Category: National Politics

The Democratic National Committee will not publicly release its autopsy of the 2024 presidential campaign, party officials said, a reversal intended to avoid a contentious reckoning over the party’s failure.

Operatives involved in drafting the autopsy worried that revisiting Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump would reignite the fiery internal debates that consumed the party in the wake of the 2024 loss at a time when Democrats are eager to celebrate a string of wins in 2025 and focus on the 2026 midterms, the officials said.

But by declining to make the report public, the party is also keeping the lessons learned from its 2024 failures limited to a small group of insiders and dodging a public accounting that many Democrats believe is necessary to avoid repeating past mistakes.

There remain sharp internal debates, for example, over the party’s stance on transgender rights, its handling of generational change, and whether Harris’ selection as President Joe Biden’s replacement on the ticket was properly conducted.

“We completed a comprehensive review of what happened in 2024 and are already putting our learnings into motion,” Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement that did not directly address the committee’s decision to shield the report. “In our conversations with stakeholders from across the Democratic ecosystem, we are aligned on what’s important, and that’s learning from the past and winning the future. Here’s our North Star: does this help us win? If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.”

Democratic officials briefed on the report’s contents said the autopsy chastises the party for failing to adequately listen to voters in 2024. The report describes a feeble response to concerns about public safety and immigration in particular, allowing Republicans to dominate the issues, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private findings. That amplified the Democrats’ credibility problem on the election’s central issue: the economy.

Another key takeaway, officials said, was that the party took young voters for granted, neglecting a group that normally supports its candidates in overwhelming numbers. As a result, they swung toward Trump, with the president winning a majority of first-time voters and increasing his share of youth voters by double digits. The report faults a party wedded to traditional media that often bypasses these voters. It calls for greater engagement with nontraditional media, something that vexed the Harris campaign.

The report, generated based on hundreds of interviews with Democrats in all 50 states, also highlights missteps in how Democrats contact voters, the officials said, noting that while the party reached more voters than ever last year, the outreach was ineffective, led to poor-quality conversations with swing voters, and came too late in pivotal states. The changes suggested by the party, the officials said, include measuring the success of an outreach program by the impact of the conversations, not the number of attempted calls, while also investing in more long-term party building so voter contact does not begin weeks before Election Day.

Democratic officials have struggled to craft and discuss the report for much of the year amid internal debates over the party’s direction and leadership.

They were in the final stages of preparing it in October and began briefing top operatives and donors on its contents. But the expected public release was delayed until after off-year elections in November, with the party hoping to keep the focus on races they eventually swept in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Those preliminary briefings did not include any reflection on the handling of Biden’s late withdrawal from the race, his perceived infirmity and the lack of a competitive process used to select Harris as his replacement, which many Democrats have said was central to their party’s defeat. Members of the Democratic committee, including Martin, argued that little could be learned from those reflections, given that it is unlikely the party will face a similar situation again. Still, the lack of any reflection on Biden or Harris led some party insiders to criticize the report as intentionally avoiding what many saw as the most decisive issue in the 2024 loss.

The delays in releasing the report have spurred internal Democratic grumbling, and the committee’s decision to keep it private was already stirring up Democratic anger.

“A handful of wins is not the same as the rehabilitation of the Democratic brand, which is required to build real governing majorities and a national coalition,” said Alyssa Cass, a Democratic operative in New York. ”Achieving that requires real soul-searching and new ideas, and it would be nice for candidates and campaigns to know they had a partner in that hard work, instead of an institutional structure buried in the sand.”

Other Democrats echoed Cass, casting the decision as the Democratic National Committee looking to obscure its own failings in 2024.

But some Democratic operatives, especially those close to the committee, praised the decision as prudent. “Democrats don’t need to engage in a hand-wringing exercise about last year’s elections when we’re winning this year’s elections,” said Xochitl Hinojosa, a former top spokesperson for the DNC.

How the party handles learning from the 2024 loss could prove critical for years to come. Democratic officials and campaign operatives from winning campaigns this year have already said they used lessons from the 2024 campaign to strengthen their operations. And some of the party’s most high-profile members, including Harris, have begun to break from the policies that defined the Biden administration.

In a speech Friday night at the Democratic National Committee meeting in Los Angeles, Harris argued that both Democrats and Republicans have failed to address Americans’ deep financial anxieties and lack of confidence in government.

“Both parties have failed to hold the public’s trust. Government is viewed as fundamentally unable to meet the needs of its people,” Harris said in an implicit condemnation of the Biden administration, which she served in for four years as his vice president and defended throughout her unsuccessful presidential campaign.

