Earlier this month, Mayor Zohran Mamdani axed the advisory board of the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, a nonprofit venture that channels private donations into City Hall priorities. The mini-massacre was a prime showcasing of Mamdanian political ruthlessness, akin to that of Donald Trump or Mamdani’s 2025 mayoral rival, Andrew Cuomo. But the bigger issue for New York is that socialists—even democratic socialists such as Mamdani—don’t believe in philanthropy, though the city’s civic culture runs on it.
The Mayor’s Fund for New York City is a handy proxy for the opposite of Mamdani-ism: Bloombergism. Bloomberg’s predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, started the fund, then called New York City Public-Private Initiatives Inc., in 1994. It was small-scale, raising just over $1 million annually, and a little slushy: in 1998, for example, one headline venture was the publication of a child-scale biography of the mayor himself, funded with $25,000 from Goldman Sachs.
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It wasn’t until 9/11 and the ensuing Bloomberg administration that the fund became a powerhouse. In 2013, Bloomberg’s final year, it raised $105.9 million, funding meal and shelter relief after Hurricane Sandy in 2012; the “Young Men’s Initiative” to “help young black and Latino men break down barriers to their success;” and a “Social Innovation Fund” to reduce poverty and sponsor summer jobs for kids. The fund also helped pay for The Shed, the arts facility at Hudson Yards.
The money, a fraction of the spending in a then-$72.5 billion city budget, mattered less than the concept. Bloomberg wanted corporations and wealthy individuals to see themselves as important and valued partners in the city’s future. Through the fund, he made clear that the city cared about what they thought and was grateful for their help.
After Bloomberg left City Hall, the fund became slushy again. Bill de Blasio named his wife to chair it. Donations fell back to the low tens of millions until Covid-19, when corporations and foundations donated $77 million for relief. Potential donors were wary of Mayor Eric Adams’s reputation for corruption, and last year, donations shrank to $7.9 million, with the fund disbursing more than it took in. Starting in 2025, with a donation from Airbnb—a highly regulated company in New York—the fund helped build soccer mini-pitches for kids ahead of this summer’s World Cup.
Through it all, the fund’s essential concept remained the same: it was a vehicle for funding worthy, noncontroversial, nonideological projects, which enabled executives and others whose main dealings with city government were paying taxes and grappling with regulations to enjoy a more positive interaction.
Mamdani’s mass firing of unpaid board members might be regarded as unremarkable: a new mayor wanting to flex his power and bring in his own people. As one jettisoned board member told me, “I assumed he would look to replace us with his friends. Whether they can raise or donate money is another matter.”
But no recent mayor has fired the advisory board en masse. Mamdani’s sweep included Ed Skyler, a Citigroup executive and Bloomberg and Giuliani City Hall alum who had served since the de Blasio administration, representing continuity.
Mamdani didn’t name any new advisory board members, and it’s not clear that he even wants to raise much money through government via voluntary contributions. The mayor’s top spokeswoman told Bloomberg that “the creation of a new advisory board is an important next step in reimaging how philanthropy can augment, but not replace, public dollars and public goods, and we are eager to share more about our new board of advisors later this year.”
The ideological dilemma for Mamdani is that the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), his power base, views philanthropy not as a complement to government but as a threat. The DSA’s Los Angeles chapter puts it bluntly as it castigates what it calls the Nonprofit Industrial Complex: “Our government, as it continues to underinvest in critical social services, turns to nonprofits to provide the services that it should provide. Nonprofits are accountable only to the foundations and philanthropic benefactors and not to the public good.” In Europe (DSA defenders’ tentative model for democratic socialism), charitable donations per capita are a fraction of what they are in America, because the corporate and public expectation is that the state is responsible not just for expansive welfare but also for arts and culture funding.
Before he disbanded its advisory board, Mamdani’s own goal for the Fund to Advance New York City exemplifies this conflict. Earlier this year, referring to “government-led efforts to lower costs,” he said that the fund would “help accelerate progress on core commitments to the movement that brought them to City Hall,” including “the first municipal grocery stores and a historic expansion of free childcare.” To that end, he wanted to raise $20 million for “child care action.”
But Mamdani’s foundational philosophy is that the government should fund these things via higher taxes. The mayor doesn’t want to ask wealthy corporations and people for more money so much as take it—gleefully—as his recent marketing of his pied-à-terre tax demonstrates. “The best city in the world deserves the best parks, libraries, and schools in the world,” he said. “That’s only possible when we all pay our fair share.”
The problem with this philosophy is that government money, even in a high-tax, high-spend city, is never infinite. Even in the best of times, and with social-service and education spending reaching record levels, the city relies on private donors to help support food banks and libraries and to augment public school spending. Private donors have helped create and maintain the city’s world-class hospital and university systems.
And New York taxpayers could never fund the city’s full array of arts and culture institutions, from opera to museums to theater and dance troupes. The arts are a key amenity that brings new taxpayers here and keeps some old ones.
Even high-tax Europe has started to figure this out, as funding becomes scarce for its own marquee arts and culture offerings. Private donors mostly paid for Notre Dame’s reconstruction after the 2019 fire. The Louvre, with its own massive capital needs, has launched something akin to the Met Gala to bring in high-dollar givers.
Mamdani should not alienate the city’s donor class, because he can’t replace it with city government.