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Politics & Government

Politics & Government in New York

The Council, the Mayor, the Governor, the budget fights, and the agencies that run your day. This is the straight-government desk that anchors The Front Page, so it leads with the cleanest account of what happened, before anyone spins it.

Desks we analyze here: THE CITY, NYT Metro, City & State NY, Spectrum News NY1.

The coverage, newest first

40 stories
  1. July 11, 2026 The Pfizer Tower Near-Collapse A landmark office tower buckled mid-conversion this week, and the mayor's housing plan runs straight through buildings just like it. Citywide
  2. July 10, 2026 Next Stop, Fast Buses, Better Service Six minutes back on your commute, and the free part of "fast and free" pushed to some other day. Brooklyn
  3. July 10, 2026 The Pfizer Tower Near-Collapse The beams were bending like cigarettes, and the paperwork shows the warnings were there a year before anyone evacuated. Manhattan
  4. July 10, 2026 The Upper East Side Legionnaires' Cluster Thirty-six cases in three ZIP codes, and the city still can't say which cooling tower did it. Manhattan
  5. July 9, 2026 ICE Rewrites Its Courthouse Playbook The argument: New York's streets are too dangerous for ICE, so its immigration courts are the safer option. Citywide
  6. July 9, 2026 The Contractor Behind 235 East 42nd Three years before two columns buckled, a union was already protesting the subcontractor's record of fatalities and wage theft. Citywide
  7. July 8, 2026 The Midtown Collapse Scare The city's largest office-to-residential conversion nearly fell from the inside out, and The City Reporter found that officials had known about the... Manhattan
  8. July 8, 2026 25 Years in the Wrong Cell Brian Kendall was a skinny 16-year-old. Eyewitnesses consistently described the shooter as a heavyset man in his mid-20s. Brooklyn detectives built a... Brooklyn
  9. July 7, 2026 The B-HEARD Promise Five years and a mayoral election after New York City promised to take mental health calls away from the police, officers still show up more than 93... Citywide
  10. July 7, 2026 New York's Prison Violence Report A $9.3 million state review named goon squads, documented beatings in transport vans and low-camera infirmaries, and confirmed what families of... Albany / statewide
  11. July 7, 2026 Black Unemployment Reaches 8.8%, Widest Gap Among Major Metros NYC's Black-white unemployment gap is now the widest of any major US metro area, and it has been growing for a year straight. Citywide
  12. July 6, 2026 WilmerHale State Prison Review A $10 million report confirmed what incarcerated New Yorkers have said for decades, and New York's own union contract is exactly why almost nothing... Citywide
  13. July 4, 2026 Record Homelessness on the Street Manhattan
  14. July 4, 2026 Mamdani's America 250 Citywide
  15. July 3, 2026 When the New Power Line Went Dark The $8 billion blackout insurance failed on its first day under contract, in 105° heat. Queens
  16. July 3, 2026 Mamdani's 9/11 Pledge Met His Own Lawyers The mayor funded the 9/11 files, and his lawyers moved to kill the lawsuit for them the same day. Citywide
  17. July 2, 2026 NYC FY27 Budget The Mamdani administration's first real spending document closes a $12 billion hole and, more to the point, picks sides.
  18. July 2, 2026 The Supreme Court Just Ended 16 Years of Protection for 5,400 Haitian New Yorkers TPS for Haiti has been extended twelve times since the 2010 earthquake. The thirteenth renewal is not coming.
  19. June 30, 2026 NYCHA PACT Paperwork Crisis Three hundred families did everything right, filed the forms, paid the rent, and still got eviction notices, because NYCHA lost the paperwork.
  20. June 30, 2026 DSA Becomes Albany's New Voting Bloc Fifteen socialists walk into a legislature and no one quite knows what happens next.
  21. June 29, 2026 Tammamdani Hall, Mamdani's New Political Machine Zohran Mamdani won the mayor's office seven months ago and has already assembled a political operation that La Guardia, the mayor he most admires...
  22. June 28, 2026 Rafael Rubio freed after 158 days in ICE detention A City Council staffer from Venezuela survived five months in federal custody, a deportation order, and a hunger strike at a GEO Group prison; he won...
  23. June 28, 2026 Hakeem Jeffries congratulates DSA nominees, draws fire from Republicans and Democrats both The would-be House speaker just rallied behind the candidates who knocked out his own endorsees, because in November he needs every Democrat he can...
  24. June 28, 2026 Venezuela earthquake death toll reaches 1,430, NYC's Venezuelan community watches from a distance The biggest natural disaster in Venezuela in a century is running over a quarter-million New Yorkers with family in La Guaira, and the...
  25. June 27, 2026 The Historic NYC Rent Freeze Seven Mamdani appointees voted to hold 1 million rents flat at El Museo del Barrio on Thursday night, and landlord groups were already calling their...
  26. June 27, 2026 CityFHEPS Budget Impasse Stalls Tuesday Vote Mamdani campaigned on protecting housing vouchers, then appealed the court ruling that would have expanded them, and now the same progressive council...
  27. June 27, 2026 Supreme Court Clears the Way to End TPS for Hundreds of Thousands The court gave the Trump administration permission to strip Temporary Protected Status from Haitian and Syrian immigrants while lower courts...
  28. June 26, 2026 Supreme Court TPS Ruling Ends Legal Status for 40,000 Haitian New Yorkers Forty thousand New York State residents woke up Friday with no path forward, and a State Department travel warning that still says the country they...
  29. June 26, 2026 Mamdani Sweeps the Primaries and Reshapes the City's Power Map The mayor endorsed three congressional candidates. All three won. The organization is already looking at 2028.
  30. June 26, 2026 EBT Food Stamp Theft Drains Accounts Across the City, and Albany Has No Fix New York knows its food stamp cards are easy to steal from. It does not know how many people are being robbed, because it stopped collecting the data.
  31. June 26, 2026 Federal Indictment Charges Former Adams Chief of Staff in Migrant Shelter Bribery The city's own agency said no twice. City Hall said yes anyway. Prosecutors say it cost $120,000.
  32. June 25, 2026 Frank Carone Arrested in Migrant Shelter Bribery The man who ran City Hall for Eric Adams is now charged with turning the migrant crisis into a personal billing cycle.
  33. June 25, 2026 Mamdani's Congressional Sweep A year after taking City Hall, the mayor's machine ousted two sitting members of Congress and a borough president from his own party, and the general...
  34. June 25, 2026 DSA Reshuffles Albany's Assembly Down-Ballot A dozen state legislative seats flipped in Brooklyn and Queens, clearing the path for housing and transit bills that Albany has blocked for years.
  35. June 23, 2026 Mamdani turns his coalition on Congress The mayor bet his movement could move votes uptown and across the river. Tuesday night, most of the bet paid.
  36. June 23, 2026 The shelter next door, and the audit that never came Two Brooklyn neighborhoods are suing to stop a shelter, and the man who was supposed to watch the spending is now running for Congress.
  37. June 23, 2026 A casino is coming to Queens, and it just cost two Jessicas an election The Citi Field casino is a done deal. The Senate race next to it is being fought as if it weren't.
  38. June 23, 2026 The "mega master" hearings built to make New Yorkers miss court Dozens of cases in a day, interpreters dropping off the line, and a deportation order waiting for anyone who doesn't show.
  39. Saturday, June 20, 2026 Rent Guidelines Board freezes rent-stabilized leases at 0% The board that sets the rent for two million New Yorkers blinked, and a year of organizing ran into one vote.
  40. Saturday, June 20, 2026 City Council passes a $112 billion budget, restoring library cuts The Council clawed back the cuts the Mayor proposed, and the branch libraries stay open six days.

