When President Trump took a swing at government efficiency, it involved an Elon Musk-led campaign called the Department of Government Efficiency, which slashed essential contracts and pushed out veteran civil servants.
In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is trying to put a new face on the fraught term.
Roughly two months ago, Mr. Mamdani announced the creation of a Charter Revision Commission designed to make city government work better for New Yorkers. To make his intent clear, he gave the commission a cheeky name, the Commission on Government Efficiency, drawing a comparison to DOGE, which never met its promise of finding $1 trillion in savings.
Mr. Mamdani has pledged to do better, and his commission on Monday released its five proposed changes to the City Charter. These would speed up approvals for outdoor dining and create new bus and bike lanes, among other ideas. The commission is supposed to operate independently, but the mayor is typically influential in proposals.
Other potential changes would reform the procurement process, simplify building permitting and set goals for the city’s rainy day fund. If the commission approves the five proposals at its final hearing on Thursday, they will appear on the November ballot for voters to consider.
Proponents of the commission argue that government efficiency is personal — experienced in delays for families who need housing vouchers, and in 311 reports of jagged sidewalks that go unanswered for weeks. Patrick Gaspard, who chaired the commission, recalled being moved by testimony from a homeless woman and her child, who talked about how forms had to be refiled and information got lost when agencies didn’t communicate with one another.
“We have turned the use of the word bureaucracy into the pejorative,” Mr. Gaspard said. “More than a few times, the folks who testified in front of us noted the rhyme with DOGE and were pleased that the approach was quite different.”
Even for some critics of Mr. Mamdani, the commission is an encouraging sign of his approach to democratic socialist governance, which has tended to emphasize making the public sector run more smoothly and effectively, and more like the private sector. Mr. Mamdani has made the theme central to recent public appearances, from a news conference where he shredded papers that listed cumbersome small business regulations to another on Coney Island where he entered on a Go-Kart to announce plans to make the city’s technology run faster.
Mr. Mamdani campaigned with the notion that his spin on democratic socialism would look like “sewer socialism,” meaning a focus on small-bore public sector improvements. In his first 100 days in office, his Department of Transportation filled nearly 4,000 potholes in March and held a “Municipal Madness” bracket-style competition for New Yorkers to pick a problem for him to address. COGE is in many ways an effort to make that work longer lasting, by proposing changes to the City Charter.
Mr. Mamdani also had political motivation to create this commission. His predecessor, Eric Adams, created his own charter review commission just before he left office on Dec. 31. Mr. Adams’s commission was to be devoted to creating an open primary system, which many feel would undermine the new mayor’s leftist coalition.
Mr. Mamdani disbanded that commission by using a new provision in the state budget, though the old commission is still fighting in court. By convening COGE, Mr. Mamdani has tried to put the attention on his own agenda.
“This commission has been focused on the wonky, nitty-gritty government reform stuff that is really sexy to people like me,” said Caitlin Lewis, an alumna of the de Blasio administration who runs Work for America, a nonprofit focused on government staffing reform. “It isn’t necessarily what you hear mayors prioritizing all the time.”
Kathryn Wylde, a COGE commissioner who was the longtime head of the business advocacy group, Partnership for New York City, said the group was focused “not on dramatic things like solving the housing crisis, but it was much more on the brass tacks of helping government work better.”
Leaders of some civic groups say the commission has put a necessary spotlight on dysfunction in city permitting and procurement. The COGE report proposes reforms that could cut qualified nonprofit procurement time in half, to six months from 13 months.
“There are few things more embarrassing than knowing that when someone gets a city contract to provide essential human services, the city employees tell them, ‘You should call and get an advanced loan,’” said Ruth Messinger, a former Manhattan borough president.
The efficiency commission largely punted on trying to fix New York’s civil service rules, given how much the state has authority over this system. Lags in city hiring and struggles to hire high-tech talent came up repeatedly during public testimony to the commission, according to Ms. Wylde.
Various agencies, including the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the Department of Social Services, have 12 percent vacancy rates. Even the agency responsible for administering civil service exams has a 16 percent vacancy rate, which slows hiring across the city.
Civic groups say there are plenty of steps the mayor could take to speed up hiring, including removing civil service exams for licensed roles or broadening which roles are exempt from the exams. The exams started in the 1880s, as an effort to reduce Tammany Hall patronage, but has now made city hiring in some cases torturously slow. Recently, Mr. Mamdani and the Department of Citywide Administrative Services commissioner, Yume Kitasei, announced the city would waive exam fees for city high schools students and first-time test takers.