Trump “is not the only source of our problems,” Harris said, arguing that the rise of his political movement is “a symptom of a failed system that is the result of years of outsourcing and offshoring, financial deregulation, growing income inequality, a broken campaign finance system and endless partisan gridlock.”

The Trump administration will repurpose $2.6 billion in military housing assistance to pay $1,776 “warrior dividend” bonuses to service members, according to a senior administration official.

In a prime-time address Wednesday night, President Donald Trump announced the Christmastime bonuses “in honor of our nation’s founding in 1776.”

“Nobody deserves it more than our military. And I say congratulations to everybody,” Trump said.

The president said the money for the bonuses came from revenue from import taxes he’s imposed on trading partners worldwide. That was incorrect, however, and Trump does not have the authority to spend the money from tariffs without authorization from Congress.

But lawmakers this summer did approve $2.9 billion to supplement the military’s basic allowance for housing as part of Trump and the GOP’s mammoth tax and immigration law, the One Big Beautiful Bill.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Pentagon to spend most of that money as a one-time payout on the bonuses, said the senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

The use of the housing funds to pay the bonuses was reported earlier by Defense One.

Roughly 1.45 million service members, including 174,000 reservists, will receive the bonuses, which Hegseth said in a video Thursday would be tax-free.

“This warrior dividend serves as yet another example of how the War Department is working to improve the quality of life for our military personnel and their families,” Hegseth said.

Trump renamed the Department of Defense as the Department of War in September, designating that as the department’s “secondary title” and authorizing its use. It’s unclear whether Trump has the authority to permanently rename cabinet departments without congressional approval.

“I can think of no better Americans to receive this check right before Christmas, whether it’s for pay, housing, faith, support, all elements of what we’re doing are to rebuild our military,” Hegseth said.

The defense secretary called the payment “a direct investment in the brave men and women who carry on the legacy of our armed forces every single day,” and said military members in pay grades E-1 to O-6 would be eligible. The top pay grade eligible includes the ranks of colonel in the Air Force, Army, Marines and Space Force, and captain in the Navy and Coast Guard.

Speaking in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump said his staff originally presented him with a plan for $1,775 bonuses.

“And I said, ‘Wow, I think we can afford one more dollar,’” Trump said.

In Congress, reaction to the bonuses was mixed, largely along party lines. Sen. Roger Wicker (Mississippi), the Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview that the payments were “quite appropriate.”

He added in a statement that the bonuses would “put real money in the pockets of our service members and their families, helping provide greater stability and improved housing options as they manage the unique demands of military life.”

Sen. Jack Reed (Rhode Island), the top Democrat on the panel, said he was concerned that pulling the money for the bonuses from the housing assistance program would prevent the Defense Department from improving housing for service members and conducting overdue maintenance.

“There has been a real fundamental need for housing improvements and maintenance,” Reed said. “I think they could find a better source for the funds.”

Sen. Chris Coons (Delaware), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, was more blunt — both about the purpose of the checks and Trump’s authority to issue them.

“Read the Constitution! You can’t just sprinkle the country with checks just because you came up with it late at night,” Coons said.

The National Defense Authorization Act, which Trump is set to sign into law Thursday evening, approves pay increases for troops, and the annual appropriations bill — which Congress has yet to pass — funds it, he said.

“That’s how we do this, not game-show checks. Not last minute whimsy by a president,” Coons said. “This is a classic campaign stunt that does not serve our warfighters, our Constitution, or our republic well.”

The Trump administration has a track record of aggressively shifting resources around the Pentagon to goose service members’ compensation.

During the government shutdown, the administration twice moved money from other parts of the Pentagon budget to keep paying troops. Doing so without the approval of lawmakers — who normally have a say over large changes in federal spending — was controversial in Congress, where aides from both parties acknowledged that the move was probably illegal.

President Donald Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, and other senior officials were looking for a fight.

In the first months of the administration, Miller, the architect of Trump’s anti-immigration and border policies, and his team discussed starting a new war on drugs by striking cartels and alleged traffickers in Mexico, according to one current and two former U.S. officials.

Reducing the power of cartels, an idea that dated back to the first Trump administration, would ease the flow of migrants and narcotics, creating early political wins. But as the administration surged thousands of U.S. troops to the southern border, increased U.S. surveillance flights and boosted intelligence sharing with its neighbor, Mexican military operations across the border curbed cartel action, the people said. That left Miller and his team looking for another target.