Start here

Explainer How a bill becomes a law in Albany The rent laws, the MTA's money, your bail law: all of it moves through one Albany pipeline. The Constitution wrote the rules, including the loophole. Explainer Who actually runs New York City One charter, five kinds of elected official, and a lot of confusion about who does what. The document itself is blunter than any civics class. Explainer How ranked-choice voting works in NYC You get five rankings, the count runs in rounds, and the runoff election is gone. The Charter amendment voters approved in 2019, explained from the text. Explainer How the NYC budget actually works Bigger than most states' budgets, adopted on a calendar the Charter wrote down to the day. Here is the machine behind every June handshake at City Hall. Explainer How a bill becomes a law in New York City The City Council passes hundreds of local laws a term, and the rules for every one of them sit in the Charter: one subject, seven days on the desk, and a mayor who can be overruled. Explainer How New York City Council districts are drawn After every census an appointed commission redraws all fifty-one Council districts under a strict, ranked set of rules, and it happens with far less attention than it deserves.

Politics & Government, explained

The questions New Yorkers actually ask.

Who actually runs New York, the city or the state?

Both, and the split is the whole story. The Mayor and the 51-member City Council run City Hall: the NYPD, the schools, sanitation, the city budget. But Albany, meaning the Governor and the Legislature, controls the things that decide daily life here: the MTA’s money, rent law, and a big share of school funding. So a New York story is almost never just a city story.

What does the Mayor control versus the Governor, for my day-to-day?

The Mayor runs the agencies you actually touch: police, sanitation, the public schools, housing inspections. The Governor and the state Legislature set the rules the city has to live under: transit funding, rent regulation, criminal-justice law, and the state budget the city leans on. When the two fight, you feel it in your commute and your rent.

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