Robert Moses's unfinished business should be Mamdani's priority

The mayor-elect has 25,000 job applicants in 24 hours and a civil service system designed to keep him from hiring any of them

Joseph Heath had a piece here a while back that I’ve been returning to since the Mamdani win in New York City. “The fundamental problem with the left in America,” he writes, “is not that their aspirations are misguided but that they want to eat their pudding before finishing their meat. Or, to translate this into American idiom, they want to go straight to dessert without eating their vegetables.“

He goes on to say:

American progressives want a Swedish-style welfare state without doing any of the hard work that is involved in creating a state apparatus capable of delivering a Swedish welfare state. There are thousands of examples of this, but one that I found particularly striking was Elizabeth Warren’s call for the introduction of a wealth tax. This is a typical “all-pudding no-meat” position. There are various objections to wealth taxes, but one of the most significant is that imposing them requires the creation of an entirely new administrative system, since taxpayers are currently only required to report their income to the government, not their wealth. You can’t just add a few extra lines to the income tax form. The problem is that in 2020, when Warren was campaigning on this, the U.S. federal government barely had the capacity to collect an income tax.

Heath then proceeds to tell a personal IRS horror story, an 18-month long saga of threatening letters directing him to talk to an agent despite there being essentially no agents to talk to. I won’t repeat it here, but it’s the kind of story that reminds me that the people complaining that government efficiency is a terrible goal probably haven’t been tortured by an agency for 18 months. (If you’re wondering how an agency gets to a state where it treats people like this, despite many well-intentioned efforts to improve it, I recommend Sam Corcos’s interview on Modern Wisdom, in which he shares that the IRS has 108 competing sources of truth and 50,000 active fax lines, not because people want to fax them, but because they still require that certain information be transmitted that way.) Heath wraps up with this observation, with which I wholeheartedly agree:

The larger point is that the IRS is barely capable of administering an income tax. The idea that they could administer a wealth tax is like something out of science fiction.

Zohram Mamdani will become Mayor of New York City on January 1, and the question on my mind is whether his administration will indulge in its own fictions or get to the hard, unsexy work ahead. I hope they eat their vegetables first. He’s promised free child care, for instance, but faces challenges not only funding it, but implementing it. New Mexico, which has a quarter of the population of New York City, is one to watch here. Even before its new policy came into effect, the state had one of the most comprehensive child care policies in the country, but less than one third of eligible families took advantage of it. The Atlantic’s analysis of the challenges New Mexico faces look a lot like the elements of the operating model we describe as the work of the Recoding America Fund: for government to be capable of achieving the policy goals its sets, it needs the right people, focused on the right substantive work, with purpose-fit systems, and test-and-learn frameworks. For New Mexico – and New York City — to deliver, it needs to hire a lot of people well and fast, streamline and right-size licensing and certification procedures, manage these processes through appropriate technology, and adjust along the way as the state learns from what’s working and what isn’t.

For team Mamdani, their first challenge is already clear: hiring. Apparently they got 25,000 job applications in the first 24 hours.¹ A lot of people want to work for the Mamdani administration. This is great! They will need a lot of people! The problem is that hiring in New York City government is subject to possibly the most insane rules in the country, as my colleagues Robert Gordon and Gabe Paley have just described for Vital City. And I say that as someone who didn’t think anything could be worse than the federal hiring rules.

Say you work in New York City government and need to hire someone. (Note: I researched this several years ago when I was writing my book, so if it’s changed since then, forgive me, and I will update this if I get corrections.) Your starting place is not an accurate description of the work that needs doing, but rather a desperate search through the job classifications system, where about 3000 different positions, a mix of totally generic, oddly specific, and generally outdated, are described.

