Democratic mayoral nominee and frontrunner Zohran Mamdani pitched a plan to reform the town Training Division’s contracting system. Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025.
Picture by Ethan Stark-Miller
New York Metropolis’s mayoral election is simply six days away, and with Democratic nominee and Meeting Member Zohran Mamdani main within the polls, he has spent the previous few weeks making extra concrete coverage plans for his potential administration.
One in every of these plans includes an try and curb wasteful vendor spending within the New York Metropolis Division of Training (DOE). The division has taken warmth from the Metropolis Comptroller’s workplace this 12 months for alleged wasteful spending, notably at a single Brooklyn restaurant, as reported by New York News in July.
With better scrutiny on the division and what Comptroller Brad Lander known as a scarcity of mayoral oversight, Mamdani is searching for to tighten the management over money circulation.
New York News examined Mamdani’s plan introduced final week to regulate DOE spending — measuring the dimensions of the division’s expenditures, the wonderful print of Mamdani’s proposal, and the way it suits into his schooling agenda extra broadly.
Vendor contract spending on the DOE
Within the DOE, vendor contracts account for roughly $10 billion of the division’s $41 billion working finances. As Mamdani seeks to scale back schooling spending with out shedding jobs, he hopes to focus on “redundant and duplicative spending.”
The division collaborates with lots of of distributors to offer help in software program, neighborhood engagement, analysis, and different companies. Although the division lists these third-party distributors publicly, it notes on its web site that the checklist isn’t a complete assortment of all “approved DOE vendors.”
A number of the listed distributors are household-name firms, resembling Adobe, Grammarly, and Zoom, whereas most are lesser-known expertise and schooling service suppliers. Data on annual expenditures to every vendor isn’t public.
Mamdani mentioned at a press convention final week, the place he introduced the plan that he intends to “ensure that every single dollar we spend within the Department of Education is one dollar that is furthering our mission of delivering excellent education to students across the five boroughs.”
The mayoral hopeful needs to activity the following faculties chancellor with a three-pronged “procurement plan” that might consider and restrict spending.
First, the chancellor would conduct audits of the division’s prime 50 distributors and its 25 largest contracts.
Second, they might reconfigure the seller system by becoming a member of its two inner procurement workplaces, establishing a contracting base in every borough, and utilizing the town’s PassPort on-line portal for company contracts.
Lastly, Mamdani needs the chancellor to create a “vendor rating dashboard” to ascertain better accountability amongst distributors.
“We expect that these measures alone will result in at least a 10% reduction in redundant spending and a 30% decrease in retroactive and emergency procurement,” Mamdani mentioned on the press convention.
If Mamdani’s assertion is appropriate, the division may stand to avoid wasting lots of of thousands and thousands of {dollars} yearly — though the precise determine is unclear.
With vendor contracts accounting for almost 1 / 4 of the DOE working finances, a major overhaul of the town’s contract administration may considerably affect spending within the division. Nonetheless, it’s unclear precisely what number of {dollars} of contract spending can be topic to Mamdani’s deliberate evaluation.
Fairly than focusing his deliberate cuts on the schooling workforce, Mamdani appears to chop spending elsewhere.
His schooling plan contains hiring 1,000 further lecturers yearly for the following a number of years, which his marketing campaign claims will value the town $12 million per 12 months because of projected financial savings achieved by means of his proposed schooling spending controls.
The plan secured the help of the town’s lecturers’ union, the United Federation of Lecturers, which endorsed Mamdani within the June main election. In an announcement to Chalkbeat, the union’s president known as the present procurement system “a chronic source of frustration.”
Mamdani appears to reclaim DOGE from the suitable
Eventually week’s press convention, Mamdani straight referenced Elon Musk’s and President Donald Trump’s efforts to slash the federal workforce and federal spending by means of t what has been known as the Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE).
Musk, who was assigned to move up the company however who has since departed Washington, mentioned the company would save $1 trillion in taxpayer {dollars} by Sept. 30.
Although the company oversaw the firing of 1000’s of federal staff and canceled numerous contracts, it stays unclear precisely how a lot cash it has saved taxpayers.
Mamdani, nonetheless, insists that cost-cutting should be a normal for the left as it’s for the suitable.
“For too long, we have allowed individuals like Elon Musk to pretend as if concerns of efficiency and waste are that of the right-wing, when in fact, they should be the bedrock of any progressive politics,” Mamdani mentioned of the press convention.
Mamdani has urged that his plans for procurement reform and cuts to pointless spending throughout the town will assist fund his bold affordability agenda he plans to implement ought to he be elected mayor on Tuesday. The candidate urged that the cash can be higher spent elsewhere.
Within the realm of schooling, Mamdani plans to rent 7,000 to 9,000 extra lecturers to the town’s workforce along with investing extra money in instructor schooling. He hopes to centralize instructor recruitment to onboard extra “aspiring teachers” to high school positions.
Mamdani additionally needs to allocate $12 million to launch a program that might “prioritize placements for the three-year teaching requirement in the districts with the highest staffing needs.”
On affordability, the candidate additionally hopes to freeze hire on rent-stabilized residences, construct 200,000 inexpensive housing items, open city-owned grocery shops, make metropolis buses free, and implement free childcare citywide.
