NYC’s New COGE Promises to Find Waste in a City That Has Elevated Waste to a Performance Art
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
NEW YORK, NY — Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Thursday the creation of the Commission on Government Efficiency, or COGE, in what political observers are calling a bold borrowing of an acronym from the federal government and what the subway system is calling absolutely nothing because the subway system does not read press releases, it just does what it does regardless of what any commission recommends.
COGE: The Name, The Mission, The Irony
COGE — which rhymes with “rogue” if you say it quickly and with despair if you say it slowly while looking at a city budget — will review municipal operations for inefficiencies, redundancies, and expenditures that can be reduced without impacting services. This is, of course, the stated mission of every government efficiency initiative in American municipal history, and the results of those efforts have ranged from modest to invisible, with occasional outliers that moved the needle slightly before the needle drifted back.
Mayor Mamdani, who came to office on a platform that included genuine progressive governance ambitions alongside the kind of fiscal realism that New York City’s budget situation eventually imposes on everyone regardless of ideological preference, has described COGE as a response to waste and duplication in city government. He did not specify which waste or which duplication, which is either strategic ambiguity or an acknowledgment that the list is long enough that identifying a subset would undersell the problem.
The federal DOGE, from which the acronym family derives, operated under the theory that significant efficiency gains were available in government operations and that finding them required only the application of private sector analytical rigor and a sufficiently public Twitter presence. COGE’s relationship to this theory has not been articulated, though the Mamdani administration’s relationship to private sector methodology suggests the analogy will be deployed selectively.
New York City’s Relationship With Efficiency: A Brief History
New York City government employs approximately 300,000 people across agencies that cover everything from education to sanitation to the administration of parking violations to the investigation of complaints about parking violation investigators. The organizational chart of the city government, if printed at standard resolution, would require a wall approximately the size of a tennis court to display legibly and several days to read.
This size is not incidental. New York City is the largest city in the United States, serves 8.3 million residents plus an indeterminate number of daily commuters and tourists, and provides a range of services that no other American city provides at equivalent scale. The administrative apparatus required to coordinate these services is genuinely large because the services are genuinely large, which means that efficiency efforts face the challenge of distinguishing between bureaucratic excess and bureaucratic necessity in an organization where the line between the two is blurry by design.
Previous efficiency commissions have identified genuine savings: contract consolidations, technology implementations that reduced manual processing, benefit administration improvements, and various operational changes that cumulatively produced measurable results. They have not identified savings sufficient to close New York City’s structural budget gap, which has been a feature of the city’s financial landscape for so long that it has its own Wikipedia entry.
The Subway Question Nobody Is Asking the Commission
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the subway and buses and which is technically a state agency rather than a city agency and therefore not within COGE’s mandate, continues to represent the most visible infrastructure challenge in New York City’s daily life. This jurisdictional technicality — the subway belongs to the state, the efficiency commission belongs to the city — means that COGE cannot address the thing that most affects New Yorkers’ daily experience of government functionality.
This is not unusual in New York governance, where the interplay between city authority, state authority, and federal funding creates a landscape in which accountability for any specific failure is almost always shared among enough parties that no single one bears it clearly. The subway is late? That’s the MTA. The MTA is underfunded? That’s the state. The state needs federal money? That’s Washington. Washington is doing something else? That’s a different story entirely.
COGE’s focus on city agency operations is a tractable problem within a set of larger problems that tractability does not reach. This is not a criticism of the commission’s design. It is a description of urban governance in an era where the most important infrastructure crosses jurisdictional lines and the most visible problems belong to nobody specific and everybody generally.
What COGE Could Actually Do
The areas where city-level efficiency initiatives have historically produced results include: healthcare benefits administration for city employees, which represents billions in annual expenditure with meaningful optimization potential; technology procurement, where cities routinely pay significantly more than market rate for software and systems due to procurement processes that favor incumbents; real estate, where city-owned properties are sometimes underutilized in ways that either generate cost or fail to generate revenue; and interagency coordination, where parallel programs with overlapping mandates spend money achieving the same goals through different organizational channels.
None of these is glamorous. None of them will generate the kind of headline efficiency savings that make a commission famous. All of them, addressed consistently over time, produce the aggregate improvement that good city management looks like from the inside and that the public rarely sees because it consists of things that didn’t go wrong rather than things that went right. NYC.gov documents the city’s operational performance across agencies for anyone interested in the baseline against which COGE will presumably be measured.
New York City political satire, Mamdani administration humor, and COGE commentary: Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
More NYC satire: The Onion and NewsThump.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/