New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed Executive Order 12 on Jan. 29, establishing chief savings officers for all NYC agencies. Each chief savings officer will work with senior leadership to review the five most costly programs of their respective agency.
The idea is to reduce unnecessary spending and reduce cost drivers in each agency’s budget.
During this review, CSOs will seek to understand cost drivers and determine strong necessary programs.
They will then find ways to streamline processes and eliminate waste from their agency through a budgetary savings plan that is reported directly to their agency head.
The move comes a day after Mamdani claimed that former Mayor Eric Adams left NYC with a $12 billion budget gap over the past two years.
He said Adams had often underbudgeted expenses, leaving essential services such as police overtime and housing vouchers with an inadequate budget and creating a crisis that the current administration is left to fix.
According to the Office of the Mayor, CSOs “will have 45 days to review agency operations, determine services that deliver the strongest results for New Yorkers and locate opportunities to streamline processes and eliminate waste.”
Mamdani also told Pix 11 that CSOs will return with a “full assessment of the savings that could be pursued, the efficiencies that we’re currently seeing and the programs that frankly need to be sunsetted or are not effective.”
CSOs will be chosen from existing employees in the agency’s budgeting or finance manage-ment teams or another senior member of the agency.
The executive order establishes that updated budget assessments be conducted every six months to determine progress on the savings initiatives and uncover more opportunities to save.
Each agency has until Feb. 3 to choose its CSO and other relevant staff. To mend the deficit, Mamdani also called upon Gov. Kathy Hochul and state legislation to increase taxation on the richest New Yorkers and corporations in addition to Executive Order 12.
In effect, this order will be a continuous operation to “move away from reliance on short-term measures and toward lasting operational improvements that will be reflected in every agency’s baseline budget,” according to Mamdani.
