through on his promises on prosecuting ICE agents with zeal, and mandating that city agencies in general actively refuse to cooperate with ICE beyond statutory minimums. Importantly, Mamdani should radically expand funding for immigration legal services, following proposals already being advocated in New York.
The attack by the Trump administration on immigrants is—and will be remembered as—nothing short of a reprehensible moral crime. ICE and national immigration policy is an attempt to substantiate the Right’s dreams of a White Nationalist America. A socialist New York City must–and can–be a bastion against these attacks and a banner for a nation that is disgusted by ICE and desperate for someone to firmly stand against it.
Housing
The mayor has a plethora of institutions to commandeer in the administration of housing. The mayor has the sole power to appoint all 9 members of the Rent Guidelines Board, which sets annual rent adjustment rates for over 1 million rent-stabilized apartments (and which has been used in the past by de Blasio to freeze the rent). NYCHA is the largest public housing authority in North America, and is governed by a seven-member board appointed by the mayor, who also appoints the chair and Chief Executive Officer. The Department of Housing Preservation and Development is New York City’s central housing authority responsible for developing and preserving affordable housing, enforcing the city’s housing maintenance code, and overseeing neighborhood planning and quality-of-life inspections. It is headed by a Commissioner appointed by the mayor who reports directly to City Hall. The boards of the Housing Development Corporation, which finances affordable housing, and the Department of Buildings, which enforces building codes and zoning regulations, are also appointed by the mayor. There are many other institutions also under his purview with significant power over housing, like the City Planning Commission, which decides questions of land-use.
In each of these cases, our capitalist mayors have consistently failed to advocate for a pro-people and pro-social housing policy. Rents have continued to rise, enforcement of codes is minimal, especially in lower-income housing and NYCHA, and land-use is done solely to benefit wealthy developers and large commercial enterprises. This sinking ship can only be turned—the accumulated waste and debris poured onto the head of public housing by the appointed managers of decline can only be cleared—through decisive action, radically expanded funding, and a total re-staffing of the boards and bureaucrats of these institutions with individuals who are openly pro-tenant, rather than pro-landlord or ‘neutral.’
These particular issues have been chosen and highlighted as examples of mayoral power in key sectors that are immensely influential for not only the administration of the city but the political fight against the Right. Our job is not to compromise in the question of political power and its administration. If Mamdani loses, it is better to force his successor to do the exhaustive work of ferreting out progressives from the government who are really administrating and guiding policy—who are building credentials, experience, and reputations—and replace them with their own stored bobbleheads.
What is additionally important is that these are minimum shifts: these are the proscribed powers of the mayor that every mayor prior has employed in line with their ideological and political vision. Finally, we might add that this is good: if given a mandate, it is the task of the politician to fight for it, in spirit and substance, and as America yearns for an alternative to the staid mediocrity of the Democrats and the repulsive politics of the Right, the Left must prove that it has the ability not only to administer but to govern.
II. Additional Examples
The breadth of power afforded to the mayor and the opportunity it affords the New York left to truly enter the world of politics cannot be understated. In the original Project 2025 document, the authors celebrate the Reaganite slogan that “personnel is policy” (p. 31). Although we cannot offer the vast number of personnel the Heritage Foundation collected from conservative academics, politicians, and so on, we can point to the real need to be conscious of the question of who is the state—that this is not an abstract question but, literally, an exceedingly personal and immediate one. The following is a short list of some institutions the mayor has control over and which appointments from the left would positively revitalize or energize them to achieve progressive objectives.
City University of New York (CUNY)
CUNY is a public university system jointly funded by the state and city. The mayor appoints 5 out of the 17 members of CUNY’s Board of Trustees and controls the NYC budget for the community colleges. Mamdani’s CUNY approach is defined by his ‘New Deal for CUNY,’ a plan to make CUNY tuition-free, hire more faculty, and improve campus conditions. While Albany would have to approve making senior colleges tuition-free, a mayor can directly increase subsidies to the city’s community colleges (which have suffered deep cuts under prior, capitalist administrations). A progressive mayor could budget for free community college tuition or expand programs like ASAP that support low-income students. They also get a say (through trustee appointments) in choosing CUNY leadership that aligns with these goals.
