Brad Lander is running against Eric Adams while serving as a watchdog. Is that a conflict of interest?

While monitoring the Adams administration as city comptroller in the months to come, Brad Lander will simultaneously be mounting a challenge against Mayor Eric Adams in the 2025 New York City mayoral primary – dual roles that may both benefit his bid while also giving opponents the opportunity to accuse him of wielding the oversight role for political purposes.

Lander has been a strong check on Adams and his administration over the past two years. Lander’s position at the helm of the comptroller’s office has allowed him to audit city agencies and hit the mayor over perceived operational deficiencies and poor fiscal management. It’s a powerful role – one Lander has taken seriously. Last December, the comptroller revoked Adams’ blanket emergency spending powers to enter contracts to house and care for migrants. That was just one chapter of Lander criticizing Adams’ handling of the migrant crisis – especially the city’s reliance on DocGo, the medical services provider company that landed a controversial $432 million contract to provide services to new arrivals. A recent audit from Lander found that the city failed to carry out sufficient oversight over the company’s contract. Other audits from the comptroller have probed a variety of issues, resulting in conclusions like a gun detection system used by the New York City Police Department is a waste of police officers’ time and the city spends millions on a program to treat people with severe mental illness on the streets without creating standards to measure its success.

Of course much of this work predated Lander’s announcement last week that he would challenge Adams in next year’s Democratic primary. Still, independent oversight of local government has long been a core facet of the city comptroller’s job. Lander’s responsibility to carry out that role remains regardless of whether he’s running against Adams.

“Doing your job as comptroller, it’s the nature of the job. It’s a separately elected position for a reason and that is because you want independent oversight,” said Rachael Fauss, senior policy adviser of nonpartisan watchdog group Reinvent Albany.

There are a number of existing legal prohibitions around political activity that are relevant to Lander and any other elected official running for office like not using city social media accounts for campaigning and ensuring staff aren’t doing campaign activity at work, according to Fauss. Recusing oneself from doing oversight of programs, agencies, contracts and spending is a very different matter however.

The last time a comptroller ran against an incumbent mayor was in 2009 when Democrat then-city comptroller Bill Thompson ran against then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg who was a Republican at the time. The parallels with Adams and Lander aren’t exact as both are members of the same party, but Thompson never recused himself of any of his comptroller duties while running against Bloomberg.

“If you are talking about a recusal that goes above and beyond the current political prohibitions, you’re also talking about not allowing independent oversight to move forward potentially,” Fauss said.

Lander used his latest audit on the city’s management of the DocGo contract to fundraise for his mayoral campaign, sending out an email that detailed what he described as “millions of dollars recklessly misspent.” While there’s nothing wrong with running on his accomplishments as comptroller, doing so could run the risk of undermining the legitimacy of the audits by giving the impression that he undertook them for his own political gain.

“It’s not surprising that the Mayor’s team would want to distract from this audit’s findings that his Administration engaged in gross mismanagement and taxpayer waste – but New Yorkers are a lot smarter than that,” Rebecca Rodriguez, senior adviser to Lander’s campaign, said in a statement. “Everyone knows that Brad has been sounding the alarm on DocGo for eleven months, declining to register the disastrous no-bid contract last September and launching the audit back then.”

Some charged that Lander has leveraged his comptroller powers for political purposes after he launched a probe into Adams’ “Operation Padlock to Protect” program, which has so far led to the closure of around 800 unlicensed cannabis shops since mid-May. Lander announced the investigation, first reported by the New York Post, in an Aug. 1 letter to city Sheriff Anthony Miranda two days after announcing his mayoral bid. 

Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf said he was concerned by the intentions of the investigation. While there are some situations where it would be fine for Lander to probe Adams despite running against him, the way he phrased things made it sound like it was a political gesture, Sheinkopf said.

“What Lander did was make it sound like this is what he was going to do. This is his grudge match. He’s going to use his power because he has it,” Sheinkopf said. “If you want to do that, that’s fine, but you can’t use your office as your campaign platform. If it’s going to be used in that way, it’s wrong, it’s unethical, it sounds terrible and it’s not the right thing to do.”

Adams himself shook off questions this week about Lander’s investigation into Operation Padlock to Protect and whether it might be politically motivated. “None of that really matters to me. I have a job to fight on behalf of New Yorkers and that’s what I’m going to do,” he told reporters at his weekly media briefing. “I’m not going to speculate why people do what they do.”

Democratic political strategist Trip Yang also said Lander doesn’t have any conflicts of interest in terms of carrying out official controlling duties like monitoring and providing oversight of the mayoral administration while embarking on his political campaign. Still, while being comptroller will likely be a boon to Lander’s campaign due to the credibility and recognition such a position offers, opponents may also try to question his motives.

“I would predict that the Adams campaign would try to frame Comptroller Brad Lander as leveraging his office in an ambitious way in order for him to be more likely to become mayor,” Yang said. “I can predict that the Adams campaign will try to do that, but I also think Brad is pretty good at promoting a positive vision for his leadership in the city … so whether or not he catches fire for mayor is going to depend on fundraising, building coalitions, getting endorsed, and putting together a campaign team.”