Zohran’s Inner Circle: Meet the Radicals on Mamdani’s Transition Team

In the February/March 2026 issue of Reason, we explore Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s policy goals and what they mean for New York City. Click here to read the other entries.

“Personnel is policy,” as the Reagan-era slogan had it, so Zohran Mamdani’s 400-person transition team tells us a lot about how he’ll run a city with an already-bloated $115 billion budget and 300,000 municipal workers. He’s cleaning house, demanding 179 Mayor Eric Adams staffers resign before he takes control of New York City—far more and far faster than the norm.

The 17 transition committees include some familiar and experienced names, including former Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh, City University of New York Chancellor Félix Matos Rodriguez, and outgoing business-oriented Partnership for New York leader Kathryn Wylde (of whom one Gothamite in the know declares, “What a shameless sellout!”). In other words, a man who’s never run anything but a failed rap career is putting some establishment tokens on his team. Look at the 400 names together, though, and a very different picture emerges.

Mamdani tried to sell himself as the race’s most philosemitic candidate, declaring in the first debate that he “will be the mayor who doesn’t just protect Jewish New Yorkers but also celebrates and cherishes them.” But here is Jenna Hamed, a “curator and bookmaker” on the Committee on Arts & Culture, who wrote a few days after the massacre of October 7, 2023, that she supported “all measures taken” in the Palestinian cause: “It’s not up to you (I’m talking to YOU, my non-Palestinian friends in the US and otherwise) to determine what that process looks like.” Tamika Mallory of the Committee on Community Safety has said Jews “uphold white supremacy” and praised noted antisemite Louis Farrakhan as “the GOAT.” The Committee on Community Organizing’s Lumumba Bandele expressed solidarity while the October 7 killings were still in progress.

Wait—the Committee on Community Organizing? Yes, besides the usual panels on education, health, housing, and the like, two are novel to New York City: that one and the Committee on Worker Justice. Few Americans know that many of these often-multimillion-dollar “community-organizing groups” get taxpayer money to find (or create) as many aggrieved people as possible. Without the oppressed, community organizing wouldn’t be a lucrative trade.

Don’t believe it’s a cushy career? One committee member is Katie Unger, “an independent strategic research consultant and trainer for labor and social justice organizations and a fourth-generation New York labor activist,” as a bio has it. The Yale graduate’s web page has a “Book a consultation” button at the very top. The transition team is filled with community organizers, but this committee has some of the most radical figures. CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities’ Julie Xu, a Chinese-born, Michigan-raised woman who cut her teeth in Chicago activism, was “excited to join CAAAV in jamming the gears of private property and fighting for true housing justice.” (CAAAV has two other employees on the team.) October 7 cheerleader Bandele met multiple times with the fugitive Black Liberation Army leader Assata Shakur in Havana and called her “our modern-day Harriet Tubman.”

Mamdani’s team is also filled with wannabe police defunders. Elana Leopold, the transition’s 30-something executive director, was one of over 230 people who’d worked for former Mayor Bill de Blasio who signed onto a 2020 open letter “demanding” the mayor institute “radical change” at the NYPD, starting with an immediate $1 billion budget reduction (out of a nearly $6 billion operating budget) and “reallocat[ing] that money to essential social services.” Even the academics here are activists. Brooklyn College sociologist Alex Vitale is best known for his 2017 book The End of Policing. New York University Policing Project Executive Director Max Markham wants cops taken off the property theft beat—a problem that exploded during the pandemic and is often accompanied by violence.

Closer to the ground, Communities United for Police Reform’s Joo-Hyun Kang and Brooklyn Movement Center’s Executive Director Anthonine Pierre are typical of the team. In a 2022 New York Daily News op-ed, the latter admitted “there are people in our communities calling for more policing as the solution to violence” while decrying “excessive investments in policing” and calling for “an immediate triaging of gun violence through necessary investments in trusted and trustworthy community-based violence prevention and intervention programs.”

Mamdani managed to find places for two United Federation of Teachers members on the education committee but not one for a teacher or student in the system. There are zero advocates of school choice, though more than one in six New York public school students attends one of the city’s 285 charter schools. Waiting lists are endless, and New York City kids, especially the disadvantaged, need the charter cap lifted. That’s not likely to happen under Mamdani, no matter whom he chooses as chancellor.

Six members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are on Mamdani’s transition; there are even two on the technology committee. (Here Mamdani is being a bit conventional, rewarding the people who helped get him elected.) Despite his policing criticisms, Mamdani regularly praised de Blasio on the campaign trail, and there are plenty of de Blasio alumni on the list—the neophyte needs a few people who know how to run a government. Though boutique owner Susan Herman, who’s on the Committee for Community Safety, won’t be all that helpful on that front: She led ThriveNYC, de Blasio’s wife Chirlane McCray’s vanity project that wasted $1 billion.

How easy will it be for the radicals to rule? Mamdani needs Albany lawmakers to help with some of his agenda. But progressives control the Legislature, and Gov. Kathy Hochul has regularly proved a wimp without any real principles of her own. Legislators managed to get her to sign off on pay raises for themselves in late 2022, without Hochul getting a single thing on her priority list in exchange.

The City Council is a hotbed of progressivism too, but former minority leader Joe Borelli sees a glimmer of hope. “The council just basically selected a more moderate member as its likely next speaker come January. That’s really the first sign that there may be any check whatsoever on [Mamdani’s] agenda,” he says. “Consider what it means that 37 of 51 councilmembers went with [Julie Menin] over a progressive.”

Still, another inexperienced ideologue on the team—co-chair Lina Khan, Federal Trade Commission chief under President Joe Biden—is looking for ways around such obstacles. She said she’s “especially focused on things like ‘How do we make sure that we have a full accounting of all of the laws and authorities that the mayor can unilaterally deploy?'”

If that isn’t scary enough, remember what America’s soon-to-be most important mayor said in his victory speech: “There is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.” And New Yorkers thought nanny-stater Michael Bloomberg was bad.