Elon Did DOGE. Now Mamdani Is Trying COGE.

In January of 2025, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) promised to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget. After 10 months, the initiative, inspired by the dog meme, became a villain in Washington and only saved $215 billion (by its own estimation). 

Now, the spirit of DOGE lives on, this time in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s New York City…kind of.

On Thursday, Mamdani launched a Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE) initiative to make the city government “work smarter, faster, and more effectively for working people.”
He wrote on X, “New Yorkers deserve a city government as careful with their money as they are.”

When asked whether there was anything he admired about Musk’s DOGE, Mamdani told reporters, “just the name and what it should have been.” 

“Government efficiency, these are words that somehow have been understood as if they are Republican priorities when in fact they are the priorities of anyone who believes in the public sector,” Mamdani said on Thursday. “And yet, Elon Musk took that language and used it to cut as many jobs that were as critical as possible for so many of the neediest people across the country and across the world.”

Mamdani added that his COGE would “focus on actually delivering efficiency” instead of serving as a “byword for cutting services.” 

New Yorkers should indeed take him at his word when he says this commission is not going to make dramatic cuts to services: Mamdani’s COGE commission is more of a fact-finding task force than a ruthless bureaucracy slasher. COGE plans to study the city’s charter to find ways to remove bureaucratic red tape slowing infrastructure projects and “to improve efficiency, savings, reserves and budgetary practices,” according to a fact sheet obtained by Politico. The Mamdani administration also plans to hold 10 public hearings on potential ballot questions ahead of November, the outlet reported. 

The COGE launch comes a day after Mamdani “moved to dissolve a charter revision commission appointed at the end of Eric Adams’ tenure,” reported amNY, and COGE would attempt to replace the Adams-era commission. 

Championing efficiency is a good start, but New York City could use a true DOGE-ing. New York spends “75 percent more per capita than the local governments of the ten other cities,” according to City Journal. Last year, under Mayor Eric Adams, the budget was $118 billion. That figure is slightly more than the budget of the entire state of Florida, which has nearly three times as many people as New York City. At that cost, New Yorkers should be receiving $118 billion worth of services, but they are not. According to the Citizens Budget Commission, only 27 percent of New York City residents rated the overall quality of public services as being “excellent or good” in 2025. That figure was 44 percent in 2017. And only 11.5 percent of residents said the New York City government spends its tax dollars wisely. 

Instead of meaningfully cutting back on city bloat, Mamdani proposed a  $124.7 billion budget for the upcoming fiscal year. Meanwhile, when he had to fill a $12 billion budget gap earlier this year, he relied on a series of budget gimmicks and a bailout from Albany. New York City Comptroller Mark Levine has called for the administration to strengthen the budget, warning that it “relies on $2.8 billion in one-time measures and $2.3 billion in short-term pension savings, without solving for the fact that City government continues to spend more than we take in, even in a year of record revenues.”

DOGE was far from perfect in its execution, but its supporters had the right idea: The state should drastically cut the size and scope of the government, which requires eliminating some federal programs. Mamdani’s COGE takes a different approach. Mamdani is not opposed to spending money on city services, whether critics say they are superfluous or not; he simply wants those services to deliver efficiently. If this is the goal, COGE faces a formidable challenge in making a $124.7 billion budget a fair deal for taxpayers.