This doesn’t sound bad, (and indeed, the truly crazy parts are still to come) but let me explain what often happens when you have job classifications that are arbitrary and out of date. I learned these pitfalls from federal job classification system, when my colleague Marina Nitze tried to hire a web designer at the VA in 2014. There was no job classification for web designers, and creating new classifications takes about a decade. (A recent example is the addition of data scientist, which throughout the 2010s was called the “hottest job of the century,” and highly relevant to many public sector functions. OPM finalized the new Data Science Series, 1560 job classification in August 2021, just in time for data science to be taken over by AI as the hottest job.) Without a relevant classification, the VA personnel team borrowed the criteria from a different tech-related job description, and with it, the qualifications for that job. Though we know of a dozen highly qualified and in fact hugely talented people who applied (because we encouraged them to!), when Marina got her “cert” (a list of the candidates that HR has deemed qualified, from which the hiring manager is supposed to choose), none of them were on the cert. Those who were held various certifications for Microsoft, Cisco, and other vendors’ products and platforms appropriate to someone doing network services or systems administration. None of them had any experience whatsoever in web design.

Marina would have had the exact same problem in New York City. As my colleagues point out:

Among 3,000-plus standard titles in city government today, not one is for a technology job recognizable to ordinary technologists — no “software engineer,” no “web designer.”

The city is, however, presently offering exams for three kinds of “computer associate,” covering everything from allocating desktop computers to coding.To learn more about the “computer associate” role, “YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR READING THIS ENTIRE NOTICE BEFORE YOU SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION.” In that seven-page PDF, most of which is consumed with describing educational qualifications and relevant certifications, here is the entire description of what the job is:

Computer Associates (Operations), under general supervision, with very considerable latitude for independent initiative and judgment: supervise the activities of subordinates in one or more computer operations units of considerable size; or serve as a technical resource person in the performance of networked, multi-tiered, or mainframe computer operations; or perform as a technical resource person in the diagnosis of and, when feasible, the correction of telecommunications hardware problems in order to maintain efficient functioning of telecommunication operations and to minimize downtime in the case of system failure. All Computer Associates (Operations) perform related work.

Telecommunications hardware! Exactly.

My colleagues and I mention technology jobs because they’re good examples of how outdated the system is, but the point holds for jobs of all flavors. And the problems in New York go much deeper than a need to update job descriptions.

In New York, a hiring manager can’t just pick the closest job title and description and hire someone using it. And an applicant can’t just apply for an open job that interests them. A central hiring authority periodically conducts exams for some of these 3000 different positions, and applicants interested in that position must take the exam when it is offered if they want to be eligible. For example, one of the positions is Administrative Business Promotions Coordinator. If, as an applicant, you think you may one day want to be an Administrative Business Promotions Coordinator in any agency or department anywhere in the City or State of New York, you must watch for when that exam is administered and spend $85 of your own money to take the exam. If your life goal is to work on transportation, or the environment, or public health, and you don’t know exactly what job title you would need to hold, you’re out of luck, because you can’t apply for a specific agency like the Department of Transportation, only for these generic and often murky job descriptions that may (or may not) qualify you for a job that comes up under that position description anywhere in government in the future.

But as an applicant, you really have no idea what title the job you may want in the future may be given, and that’s because the hiring managers and their HR partners must play an absurd game when they have a position that needs filling. Let’s say you work in the Department of Transportation and you’ve decided you need an Administrative Business Promotions Coordinator. (If you don’t quite know what that is, no worries. We’re in the same boat.) If an exam has been conducted for Administrative Business Promotions Coordinators in the last five years, as a hiring manager, you can only interview the three people who took that exam and scored the highest. You must hire one of them, no matter if they are a fit for the job you are trying to fill. None the people out there who are knowledgeable and passionate about public transportation and actively looking for a job are eligible, unless they happened to have seen into the future a few years ago, known that a job for Administrative Business Promotions Coordinator would come up in the Department of Transportation, found their way to the obscure web page that would have told them this exam was happening, shown up in downtown Manhattan on a Saturday, waited for several hours to take this exam, and rated among the top three on what might have been a test of attention to detail or might have simply been a questionnaire asking them to rate themselves in various competencies. Because the pool of people who did take the test is often skewed towards those with no significant interest in the domain but with a strong interest in a steady job from which they almost can’t be fired, and the rules around hiring off the list are so stringent, hiring managers have developed ways to avoid hiring off the list at all.

