Opinion: An indictment of the sad state of New York government

From 2021 to 2024, I served as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. During my tenure, the Southern District brought some of the most significant enforcement actions in America. We fought corruption on Wall Street and in our government. We protected the country from national security threats. We brought sex traffickers to justice. We advanced civil rights.

We dismantled violent gangs. We attacked every level of the fentanyl crisis, from Chinese companies that supply the precursor chemicals, to Mexican cartel leaders who manufacture the drug, to the local dealers who distribute the poison in our communities.

By any measure, the Southern District has been historically productive. We achieved these results by matching innovative approaches with time-tested values. By investigating with urgency. By rewarding creativity and collaboration. By respecting dissent and rejecting partisan bias. By being disciplined with a limited budget – and then returning billions of dollars to the public through our work.

I’m naturally proud of what the Southern District has achieved, but our record of success demonstrates something more important, especially at this moment in history: It shows that government can work. Government can be energetic, efficient and effective. This shouldn’t be remarkable. But as every New Yorker knows, excellence in government has become all too rare.

The timing couldn’t be worse. Now more than ever, it is essential for state and local governments to put their best foot forward. New York, unfortunately, isn’t ready to meet the moment.

Let’s review the sad state of things and why it doesn’t have to be this way.

The public reporting alone paints a picture of New York City in deep crisis. America’s most vital city is being led with a broken ethical compass. All this while New Yorkers deal with a declining quality of life – high housing costs, a too-often-unsafe subway and a general sense of disorder.

Albany is hardly in better shape. Its entrenched culture of corruption, which the Southern District has long sought to address, is only rivaled by its knack for inaction and incrementalism. Albany is wired in every way for insiders, with the predictable result that the problems affecting most New Yorkers are either deprioritized or the responses so diluted by special interests that very little changes. A glaring example is the cost of living. It’s so egregiously expensive to live in New York that working people are voting with their feet and fleeing the state altogether.

Lawmakers have belatedly begun to take action, but the problem should never have been allowed to mushroom into a crisis. Similarly, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority – the lifeblood of business and work in greater New York City – has been dysfunctional and wasteful for decades. But because of its byzantine governance structure, accountability is spread so thin that it barely exists. On these problems and others, Albany has been chronically asleep at the switch. And New Yorkers can sense it.

From housing costs, to health care, to education, to crime, to transportation, it’s difficult to identify a single area where New York’s government has clearly succeeded. This pervasive underperformance has led to pervasive public dissatisfaction. The people are in a foul mood, and they have every reason to be. But they also have been conditioned to believe that this is as good as it gets. And that our government is destined to be sclerotic, scandal-plagued and systematically broken.

The truth is that my party – the Democratic Party – has grown too comfortable with the way things are in New York. Reform – the kind of big, structural change necessary to meet our challenges head-on – is rarely pursued with sufficient urgency and imagination. And the measure of success too often appears to be whether we hold power on Election Day instead of whether we wield power on behalf of everyday people. For their part, Republicans – though largely locked out of power in New York City and in Albany – aren’t offering anything like the reforms we need.

Unlike so much of today’s politics, this indictment of the status quo isn’t partisan. As I see it, the most meaningful divide in New York is not between Democrats and Republicans. It’s between the insiders who thrive in our broken system and the outsiders who are fed up and know we must fundamentally change it – from root to branch – so that government can finally address our most acute problems.

For years, reformers have proposed commonsense, structural solutions for returning power to the people and making government more effective. But without elected officials willing to disrupt the status quo, progress has been nonexistent. That needs to change.

Take campaign finance. At a bare minimum, no politician should be permitted to raise money from individuals or entities with business before the state. It reeks of pay-to-play corruption and is offensive to most New Yorkers. And yet the practice has persisted for generations, fattening the coffers of elected officials while feeding the justifiable perception that politicians – and the taxpayer funds they control – are for sale. We also need to establish a truly transformative public financing system for state elections to minimize the toxic influence of special interest money. (The state’s new matching funds program is woefully inadequate, a fig leaf meant to resemble reform without actually achieving much of it.) The goal should be empowering anyone with good ideas and leadership chops – teachers, nurses, veterans, homemakers and young people – to run for office, regardless of their access to donors. The ability to raise obscene sums of money for a campaign is precisely the wrong bottleneck to elected office.

Term limits should be enacted. Yes, there are potential drawbacks. But surely we can agree, as a starting point, that our statewide elected officials shouldn’t be able to serve in perpetuity. Four years is a long time. Eight years is an eternity. Who exactly benefits from New York’s permanent ruling class? It thwarts generational change and shuts out new ideas. It also promotes timidity – the next election is always just around the corner, after all – when boldness is what the moment requires. Dynamic institutions, including the Southern District, embrace churn and renewal. That’s how new thinking emerges, dogma is challenged and vitality is maintained.

New York government needs a thorough efficiency review. No matter your partisan leanings, it’s clear that our government is far too inefficient. New York’s taxes are the highest in the country. Yet our roads are among the nation’s worst. And, in New York City, 1 in 4 children live in poverty and 1 in 8 public school children are homeless. Government needs to examine whether it’s using taxpayer dollars responsibly and whether it can do more to optimize outcomes. There’s nothing progressive about bloat, nothing liberal about endless roadblocks that grind infrastructure development to a crawl. It makes government slow and dysfunctional, when it needs it to be nimble and productive. Democrats rightly defend democracy, and to succeed in that effort we need to ensure that government by the people actually serves the people.

Despite our challenges, and there are many, I’m confident we can do better. Change is a choice. New Yorkers can reclaim power and achieve necessary systemic reform if they band together and demand it – loudly enough that politicians finally listen. That kind of transformation is hard, but in New York, it’s long overdue.