“When you hope and wait for something to develop that doesn’t, you start looking at countries south of Mexico,” said the current official, who, like nine others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

The campaign that emerged in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean is unprecedented in its use of lethal force by the U.S. military against alleged drug smuggling groups. These operations, which began Sept. 2, have evolved to embrace the Trump team’s long-running ambition to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whom the president has accused of overseeing “narco-terrorists” assaulting the United States.

Miller has been a driving force behind the administration’s counternarcotics campaign, pressing for results and fresh military options that could be turned into future operations, the current and former officials said.

“President Trump’s counternarcotics policies come from President Trump himself,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said. “All senior administration officials work closely together to carry out the agenda President Trump was elected to implement, including eliminating the scourge of narco-terrorism that takes tens of thousands of American lives every year.”

Miller could not be reached for comment.

Miller steered the drafting of a July 25 classified directive signed by the president that authorized the military to undertake lethal force against two dozen foreign criminal groups, said a former U.S. official familiar with the campaign and its evolution. The administration has labeled these groups “designated terrorist organizations,” accusing them of using drugs as a weapon to kill Americans, using a moniker that many experts say has no basis in law.

“The president’s memo is the original sin of the whole operation,” the former official said.

That presidential directive provided the foundational authority for an “execute order” that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued on Aug. 5 and that subsequently has been modified. The order, details of which were previously unreported, contains permissive targeting guidelines for lethal operations, current and former officials said. The presidential directive’s existence was first reported by the New York Times.

Together, these two documents guided a military campaign of lethal strikes against criminal organizations, grafting a wartime frame to what has been traditionally treated as a law enforcement problem. The execute order also contains targeting criteria lifted from the language of the counterterrorism campaign against al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, which some current and former officials say give the Pentagon an overly permissive license to kill.

The department will treat suspected drug smugglers “EXACTLY how we treated Al-Qaeda. We will continue to track them, map them, hunt them, and kill them,” Hegseth said on social media last month.

Pursuant to these orders, the Trump administration has launched strikes on at least 26 boats, killing at least 99 people in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. The Pentagon has not publicly identified those killed, and it is unclear whether it has collected the intelligence to do so.

“The administration appears to have authorized a campaign against civilians and alleged criminals that is now stretching the limits of international law so that it’s now totally unrecognizable,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign and is director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.

The White House’s early deliberations about the use of lethal force against cartels contemplated using covert action by the CIA. But as resistance emerged from lawyers and others over the ensuing months, Miller and his team turned increasingly toward the idea of using the military to pursue alleged traffickers.

Miller’s larger vision was to reduce the flow of drugs — and migrants — into the United States. He figured that attacking cartels would diminish their power and help stabilize Latin American countries, resulting in fewer people risking the trek to the United States, according to one of the former U.S. officials familiar with Miller’s deliberations.

As the summer progressed, the White House’s campaigns against narcotics and migration coalesced with a long-held desire of Secretary of State Marco Rubio to force Maduro from power. Rubio and the Justice Department in August doubled to $50 million the reward for information leading to the Venezuelan leader’s arrest, citing an indictment for corruption and drug trafficking during the first Trump administration.

Meanwhile, the White House found a willing partner in Hegseth, who had been knocked off stride by several missteps and was eager to show he could deliver on a high-priority mission.

“Pete very much wanted to keep Stephen in his good graces and also the president,” said the former official familiar with Miller’s thinking. “And that was a motivation for him — getting behind this campaign in an aggressive way.”

The Defense Department declined to address questions about its operations to strike alleged traffickers and how the mission took shape. Elements of Miller’s leading role were reported earlier by the Guardian.

“This reporting is inaccurate and is built on a false premise that ignores reality,” Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement. The department’s focus, he said, “is, and will continue to be, protecting the Homeland from any threat.”

Widening the scope

The Aug. 5 execute order, or EXORD in Pentagon parlance, stated that the campaign’s goal is to stop the flow of drugs by sea to the United States, two people said.

Initially, the order contained a geographic boundary that designated target areas in international waters off the coast of Venezuela, but it was modified about two months later to include the eastern Pacific area, one current and one former U.S. official said. It specified that at least for the initial strikes, Joint Special Operations Command would be in charge of operations, the two people said.

Over the late summer and into the fall, lawyers and policy personnel raised concerns about the legality of the lethal force campaign that was taking shape. Administration officials sought to reassure them by saying that a Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memo was being drafted that determined that the lethal targeting of suspected drug runners was lawful under the president’s power to ascertain that the U.S. is in a formal state of war — in this case with alleged drug traffickers.

