New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday announced the creation of a Commission on Government Efficiency, or COGE, the centrepiece structural reform of his first year in office. The body, formally constituted by mayoral executive order, is charged with examining the New York City Charter to identify provisions that "no longer serve the city," propose amendments and to recommend operational efficiencies across municipal agencies.
Mamdani named Patrick Gaspard, the former executive director of the Democratic National Committee and former US ambassador to South Africa, as commission chair. Gaspard has spent the past three years running the Open Society Foundations' US office and is widely respected across the progressive ecosystem. The commission will include twelve members appointed jointly by the mayor and the City Council, with announcements expected next week.
The commission's working remit includes three areas: charter modernisation, agency consolidation and digital service delivery. Mamdani told reporters in the Blue Room that he wanted COGE to identify "duplicative" agency functions and to propose a smaller, "more legible" city government structure that would allow what he called "the policy ambition of this administration to actually arrive in residents' lives."
COGE will hold ten public hearings, one in each of the city's twelve community-district clusters, beginning June 9 at Hostos Community College in the Bronx. The commission is required by the executive order to deliver a preliminary report by January 2027 and a final set of charter-amendment recommendations by July 2027, in time for placement on the November 2027 general-election ballot if the City Council approves.
The name is a deliberate counterpoint to Donald Trump and Elon Musk's federal Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which spent the early months of 2025 cutting federal personnel before being unwound by mid-2025 court rulings. Mamdani said COGE would explicitly not be about "cutting workers" and that the city had "too few inspectors, too few caseworkers and too few engineers, not too many," but acknowledged some agencies would be combined.
The commission proposal had been part of Mamdani's November 2025 mayoral campaign platform and tracks an organisational chart he made public during the transition. Among the likely consolidations are merging the Department of Housing Preservation and Development with the city Housing Authority's policy office, restructuring the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, and creating a single permitting platform across construction, business and event uses.
Reaction from the City Council was largely supportive. Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said the council would "be a partner, not a rubber stamp," and confirmed she would introduce parallel legislation creating a council-side review process. The municipal labour federation, District Council 37, said in a more guarded statement that the commission's framing was "fine in principle" but that "any reorganisation of agencies will require negotiation, not assertion."