Category: News

More than 74,000 people, with an average age of 28, have applied for roles in Zohran Mamdani’s new administration. Those figures are both a measure of enthusiasm for New York City’s incoming mayor and a sign of how tough the job market is for young people in the five boroughs.

Young voters and volunteers fueled the 34-year-old Mamdani’s fast rise from a relatively unknown Queens assemblyman to mayor-elect of America’s largest city. A lot of them had time on their hands: New Yorkers aged 16 to 24 faced a 13.2% unemployment rate in 2024, 3.6 percentage points higher than in 2019, according to a May report from the New York state comptroller.

New York City had a 5.8% unemployment rate overall in August, 1.3 percentage points above the U.S. average. The city added roughly 25,000 jobs this year through September, compared with about 106,000 during the same period in 2024, according to city data.

Mamdani’s campaign pledge to lower the cost of living in New York resonated with voters struggling to find jobs and establish themselves at a time when rents have stayed high and income growth has slowed. Now he’s looking to hire an unspecified number of roles across 60 agencies, 95 mayoral offices, and more than 250 boards and commissions, with senior roles a priority, according to his transition team.

The typical size of the New York City mayoral staff — commissioners, communications, operations and community affairs — is about 1,100, according to Ana Champeny, vice president of research at the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit finance watchdog. City government in total hired 39,455 people in 2024, according to New York City data.

Applications for roles in Mamdani’s administration have come from workers of all experience levels and from a wide range of backgrounds and industries, said Maria Torres-Springer, co-chair of the mayor-elect’s transition team. About 20,000 of the applicants came from out of state.

When Barack Obama was elected U.S. president in 2008, workers submitted more than 300,000 job applications to his administration. Blair Levin, who co-led the technology transition team for Obama, said he received around 3,000 of those resumes. He whittled the pool down to 75, a relatively easy task because he needed applicants with specific tech and economics skills, he said.

Without invoking the term “AI,” Torres-Springer said the applications would be filtered using “the typical technology that any big corporation would have in an applicant-tracking system.” The resumes will then be sorted and matched to different agencies.

Mamdani’s avid use of social media, which helped him connect with young people during his campaign, has continued into his transition efforts, creating excitement — among young people especially — about the prospect of joining his administration.

“The average age does tell a particularly interesting story in two ways,” Torres-Springer said. “It might be because of volatility in the job market but it’s also because I think we are attracting, the administration is attracting, New Yorkers who may not have considered government in the past.”

Take David Kinchen, a 28-year-old data engineer who moved to New York from northern Virginia three years ago. Since getting laid off from a job in fraud detection at Capital One, he has applied for more than 1,000 roles and completed at least 75 interviews without an offer, he said. Kinchen volunteered for Mamdani’s campaign and applied to the administration, highlighting his tech credentials and a passion for photography.

“I did data engineering, so I could help with database decisions. There was also a creative option on the application, since I could work as a staff photographer too,” Kinchen said.

Another applicant, 22-year-old Aurisha Rahman, has struggled to find a job since graduating with a civil-engineering degree from Hofstra University on Long Island.

“The job market is even worse than it was last fall,” Rahman said. Mamdani’s resumé portal was one of the few places she found open to entry-level applicants.

Rahman, who was born and raised in Queens, said she wants to give back to the city where she was raised and wouldn’t be picky about a position. “Whatever they need, I’ll do it. I don’t care,” she said. “Right now, it’s better to be busy with something than nothing.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) on Tuesday said President Donald Trump has “real problems” within the Republican Party, adding in an interview with CNN that the president is out of touch with voters on key issues such as affordability.

Greene told Kaitlan Collins on The Source that the “dam is breaking” in terms of Trump’s hold on support within the party and that she expects Republicans to struggle in next year’s midterm elections.

Citing the backlash to Trump’s comments on the death of director Rob Reiner, the 13 House Republicans who voted with Democrats to overturn Trump’s executive order on collective bargaining and Indiana Republicans’ rejection of the president’s redistricting push, Greene said she expected “pushback” within the party to grow as lawmakers enter the campaign phase for the upcoming elections.

“I think the midterms are going to be very hard for Republicans,” Greene said. “I’m one of the people that’s willing to admit the truth and say I don’t see Republicans winning the midterms right now.”

The White House did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Greene’s interview.

Greene had carved out a high-profile role as one of Trump’s most vocal allies, first in the “Make America Great Again” movement and then with her support for the “America First” agenda. But after weeks of speaking out against the president on several issues, Greene and Trump had an acrimonious public split last month after she joined with Democrats on a discharge position to compel a House vote calling on the Justice Department to release files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump, who has called Greene a “Lunatic” and “traitor,” withdrew his endorsement of her reelection. Days after the spat, Greene announced she would resign from Congress as of Jan. 5 and has since criticized the administration for being out of touch with core issues affecting MAGA voters, such as the cost of living and healthcare.

Speaking to the Washington Post this week, Greene described herself as a “bellwether” who is closely attuned to Trump’s base. “I say it, and then within four to six months, everybody’s saying the same thing,” she said.

Trump’s advisers have put the criticism down to “cyclical” feedback and have planned for weekly election rallies so Trump can highlight his achievements, the Post has reported. Polling shows Trump maintains support from the vast majority of the party, even though recent polling shows this has dipped slightly below the usual 90% approval mark.

In the CNN interview Tuesday, Greene said she had only broken with Trump on a few issues — such as the release of the Epstein files, artificial intelligence regulation and foreign workers — “but he came down on me the hardest.”

“He’s got real problems with Republicans within the House and the Senate that will be breaking with him on more things to come,” she added.

Greene also said Trump’s supporters “didn’t appreciate” the president’s reaction to the death of Rob Reiner, who was found stabbed to death alongside his wife, photographer Michele Singer Reiner, in their Los Angeles home Sunday. The couple’s son Nick Reiner faces two counts of first-degree murder, among other charges, in their deaths.

In a social media post less than a day after the Reiners’ bodies were found, Trump suggested the director’s death was somehow linked to his past criticism of the president: “He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”

Trump’s comments drew bipartisan backlash, including from some prominent figures on the right.

“I thought that statement was absolutely, completely below the office of the president of the United States,” Greene told CNN. “Classless and it was just wrong.”

In the interview, Greene described affordability as a “crisis” that Trump has failed to tackle.

“What I would like to see from the president is empathy for Americans,” she said.

“Donald Trump is a billionaire, and he’s the president of the United States. When he looks into a camera and says affordability is a hoax and just totally tries to make nothing out of inflation, he’s talking to Americans that are suffering, and have been suffering for many years now, and are having a hard time making ends meet.”