Meet Mamdani’s Biden Expats

Authored by David Dayen via prospect.org,

Last week, Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as the 111th mayor of New York City. This would have been scarcely thought possible just one year ago. The spirit with which Mamdani organized and beat an avatar of the state political establishment—twice—sustained progressives during the long winter of 2025 and provided some hope that charisma, expert use of modern communications, and a laser focus on the cost of living could produce a winning formula.

But as campaigning shifts to governing, those skills in isolation are unlikely to enable Mamdani to solidify public goodwill. The experience of the past several years, with presidents of both parties, has reinforced that delivering tangible results that people can feel is the only thing that earns chief executives lasting support. Taking on fights and naming villains and demonstrating who you care about can get you far, but that must be accompanied by follow-through.

That reality makes Mamdani’s choices of people implementing his agenda quite interesting. Increasingly, he has turned to refugees from the Biden administration who (too quietly) carried out some of the more effective pieces of the former president’s agenda. New York City will have a Biden cabinet member in a deputy mayor role, and a top consumer protection official leading a local agency. Lina Khan, the former Federal Trade Commission chair, co-chaired Mamdani’s transition team and may have a role in his government; that is to be determined, sources tell the Prospect.

The more conventional trajectory for these kinds of public officials after a presidential term is congressional or statewide elected office, or in the worst-case scenario, a high-paying position at one of the entities they used to regulate. That these individuals would step down from the U.S. executive branch to municipal management speaks to how much left-wing populists want to help Mamdani succeed and are thrilled by a government that leads with concern for its working-class constituents.

“It’s something I really felt like I had to do,” said Julie Su, the acting labor secretary for nearly two years under Biden, who will serve in the new position of deputy mayor for economic justice, something she relished. “Not economic development, not economic growth. Justice! The idea that you can care about just outcomes is huge, and that it’s the responsibility of government to make that happen.”

The Biden expats have an important role in the Mamdani administration. Much of his first-term agenda, from universal child care to faster fare-free bus service, hinges on getting the necessary funding through higher taxes on the wealthy. Functionally speaking, that battle will be fought in Albany, against a skeptical governor and the bureaucracy of the legislature. But existing laws on the books give Mamdani the opportunity to make immediate progress through rigorous enforcement, buying time and building momentum for the bigger fights to come.

Take Sam Levine’s new role as head of the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP). Levine was the lead consumer protection official at Khan’s FTC, and since that ended he has engaged in research about the increasing sophistication of technology-fueled pricing, including an excellent report about how companies use loyalty cards to entice customers and scrape their data to use in maximizing profits.