Call it Mamdani-proofing.
Potentially packing New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board with landlord-friendly appointees to delay the freeze Zohran Mamdani promised for roughly 2 million apartment tenants. Offering to rehire public employees fired during the pandemic for refusing the mandatory COVID-19 vaccine. Budgeting an NYPD headcount boost to 40,000 cops, even though Mamdani campaigned to keep the force at the current 35,000 it’s been for years.
In the 110th mayoralty’s waning weeks before Mamdani is inaugurated Jan. 1, Eric Adams is looking to extend his reach into the 111th. He appears to be considering how to embed people and policies to stymie his successor — as lame-duck politicians have done since the beginning of American history — and mucking up that successor’s ability to quickly deliver on some of the campaign pledges that won last week’s election.
Adams spokeswoman Liz Garcia, asked for comment about potential Mamdani-proofing, said Friday by text: “The mayor and mayor-elect spoke yesterday and the mayor shared his team’s complete cooperation with the transition process.”
Adams has made no secret of his disagreement with Mamdani’s democratic socialist platform, a left-leaning plank of expanded social services, lower residential rent, more restrained policing and higher taxes on the rich.
Insidious forces
“Too often, insidious forces use local government to advance divisive agendas with little regard for how it hurts everyday New Yorkers. Major change is welcome and necessary. But beware of those who claim the answer to destroy the very system we built together over generations. That is not change. That is chaos,” Adams said Sept. 28 in a video announcing he was quitting the mayoral race.
American history is rich with examples of lame-duck politicians — mayors, governors, presidents — making eleventh-hour moves to try to bind successors. But Adams appears to be pushing the bounds of what past New York City mayors have done on the way out, according to experts.
While the city’s lame-duck mayors have all taken such late-term actions — particularly when the next guy is an ideological foe — Adams is venturing beyond precedent, according to Ross Sandler, founding director of New York Law School’s Center for New York City Law and an official in the administration of Mayor Edward I. Koch, who served from 1978 to 1989.
“It’s far more dramatic in my experience than any of the ones that I saw,” said Sandler, a law professor who has studied mayors going back more than six decades, including midnight appointments by outgoing Mayor Abraham Beame in the 1970s.
Other New York City mayors have sought to constrain their successors, but Eric Adams appears to be pushing the maneuver to new heights. Clockwise from top left are Mayor David Dinkins with Mayor-elect Rudy Giuliani; Dinkins with the man he replaced as mayor, Ed Koch; Mayor Michael Bloomberg with his successor, Bill de Blasio, and outgoing Mayor Abe Beame, right, congratulating Mayor-elect Koch. Credit: AFP via Getty Images; AP; Newsday
Laura Tamman, a Pace University clinical assistant professor of political science who studies political persuasion, questioned whether Adams can be trusted to do the right thing as his mayoralty draws to a close, particularly given the allegations of corruption, self-dealing and favor-doing for moneyed interests that have swirled around his tenure.
“He’s shown that he acts in his own personal financial interest — he’s demonstrated that to the public — so that’s why I think what he’s doing is concerning,” she said.
Cool to freezing rent
Recently Adams’ staff approached real estate broker Eleonora Srugo, star of the Netflix reality show “Selling the City,” to ask whether she’d be interested in an appointment such as joining the Rent Guidelines Board. Srugo told Newsday she wasn’t sure whether she’d accept, but if she did, “I have a unique experience that would actually allow me to be fair,” as someone who’s lived in an apartment and a luxury broker herself.
She used a barnyard expletive to describe Mamdani’s pledge to freeze the rent, and she shrugged off naysayers who question Adams’ last-minute moves.
“If it’s within his purview, then the mayor should do what he wants,” Srugo said, adding: “I’m sure Mamdani at the end of his term — which I hope is just a singular one — will do the same thing.”
Adams is reportedly considering appointing at least four or five or even six members to the nine-member board, who serve staggered terms lasting multiple years, except for the chair, who serves at the pleasure of the mayor. Other board members can be removed only for cause. Adams has long argued that rent freezes are unfair to landlords, especially small ones, whose costs keep rising even as rent payments remain frozen.
“While freezing the rent may sound like a catchy slogan,” he said in a statement in June, “it is bad policy, short-sighted, and only puts tenants in harm’s way.”
Adams has long received campaign donations from real-estate interests, going back to his days as Brooklyn borough president and continuing earlier this year before he dropped his reelection bid.
In theory, Adams’ late-term appointments could delay any rent freeze until October 2028, according to Jay Martin, executive vice president of the New York Apartment Association, which represents rent-stabilized landlords.
Ready for a fight
Mamdani — whose freeze could mean as much as $6.84 billion less rent paid over four years — is not pleased at what Adams is considering.
