Mayor Zohran Mamdani told New Yorkers he would rein in the city's sprawling education bureaucracy. Instead, his first budget handed the Department of Education $680 million more than his own executive proposal called for, and the details only surfaced when city officials released budget documents without fanfare days after the City Council had already voted yes.
The DOE's fiscal year 2027 budget now stands at $38.6 billion, an increase of roughly $4 billion over the prior year. That figure consumes nearly one-third of the city's entire $126 billion spending plan, the New York Post reported. Neither City Hall nor the DOE responded to the Post's request for comment.
The gap between what Mamdani promised and what he delivered is not small. Shortly after winning the 2025 mayoral race, Mamdani told the Post he would cut the DOE budget by going after contracts and consultants. At the SOMOS conference in Puerto Rico on November 6, he repeated the pledge in public.
Budget documents show at least three large additions that inflated the DOE's bottom line well past the mayor's original proposal. The biggest: roughly $400 million to keep funding flat at schools where enrollment is declining. Another $100 million covered school cleaning costs that Mamdani's executive budget had simply left out. The City Council tacked on an additional $42 million for social and emotional support programs and art activities.
Add those up and you approach the $680 million overshoot, money that appeared in the fine print only after the Council approved the budget on June 29.
Andrew Rein, head of the Citizens Budget Commission, a fiscally conservative watchdog group, put the enrollment math bluntly:
"Not only is budgeting to pay for students that don't exist unfair, it means you miss the opportunity to spend those dollars on programs to help New Yorkers... or building reserves that help New Yorkers weather a rainy day."
Rein's point lands harder when you look at the enrollment numbers. New York City public schools now serve about 780,000 students. The city is projected to lose another 153,000 over the next decade. At $38.6 billion, the per-pupil cost works out to approximately $49,500, already 50 percent more than what Los Angeles and Chicago spend per student, according to federal data cited in the Post's reporting.
The spending surge might be easier to defend if it were producing results. It is not.
The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the "Nation's Report Card", found that only about a third of New York City fourth-graders scored proficient in math. Just 28 percent were proficient in reading. Among eighth-graders, the numbers were worse: 23 percent proficient in math, 29 percent in reading.
Nearly 35 percent of the city's students, roughly 300,000 kids, are chronically absent. The city is pouring record sums into a system where a large share of students do not show up and the majority of those who do cannot read or do math at grade level.
Mamdani himself acknowledged the bloat when he spoke at the SOMOS conference. He told attendees that about $10 billion of the DOE's budget goes to contracts and consultants, and that some of that spending "can be reduced when you take a real look at the duplicative processes." He added a line that now reads like a punchline:
"We have to always ensure that every dollar of that budget is being spent effectively."
Seven months later, his own budget added hundreds of millions in spending above what he proposed, and the public learned about it only after the vote was done.
The DOE budget is not the only place where Mamdani's actions have diverged from his public commitments. His final budget also cut $29 million from the NYPD, after he had publicly defended a boost in police officer numbers just two weeks before the vote. A promise of 580 new cops was walked back entirely. The reversal was dropped on City Council Speaker Julie Menin late on a Monday night, after the budget had already received approval on both sides.
Republican lawmakers were rankled by the broken police-hiring pledge. The Post reported that Mamdani's cave on NYPD expansion came after pressure from his allies in the Democratic Socialists of America, who had rallied against adding officers.
Meanwhile, a deal between Mamdani and Speaker Menin severely curtailed spending on any housing voucher expansion, another area where the mayor's rhetoric has outpaced his follow-through.
The budget was not without internal dissent. Bronx Councilwoman Althea Stevens cast the lone Democratic vote against the spending plan, citing the Bronx's inadequate share of city funding. She told the Post:
"Equity cannot simply be a word we use in speeches or campaign slogans. Equity means directing resources where the needs are greatest."
The quiet release of budget documents, days after the vote, with no public explanation for the $680 million increase, fits a broader pattern. The Mamdani administration has faced questions about its willingness to let the public and the Council see where the money goes. The DOE has been accused of blocking a City Council audit of billions in contract spending, and the mayor's office has drawn criticism for its handling of other policy rollouts.
It remains unclear whether the City Council was even aware of the added hundreds of millions in DOE spending before members cast their votes on June 29. The Post's reporting raises the question but does not resolve it. If Council members voted on a budget whose final DOE figure had been inflated without their knowledge, that is a transparency failure of the first order.
Mamdani's approach to governing has already raised eyebrows beyond the budget. His government grocery plan drew pushback from bodega owners who said City Hall demanded sensitive business information without adequate justification. The administration's broader political profile, including Kamala Harris courting Mamdani as 2028 primary maneuvering heats up, suggests that the mayor's national ambitions may be outrunning his local accountability.
At its core, the story is simple. A mayor who ran on fiscal discipline and promised to cut a bloated education bureaucracy instead added $680 million to it. He did so quietly. He cut police funding to do it. And the system receiving all that money cannot get three out of four eighth-graders to read at grade level.
New York City now spends roughly $49,500 per student in a school system losing enrollment every year. The $400 million set aside to keep funding flat at shrinking schools is, in Rein's words, money spent on "students that don't exist." That is not investment. That is institutional inertia dressed up as compassion.
The city's taxpayers, the ones footing the $126 billion bill, deserve to know why the mayor's budget grew by nearly $700 million beyond his own proposal, who approved it, and what they are getting for it. So far, City Hall's answer has been silence.
When a politician promises to cut waste and then quietly adds hundreds of millions in spending after the cameras turn off, the waste isn't the only problem. The dishonesty is.
