New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood before cameras Thursday and announced he was borrowing Elon Musk’s playbook. He was calling it COGE, the Commission on Government Efficiency. He said New Yorkers deserve a city government “as careful with their money as they are.”
The man Mamdani chose to chair COGE is Patrick Gaspard, who from 2017 to 2020 served as president of the Open Society Foundation, the Soros family’s global political operation. Before that, Gaspard ran the Democratic National Committee as its executive director. Before that, he served as a senior White House advisor to Barack Obama. Just weeks before announcing Gaspard’s appointment, Mamdani met privately with Alex Soros, George Soros’ son, at his Manhattan residence.
Sitting alongside Gaspard on the new commission: Susan Kang, a member of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. And Theodore Moore, executive director of ALIGN, a progressive advocacy organization whose mission focuses on worker power and, in the city’s own words, “climate justice.”
The name says efficiency. The commissioners say something else entirely.
That is not a procedural detail. The City Charter is the foundational legal document that defines how every agency operates, how city government is structured, and what powers the mayor holds. COGE’s stated mandate is to review the “entire New York City Charter” and propose amendments directly to voters through the November ballot. Ten public hearings across five boroughs. Whatever they recommend, it goes to a ballot. No council override. No Albany check. The commission writes the question; New Yorkers vote yes or no.
The left has a word for repackaging progressive goals inside efficiency-sounding language. They call it “delivering for working people.” The actual translation: Mamdani wants to use a Charter revision commission to restructure city government in ways that expand public services, entrench progressive priorities in the city’s foundational legal document, and lock in changes before his political opponents can mobilize.
COGE’s goal, as stated by its own chair, is to deliver housing, transit, child care, and affordable groceries faster. The mechanism is the same. The direction is the opposite.
