Democratic mayoral nominee and frontrunner Zohran Mamdani pitched a plan to reform town Schooling Division’s contracting system. Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025.
Picture by Ethan Stark-Miller
Democratic mayoral nominee and frontrunner Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday rolled out a plan to overtake how town’s Schooling Division inks contracts with exterior distributors — a coverage designed to deal with what he labeled because the company’s “redundant and duplicative spending” and a “lack of accountability.”
Mamdani pitched “curing procurement” as a three-pronged plan, he stated, which might minimize “wasteful spending,” overhaul the company’s present procurement structure, and maintain distributors accountable.
Mamdani charged that the DOE’s present procurement processes are poorly managed. He charged that the division makes use of outdated programs which can be “incompatible” with these employed by the remainder of town authorities, is short-staffed and faces delays in hiring, and is overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of contractors with whom it really works.
Metropolis Council Contract Committee Chair Julie Gained (D-Queens), who joined Mamdani on the occasion together with state Sen. Robert Jackson, said that out of the DOE’s $40 billion price range, it spends roughly $10 billion on contracts yearly.
Mamdani’s training math
Outdoors contracts have been scrutinized earlier than. In August, for instance, Metropolis Comptroller Brad Lander revealed in a report that the DOE had spent greater than $750,000 for catering offered by a Brooklyn restaurant, an quantity that exceeded what the comptroller deemed to be a suitable quantity.
Underneath the primary prong of Mamdani’s plan, the following DOE chancellor will conduct audits of the division’s prime 50 distributors and its 25 largest contracts, he stated. The division will even assessment every new contract because it comes up for renewal.
“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 stated.
Underneath these projections, that may translate to an annual financial savings of between $1 billion and $3 billion.
For instance of the wasteful spending Mamdani says his plan would curtail, he pointed to a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in expertise contracts he stated the DOE inked throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The division did that, he stated, with out coordinating stock, leading to “duplicative practices” and “redundancies” that led to wasteful spending.
The second plank of Mamdani’s plan entails reconfiguring the DOE’s vendor system by merging its two separate inside procurement places of work, establishing a contracting hub in every of the 5 boroughs, and using town’s PassPort on-line portal for the company’s contracts.
“This will be done in addition to mandating fiscal training and certification for every single staffer who works on procurement,” Mamdani stated. “These measures are expected to accelerate the procurement cycle by 40%.”
Council Member Gained said that inserting DOE contracts in PassPort will make it far simpler for town to trace its spending on distributors and alter its expenditures accordingly.
The final piece of Mamdani’s plan entails introducing a “vendor rating dashboard” to spice up accountability.
Mamdani stated he will even push to make town authorities extra environment friendly total by reducing wasteful spending at different metropolis businesses. He has steered that procurement reform and different measures to scale back pointless prices may assist fund his bold affordability agenda, which incorporates objects akin to free bus service and common free childcare.
New York News reached out to the DOE for remark concerning the proposal, and is awaiting a response.