What do they do instead? They look around for a job title for which no test has been administered in the last five years. There are often many of them, but the job title they pick must also be one the agency has the authority to hire, as not all job titles are allocated to all agencies. If they can find a job title that’s somewhat defensible as a descriptor of the work that needs to be done, for which a competitive exam hasn’t been administered in the last five years, and for which the agency has the authority to hire, that’s the job title they will pick because then they can run their own competitive process and select someone better suited to the job. It can take weeks of hunting around various job titles to find one that fits those criteria before the process can even begin. One public servant told me that job title hunting is the main skill HR professionals in NYC government are valued for. There’s no time for developing candidate pools or creating effective selection processes. Almost all of the capacity of HR professionals in NY city and state government is eaten up by a game they must play if they want even a shot at hiring someone fit for the job. Ironically, the game tries to outwit a system that’s supposed to ensure merit hiring.

We have these supposedly merit-based hiring systems because in the mid- to late-19th century, positions in government were filled through patronage, or what’s known as the spoils system. After a party won an election, the leaders gave out jobs in the new government to friends, family, supporters, and others to whom they owed favors. In 1881, a desperate crackpot named Charles Guiteau believed that the newly elected President James Garfield owed him a diplomatic post as a reward for an incoherent and ineffective speech he had printed and distributed in support of Garfield’s candidacy. (The speech had previously been written in support of former President Ulysses S. Grant, and when Garfield beat Grant out for the nomination, Guiteau awkwardly and incompletely attempted a 19th century version of search and replace of Grant for Garfield. The result was not good.) When Garfield failed to grant him the post, or to pay him any attention whatsoever, Guiteau shot him at point blank range in a waiting room at the train station, only four months into his presidency. Garfield died 79 days later.

The assassination brought attention to the problems of the spoils system, and created the conditions for the passage of the Pendleton Act of 1883, which established “fair and open competition for federal jobs, admission to the competitive service only on the basis of neutral examination, and protection of those in the service from political influence and coercion.” Though it covered only a small fraction of government employees, it was the first time federal employees were both hired for merit and protected by law from being fired for political reasons, and it served as the basis for future legislation that both expanded the number of employees covered and strengthened the protections. Among these was the Classification Act in 1923 which “established in law the principle of nationally uniform compensation levels, providing for the standard classification of duties and responsibilities by occupations and positions with salary levels assigned to the resulting positions.”

These “duties and responsibilities by occupations” got an update with the Classification Act of 1949, which directed the Office of Personnel Management to prepare standards for agencies to use in placing positions in their proper classes and grades, resulting in the creation of the General Schedule, which is still in use today for most federal civilian employees. Certainly changes have been made to the GS since then, but mostly to make them more complicated and ossified.

New York City’s hiring rules are different, but they derive from New York State law that was inspired by the same events that led to the Pendleton Act in the same era, and extended to every city, town and village in New York. Robert Moses spent the early part of his career attempting to reform New York’s civil service system. His biographer Robert Caro attributes his Moses’s famous thirst for power to his early failure to effect change in the civil service system. To build his empire, he created various authorities and public benefit corporations like the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (which became Moses’s primary power base) and the Jones Beach State Park Authority that were exempt from the civil service rules he abhorred. The workarounds got him what he wanted, but left the system in place for the rest of the city. The resulting power imbalance between team Moses and the rest of the bureaucracy drives the story we all know, with its lessons for good and ill.

That’s not a story Mamdani probably derives inspiration from. But the New Yorkers who voted for Mamdani were inspired by his big, bold visions. His big, bold visions rely on strong foundations. The civil service system is the bedrock of that foundation. If Mamdani wants to achieve a fraction of what he’s promised voters, he should start with Moses’ unfinished business.

UPDATE: For concrete, detailed recommendations, the Mamdani team should look to Rebecca Heywood’s excellent post here. Thanks to Gabe Paley for sending this along. Though, really, the city should lobby Governor Hochul — or the next governor, who will take office in a little more than a year — to fix the system at the state level. The Mamdani team could tee up the shape of those reforms and have them ready.

1. https://x.com/morganfmckay/status/1986829958467989646?s=20