Additionally, the mayor can use their platform to demand state investment in CUNY, a precedent already performed by Fiorello LaGuardia. The mayor can restore cuts, fight for full funding of adjunct salaries and student services, and ensure the city’s own education initiatives (like universal free pre-K and childcare) are tied into CUNY workforce pipelines. Ultimately, Mamdani should fight for CUNY to become a model for public education, and win back the title of being the “Harvard of the Proletariat.”
New York Power Authority
The New York Power Authority (NYPA) is the largest public utility in New York, and is mandated to build renewable energy with the goal of achieving 70% renewable generation by 2030 and 100% by 2040. (At the time the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) was passed, the actual number was 4%.)
The NYPA has the authority to raise funds for renewable energy development, and yet is scaling back its plans to expand renewable energy. Legislators are currently pushing for NYPA’s board of trustees to expand from 7 to 17. To make climate politics and commitments substantive, NYPA should be turned into a fighting institution for green energy. That means filling its board with climate scientists, labor-aligned energy experts, and unapologetic public-power advocates, and directing the authority to aggressively expand renewable generation for public housing, transit, and municipal infrastructure.
City Planning Commission
The mayor appoints the majority of the City Planning Commission (CPC), including its Chair. Through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), the mayor can steer what gets built in NYC. So far, ULURP has been used almost exclusively to enrich developers and for luxury projects, like Hudson Yards.
A left-wing mayor can use his position to ensure that these projects are not completed exclusively for the benefit of the super-rich and pressure developers to upzone wealthy areas, build affordable housing–or even deny granting public land to private developers for commercial use in the first place. Instead, the mayor should emphasize using city-owned land for socially useful purposes, as many local communities have already been pushing for.
The opportunities for aggressive housing policy are significant, and there is already a precedent of using mayoral authority to direct agencies to serve affordable housing goals. Balking here does not win respect or stability, but just leaves existing tools and potentials on the wall.
Economic Development Corporation
The mayor controls the NYC Economic Development Corporation (EDC) by appointing its president and board members. The EDC manages all revenue-generating businesses in New York City, including airports, private property in Times Square, and more. The EDC’s mandate is to stimulate economic growth and, as might be expected, it does so by inefficiently doling out hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to private corporations (and not the small ones, either). Mamdani needs to replace the board with committed people who believe in the labor-first and socialist model of economics, where job creation and pro-worker outcomes are prioritized rather than private profits.
A socialist mayor in charge of the EDC, if he doesn’t want to abolish it, must restaff it and redirect it to invest in public enterprises (perhaps a convenient way to help fund the proposed city-owned grocery stores in underserved “food desert” neighborhoods) and, most importantly, directly create union jobs to stimulate growth rather than subsidize capitalists in the hopes that our own money will trickle back down to us. It needs to be a genuinely democratic institution, not one that works exclusively for the rich.
All these levers allow a socialist mayor to materially build an alternative economic pattern–using NYC’s enormous budget and development apparatus to benefit workers and marginalized neighborhoods instead of doling out tax breaks to big corporations–and to really put into practice a different way of ‘doing business.’
Palestine
Divestment is formally the purview of NYC’s comptroller, who is elected rather than appointed by the mayor. But the mayor still has numerous levers of power he has access to that can push the anti-Zionist struggle forward. Eric Adams’ notorious executive order prohibiting mayoral appointees and agencies from boycotting or divesting from Israel should be immediately rescinded (and possibly replaced with an executive order mandating the opposite).
The upcoming likely comptroller, Mark Levine, has stated he intends to resume investment of the NYC budget in Israeli bonds. But there are numerous boards Mamdani could stack that would allow for him to push for divestment despite that, along with executive orders and public posturing to emphasize a pro-Palestine orientation. Of course, Mamdani should also promise to follow through with his promise to arrest Netanyahu should he ever visit New York City.