“The mayor is seemingly unsatisfied with a record of raising rents by more than 12% on more than 2 million New Yorkers, and is going so far as to consider appointing someone to the Rent Guidelines Board who is known for being a star, I think, on a show called ‘Selling New York,’ and in many ways that’s the description of what he wants to do over these next few months,” Mamdani said Wednesday, the day after he won.
Ritti Singh, a spokeswoman for the New York State Tenant Bloc, said that even if Adams does fill the board with landlord-friendly appointees, the pro-freeze fight will continue.
“We’re committing to generating the external pressure needed to get a rent freeze, whether that’s by changing board members’ minds,” she said, “or if that means creating the pressure for Rent Guidelines Board members who plan to raise rents to resign.”
Adams has opposed a rent freeze since his successful campaign in 2021 for mayor. And during the four years of his mayoralty, the board, which the mayor appoints, has hiked rent four times, totaling 12.6%, according to an analysis by the Community Service Society of New York, one of the city’s oldest social service agencies.
When Mamdani takes over, he’ll be in charge of a government with more than 300,000 municipal employees and over 100 agencies. That includes the NYPD, the nation’s largest local police force, which is budgeted for 34,975 cops in the current fiscal year, a figure Mamdani wants to leave at the status quo.
A plan for more cops
But on Oct. 31, four days before the election, Adams announced a plan, similar to Mamdani foe Andrew M. Cuomo’s campaign pledge, to begin to boost the headcount to 5,000 cops by 2029 — the last year of Mamdani’s term — and start next year with 300 more cops. The plan would grow the NYPD to its highest headcount in 25 years.
Ultimately, Mamdani and the City Council will decide how many cops should be on the force. But while Adams’ plan can be reversed, Mamdani would likely face criticism such as that voiced by Cuomo, whom he beat last week, who said failing to add the 5,000 cops would be akin to defunding the police.
On Wednesday, as Mamdani was in Queens for an event announcing his mayoral transition team’s co-chairs, Adams announced his offer — the second time in his administration — to rehire those fired across all city agencies over their failure to take the COVID-19 shot. The announcement covers about 1,500 terminated employees, and the deadline for applying is Dec. 5, less than a month before Mamdani takes office. Adams said he’s offering to rehire those fired because the city “has fully recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The plan is subject to a proposed rule change and public hearing and the greenlight by the state Civil Service Commission.
And whatever Mamdani might want to do, those who are rehired into permanent civil service positions could not be terminated except for cause, said Sandler of New York Law School.
Earlier this year, when Mamdani was asked on a podcast whether he’d rehire a police officer who was fired for refusing the COVID-19 shot, Mamdani said: “I think I would fall on the side of no… because of the concerns around the necessity of upholding that public health mandate.”
“My concern comes from the likelihood that we could be in a new pandemic, and the necessity of following the public health guidance that we put forward in that pandemic,” he said.
An age-old practice
Adams’ attempts to entrench policy preferences are just the latest examples of an age-old practice, albeit one done at varying degrees.
Before there was Mayor Eric Adams doing it after failing to win reelection in 2025, there was President John Adams doing it after failing to win reelection in 1800, beaten by Thomas Jefferson.
Undeterred by his loss and with just three months left in office, Adams and his allies in Congress hastened to reshape the judiciary, boost the number of seats on the bench, and create new judgeships, to which he appointed allies, to be more sympathetic with the broadening of federal powers over the states, according to a Federal Judicial Center history of what came to be known as the midnight judges scandal.
Then-Secretary of State and Chief Justice John Marshall “raced against time to deliver the judges’ commissions, failing to distribute some on Adams’ final day in office because there were too many documents to carry,” the history says.
Jefferson’s party later repealed some of what Adams’ allies had rammed through.
For his part, Eric Adams has said his personal goal for the remainder of his mayoralty is to “have so much fun.” Finally, he said, he can now take a real vacation. Nowadays his schedule barely has any public events anymore.
“No. 1 thing I’m gonna do is I’m gonna have fun,” Adams said the day after Mamdani beat Cuomo, whom Adams had endorsed. “I plan to have so much fun of just enjoying life.”
His advice to the next mayor: “I’m leaving you a good city, don’t [expletive] it up.”
WHAT NEWSDAY FOUND
- With weeks before the end of New York City’s 110th mayoralty, Eric Adams is seeking to extend his policy influence into the 111th by binding Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.
- Adams is looking at how to make it harder for Mamdani to freeze the rent and keep the NYPD headcount from expanding.
- Other New York City mayors have sought to constrain their successors, but Adams, who says he’s planning to “have so much fun,” appears to be pushing the maneuver to new heights.
Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.