New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has signed exactly one piece of legislation into law since taking office 10 months ago, according to reporting from the New York Post. By comparison, his three immediate predecessors signed 30, 47 and 28 bills, respectively, over similar stretches.
The lone bill Mamdani put his name to allows year-round outdoor dining. Nearly everything else passed by the City Council has instead gone through a process called “returned unsigned,” in which legislation automatically becomes law after sitting on the mayor’s desk, untouched and unvetoed, for four weeks.
Far-left state Sen. Jabari Brisport defended the practice, posting that it’s a sign of productivity: “That’s why he gets done more than other Mayors.”
Critics tell a different story. A source who regularly works with City Hall told the Post that Mamdani “and his team are obsessed with becoming a content farm, often delaying or can-kicking boring governmental meetings so the mayor and his staff can hold pitch sessions for social media videos.”
Mamdani has built a steady stream of viral content since taking office — opera-ticket giveaways, a staged trash-basketball game with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, and more — while his staff has enlisted social-media influencers to amplify the same material. Meanwhile, close to 100 bills have sat on his desk without his signature.
A former City Hall staffer put it bluntly to the Post: “It’s easier to govern by TikTok than to actually perform the duties of the job.”
Council members left waiting
The practical effect falls hardest on City Council members who spend months building coalitions and negotiating language to pass bills, only to see them take effect without a signing ceremony — and without taking effect for a full month after passage, since the unsigned bills must sit out the four-week clock.
That delay, and the lack of any public credit from the mayor’s office, has created friction with council members whose cooperation Mamdani will likely need again.
Who’s actually running the city
With the mayor’s attention split toward content production, day-to-day governance has fallen to his appointees — including housing czar Cea Weaver, who has pushed an aggressive stance against landlords, and Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels, who is overseeing a public school system still in decline.
Whatever decisions those officials make, the mayor remains accountable for the outcomes. And every mayor before him has eventually faced a crisis that tested whether he understood how the machinery of city government actually works — Rudy Giuliani with the September 11 attacks, Bill de Blasio with COVID-19, Eric Adams with the migrant influx. Mamdani has not yet been tested in the same way, and his approach so far gives little indication of how he would respond.