Judicial and Oversight Appointments
The mayor’s powers extend into the city’s judicial system and oversight bodies, which can be harnessed for progressive reform. The mayor appoints judges to the Criminal Court and Family Court for 10-year terms. A socialist mayor can appoint judges with backgrounds in public defense, civil rights, or restorative justice. Speaking from a law background, the authority of the left in the law is often strongly correlated with institutional positions and appointments decided by people like mayors. A decisive strike here is an advance not only for a humane and effective criminal justice system, but also for the legitimacy of progressive and left-wing thought in the academy and the legal field.
The mayor also appoints the chair and several members of the Civilian Complaint Review Board (which investigates NYPD misconduct), as well as members of the Board of Correction (which oversees city jails). By picking strong reform advocates for these oversight boards, a mayor can tighten accountability for police and correctional authorities. There is also little better opportunity to systematize and apply methods critical of carceral logic and sympathetic to abolitionist perspectives than as mayor of a city where the treatment of the incarcerated is so offensive and unjust.
These are a minuscule number of institutions that the mayor has power over—in fact, there are over 200 boards and commissions appointed by the mayor, along with a host of other powers and authorities not examined at all. Packing these with progressives and socialists is the substantial content of what it means to transform New York City’s government into a progressive and socialist one.
Being the mayor is a wonderful achievement for the left, but it is an achievement precisely because of how much authority the mayor has. Mamdani is not the normalcy candidate. He is not the establishment candidate. He is not the liberal candidate. The working class of New York has posed to the socialist party a decisive, world-historical question: whether or not the socialists are capable of being political leaders. The only incorrect answer is the silent one—it is our time to prove that socialism is not just a good idea, but a real way of running society. It is not the moment for expanded pressure groups, but delivering on our promise that we can and will really transform society into something better, as our mandate demands.
Conclusion
Reading through the original Project 2025 document, the emotional sense one gets is that the conservatives are under attack. Let us take the following excerpt from the Project 2025 document, summarizing the Right’s assessment of our situation:
Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries. [...] Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s “radical chic” to build the totalitarian cult known today as “The Great Awokening.” And now, as then, the Republican Party seems to have little understanding about what to do. Most alarming of all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril. (1).
It is clear: for the enemy, the narrative is one of existential struggle–against the liberal State, against the Communists, and against the horrible Wokeists. They are right. History never stands still, and it is never at equilibrium. The struggle over the past century has been a struggle over the ultimate destiny of our nation–whether it will plunge right, or rise left. Our leadership has shirked the weight of this responsibility in favor of technocratic reassurances of a return to normalcy–but, again, it is an existential struggle, and it can only be truthfully posed in those terms.
Despite its political and class position being fundamentally oppositional to our own, it is nevertheless possible to exploit some rudimentary elements of this publicly-available construction of political theory, and perhaps this points to some avenues for future effective practice: for one, the stock of bureaucrats and intellectuals on the left is meagre and disorganized. Mamdani’s massive collection of resumes for his transition team was a means of overcoming this lack and, hopefully, it can be the first step of a left equivalent of the Right’s vast personnel database–a collection of tappable progressive and left intelligentsia, government workers, politicians, etc.
But more essentially, it points to the necessity of a radical expansion of the left’s penetration into the legal and governmental world. The left has long held tightly to the ‘rank-and-file’ strategy of sending prospective socialists permanently into the field of organizing/organized labor with the intention of creating organic working-class labor leaders and expanding union organizing. Today, it is clear we need a ‘political rank-and-file’ strategy–a massive expansion of the progressives and socialists present in political and community discourse, as government lawyers and public defenders, as professors, policy advisors, and campaign managers. It is time to replace “personnel is policy” with our own equivalent principle: that “cadres are the decisive factor.”