Mayor Zohran Mamdani has presented his first executive budget, released last week, as a heroic act, claiming to have cleverly filled the city’s budget gap without cutting services. But as my colleagues John Ketcham and Ken Girardin have explained, many of Mamdani’s savings are illusory—likely including a projected $149 million saved on special-education due-process cases, also known as Carter cases.
Even after the projected reduction, the New York City Department of Education will still spend more than $1.4 billion on Carter cases next year, more than triple what it spent a decade ago. It’s now one of the largest items in the DOE budget and the only one that grows automatically each year, as new cases are filed and old cases are renewed automatically.
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There are two easy ways for the city to spend less on Carter cases: it can build stronger public special-education programs so that fewer families choose to go to private schools, or it can fight harder to keep these families in public schools. Mayor Mamdani has done neither of these things, so it’s unclear how his projected $149 million in savings will emerge.
Carter cases allow parents to seek reimbursement for sending children with disabilities to private schools when those children have not been adequately served in public schools. While the program began as a narrow court settlement, decades of poor management have caused it to balloon to its current cost. The average settlement per student in 2025 was $101,757. Total Carter-case spending has grown from $47 million in 2005 to the more than $1.4 billion projected next year.
The amount of Carter-case spending depends on three factors: how many families file claims; how many claims the city loses or settles; and how much the city pays out in each case. The mayor cannot change the second or third factors, since hearing officers decide the outcome of cases, and private schools set tuition rates. He can influence the first factor—by contesting more renewals, and by building DOE programs that keep more families in the public school system.
He could follow the example of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, under whom the city hired additional lawyers to contest private school placements, thus limiting the amount of public money that flowed to private schools. Under Bloomberg, the city also reevaluated Carter-case placements annually, rather than automatically renewing them, allowing some students who could be served by the public school system to return when appropriate.
Bloomberg’s successor, Bill de Blasio, reversed both policies and instead sought to streamline the reimbursement process, automatically renewing claims rather than reexamining them. Over the years, this practice has led to massive spending increases.
The Mamdani administration has not restored the annual redeterminations and has not committed to hiring more lawyers. So it’s unlikely he’ll be cutting costs that way.
What about improving the special education system? The city has operated under a federal court order to do so for almost three years. In July 2023, a Southern District of New York judge ordered the city to make 51 reforms to speed up the delivery of special-education services. According to a July 2025 report from the court-appointed monitor, the DOE had implemented just 21 of those reforms.
But while Mamdani is looking to make changes, none is likely to produce Carter-case savings. For example, the executive budget adds over $30 million in funding for contracted-out services like speech therapy, occupational therapy, and other mandated supports provided by private providers. But this spending just grows the private-contractor side of the special-education system, which actually drives up Carter-case spending.
Mamdani also recently announced the opening of two new special-education schools this fall. But neither school is designed for the population that most often files for private placement or is located in the neighborhoods that generate the most due-process cases. So it’s unlikely these schools will meaningfully reduce costs.
The mayor came into office on a platform of protecting the city’s most vulnerable. If he wants to do that—and reduce spending in the process—he should reverse the Carter-case policies he inherited from recent administrations. As it stands, his promised savings on the program seem unlikely to materialize.