But the opinion was not signed until Sept. 5 — three days after the first boat strike — and some career lawyers were not permitted to read the draft OLC memo before the execute order was issued, said the former official familiar with the campaign’s evolution.

The OLC memo, signed by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser, asserts that alleged drug trafficking groups are a threat to the United States akin to a foreign nation attempting to invade, Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), who was allowed to read it in his capacity as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told the Post in an interview.

The execute order contains targeting instructions that do not require positive identification of any individual but rather “reasonable certainty” that adult males are members of, or affiliated with, a “designated terrorist organization,” or DTO, according to five current and former U.S. officials familiar with the criteria. To mitigate civilian harm, the order requires “near certainty” that no women, children or civilians are present, they said.

The administration is using the phrase “designated terrorist organizations” to refer to 24 alleged drug trafficking groups whose activities it contends are killing millions of Americans.

The term, said Rebecca Ingber, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law and a former State Department law-of-war expert, “is entirely manufactured as a source of targeting authority with no basis in law.”

The list of 24 such groups appears in an annex to Trump’s July directive and also in the EXORD, according to one current and one former official.

The assessment of “affiliation” is based on a number of factors, including the presence of drugs on board the vessel and its route, as well as intercepts of communications, the current and former officials said.

As a result, the campaign may be killing individuals who in some cases have a tenuous link to any organized drug-running operation, said one of the former U.S. officials, who has read the execute order.

“When you define DTO and affiliate so loosely and you’re attacking boats, [the guidelines are] basically meaningless,” the former official said.

If the United States were actually at war, the reasonable certainty standard would be “perfectly reasonable,” said Ryan Goodman, a former Pentagon special counsel who worked on counterterrorism targeting issues in the Obama administration.

“Not being in an armed conflict changes everything,” he said. “The idea that a government would kill people on the basis of ‘reasonable certainty’ that they’re a member of a drug cartel is beyond the pale. Any U.N. body would find that to be a gross violation of human rights.”

Identification and delegation

The targeting requirements, four former officials say, resemble the “signature strikes” of past global counterterrorism campaigns, in which the CIA and the military launched drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen on individuals or groups whose identities were unknown but who were targeted based on a pattern of behavior or other characteristics associated with terrorist activity.

The execute order, which sets the rules of engagement for the military, designates Hegseth as the “target engagement authority” — the official who can approve strike targets. It also stipulates that he can delegate that authority to others in individual missions.

“Now, the first couple of strikes … as any leader would want, you want to own that responsibility,” Hegseth said at a cabinet meeting this month in response to questions about the first boat strike, details of which — including a subsequent missile strike to kill survivors — were first published by the Post. “So I said I’m going to be the one to make the call after getting all the information and make sure it’s the right strike.”

Pentagon general counsel Earl Matthews — who had just been confirmed by the Senate on July 29 with a 50-47 vote — signed off on the Aug. 5 order, said a person familiar with the matter. Lawmakers have for weeks requested a copy of the order and related documents but have not received them. Matthews did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump has asserted, without offering proof, that the U.S. troops know who they are targeting in every case. “We know everything about them. We know where they live. We know where the bad ones live,” he told reporters this month.

The military knew the identities of all 11 people killed in the first attack of the campaign on Sept. 2, Pentagon officials have said. But “they don’t know all of the individuals on many of the other boats” in subsequent strikes, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D., Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told ABC News on Sunday.

Trump posted on Truth Social the day of the first strike that the U.S. military had killed 11 “positively identified” members of the Venezuelan organization Tren de Aragua. He called them “narco-terrorists” operating “under the control of” Maduro, who has been condemned by both the Trump and Biden administrations for illegally retaining power after losing last year’s presidential election.

This week, the commander overseeing that operation, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, told lawmakers that the military knew one of the 11 was a member of Tren de Aragua and the other 10 were affiliates, according to three U.S. officials.

The U.S. intelligence community this year assessed that Tren de Aragua, a transnational crime syndicate, was not directed by Venezuela’s government.

Two family members of men killed on Sept. 2 did not deny that the boat was smuggling marijuana and cocaine. But they said Trump’s allegation the men had worked for Tren de Aragua was inaccurate.

“I knew them all,” one of the family members told the Post in October, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “None of them had anything to do with Tren de Aragua. They were fishermen who were looking for a better life” by smuggling contraband.

In some of the strikes, the targets who have been identified are not high-level operators or cartel bosses, lawmakers said. “It’s one thing to be a narco-terrorist and another thing to be a fisherman that’s getting paid a hundred bucks a couple times a year … to supplement his income” to ferry drugs, Warner told reporters at the Defense Writers Group last week.

Lifting language from the ‘war on terror’

The Aug. 5 execute order adopts the language of previous administrations in successive global counterterrorism campaigns after 2001, but the context is vastly different, current and former officials say.

The fight against ISIS in Iraq from 2014 on generally involved clearing terrain of fighters who often barricaded themselves in buildings in cities teeming with civilians, and U.S. troops were often firing in self-defense at militants shooting at them, former Special Operations personnel said.

In the drug boat campaign, the U.S. military is launching munitions from afar, more like the counterterrorism operations in Yemen and Somalia during the Obama and first Trump administrations.

Under President Barack Obama, outside areas of active hostility, the targeting guidelines required that lethal force be used only when capture was not feasible and only to prevent attacks against U.S. citizens or when targets posed a continuing imminent threat. They required “near certainty” that a target was a member of a terrorist organization.

“Generally you had people swearing allegiance” to a group like al-Qaeda as an indicator of membership, said the former U.S. official, who is familiar with the counterterrorism targeting criteria. “So you had the presence of weapons and good intelligence on planning you could point to, to link people to the group and say this person is a planner of attacks, this is the money guy, this is a recruiter, etc.”

The standard was changed to “reasonable certainty” under the first Trump administration. But for all practical purposes, said a former senior military officer involved in special operations and battle in the Middle East, the military was applying the “near certainty” standard in these areas. The standard was returned to near certainty under Biden.

“In places like Yemen, whether it was under Obama or Trump,” the retired officer said, “we knew who we were going after. We knew what their place in the network was. We knew what the effects of removing them would be on the network. I don’t see that in some of what [the U.S. is] doing right now.”

One major contextual difference in the current operations against seaborne narcotics is the lack of congressional authority. In the battles against al-Qaeda and associated forces, Congress explicitly authorized the campaigns, giving the president permission to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against those who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

The execute order and subsequent targeting guidelines were grounded in the 2001 congressional authorization to use military force.

In 2013, during the Obama administration, the “near certainty” standard typically required confirmation via two sources of intelligence, said Huntley, the former military lawyer for Special Operations forces.

A combination of intelligence tools — signals intelligence, eavesdropping, human spies, and drone surveillance — would contribute to a “positive identification of the individual,” Huntley said. To get to “near certainty” that civilians were not present, the attack location was usually a remote area or a place known to be frequented by only members of the terrorist organization that Congress had specifically authorized as a viable target.

If U.S. officials know the identities of who they are striking, as Trump and Hegseth maintain, then they should release them, the former senior military officer said. “It would help build the case,” he said, that the military is acting to protect civilians according to the law of war.

‘Anybody … is subject to attack’

Though the administration’s charges against Maduro have merit, its claims that Venezuela is sending massive amounts of drugs to America do not, analysts and officials have said. The main domestic drug scourge is fentanyl, a synthetic opioid produced in Mexico, not Venezuela.

Many strikes taken have been in the Pacific, the main sea lane used by traffickers from Colombia and Ecuador. Drug running in the Caribbean focuses mainly on non-U.S. markets, such as Europe. The lethal strike on Sept. 2, for instance, targeted a boat carrying cocaine ultimately bound for Suriname, officials have said.

That absence of information has prompted speculation that the larger buildup of U.S. forces in the region is a preparation for an attack on Venezuela. Miller has indicated to colleagues that a strong reaction from Caracas could provide the reasoning to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to quickly deport hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants from the United States, the former official noted.

This month, Trump suggested that he wanted to go after Colombian targets. “I hear the country of Colombia is making cocaine,” he said. “They have cocaine manufacturing plants. And then they sell us their cocaine. … Anybody that’s doing that and selling it into our country is subject to attack.”

He also has stepped up the pressure on Venezuela, seizing an oil tanker last week off that country’s coast.

“He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” Trump’s chief of staff, Susan Wiles, told Vanity Fair in an article published this week. “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”

On Tuesday, Trump announced in a social media post a “total and complete blockade” of all sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving Venezuela, further ratcheting up the pressure.

On Wednesday, Miller amplified Trump’s post, commenting: “American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.”

Trump, meanwhile, has been signaling that the campaign is widening.

“We knocked out 96 percent of the drugs coming in by water,” he told reporters Friday in the Oval Office. “And now we’re starting by land, and by land is a lot easier, and that’s going to start happening.”

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.”