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Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s signature plans for New York City will take time. Lina Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission, has ideas for making a swift impact.

Lina Khan, a leading progressive scholar, chaired the Federal Trade Commission under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Dec. 26, 2025, 3:00 a.m. ET

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has vowed to make New York City more affordable, but his most well-known plans will take time — and in some cases the cooperation of state legislators.

So he has already begun considering more than a dozen potential executive and regulatory actions aimed at lowering costs and protecting workers without having to worry about the sluggish pace and political calculations of lawmakers in Albany.

The list of options was provided in recent days by a team led by Lina Khan, a leading progressive legal scholar, that has spent weeks scouring New York City’s laws to find dormant or underused mayoral authority that could allow Mr. Mamdani to take action in a hurry.

The exact proposals have been kept under wraps. But three people familiar with the discussions said they include specific attempts to drive down apartment rental fees and utility costs and compel businesses to be more transparent about pricing. Other suggestions include dusting off a little-used 1960s price-gouging statute and policing new protections for food delivery workers.

The proposals that Mr. Mamdani pursues may give New Yorkers an early indication of how aggressive their new mayor will be in advancing a leftist political agenda. If he does take action, he may test how much power the mayor of New York City can exercise without constraint from Albany and Washington.

There is much riding on Mr. Mamdani’s early tenure. As the mayor-elect of New York City, he has already become a standard-bearer for the American left, and his performance will be scrutinized closely by supporters and adversaries. His ideological allies, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have actively participated in transition meetings and planning in recent weeks.

“N.Y.C. is the proof point,” Ms. Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said in a recent interview. And Ms. Khan, she added, “understands how to use legal authority to make meaningful change better than just about anyone.”

Ms. Khan rose to prominence as a Yale Law School student after publishing a paper that used Amazon as a case study to argue antitrust laws had failed to rein in modern corporate behemoths.

Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. appointed her to chair the Federal Trade Commission and she sued Amazon, accusing it of having squeezed small merchants and moving to block corporate mergers across the economy. Her record in court was mixed — some merger challenges succeeded while others failed — and the lawsuit against Amazon is ongoing.

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Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani appeared with Ms. Khan and other members of his transition team just after the November election.Credit...Vincent Alban/The New York Times

Mr. Mamdani wants Ms. Khan to join his administration, according to several people familiar with internal conversations. Those conversations are ongoing.

But even if she remains outside City Hall, Ms. Kahn’s imprint is already becoming clear in other ways. One of her former lieutenants, Sam Levine, has been appointed to lead the city’s consumer and worker protection agency. She also pushed for the appointment of Julie Su, a former acting secretary of labor, to be appointed as the deputy mayor for economic justice, said three people familiar with the matter.

“Laws are only as good as their enforcement,” Ms. Su said at the news conference announcing her role. “Otherwise, they are words on paper. Part of the job will be to breathe life into the protections that workers enjoy — out of respect for the City Council that has passed them, but also to fulfill the vision of this mayor-elect.”

Ms. Khan and her team have also studied a 1969 consumer protection law meant to prohibit “unconscionable” business tactics, to potentially target hospitals and sports stadiums where consumers typically have little choice but to pay high prices for products that are cheaper elsewhere, as Semafor previously reported.

They have looked at whether food delivery companies, which wield significant power in the city, are complying with laws that protect their drivers, and whether landlords are complying with a newly enacted law barring many real estate brokers from collecting thousands of dollars in fees.

“The team, spanning former federal enforcers and regulators, worked closely with the transition to provide key research support on ideas for hitting the ground running,” said Douglas Farrar, a spokesman for Ms. Khan.

The unit has worked in a tight-knit fashion, largely walled off from other members of Mr. Mamdani’s transition team. A senior member of Ms. Khan’s team met with the transition’s policy director while it was developing ideas, and the full group briefed Mr. Mamdani and the transition’s leaders about its proposals, said Mr. Farrar.

New executives are often measured by their first 100 days in office. And Mr. Mamdani’s three central campaign promises — freezing the rent for New Yorkers in rent-stabilized housing, making buses fast and free, and providing universal child care — could take many months, if not years, to achieve.

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Mr. Mamdani has pledged to dramatically expand free child care in New York City.Credit...Angelina Katsanis for The New York Times

Expanding child care would require an enormous expansion of the social safety net, costing billions of dollars and requiring the buy-in of the state legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul. Fast and free buses would necessitate agreement from the leaders of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, who have expressed skepticism of Mr. Mamdani’s plan.

The appointees who make up the board that would decide whether to freeze the rent on rent-stabilized housing are appointed by the mayor. In recent weeks, Mayor Eric Adams has appointed members of the board who appear to be likely to seek to block Mr. Mamdani’s proposal.

Ms. Khan’s menu of executive actions could allow Mr. Mamdani to maximize his productivity — or at least appear to do so. The image of an energized mayor could keep Mr. Mamdani’s youthful base animated.

But the appearance of overreach could also spook the business community, much of which is still uncertain about Mr. Mamdani. It could also invite comparisons to other executives, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom Mr. Mamdani has cited approvingly, and President Trump, whose Justice Department has aggressively pushed the limits of the law in seeking to achieve the White House’s agenda.

Cromwell Coulson, the chief executive of OTC Markets, which runs a stock market, said that if the new mayor and Ms. Khan too aggressively single out large companies, they could sour the city’s business climate at a tenuous moment and hasten the flight of financial firms to states like Texas and Florida.

“Lina Khan is an incredibly smart person,” he said. “The question is where do they point her.”

Mr. Coulson continued: “If they say big business is bad and we’re going to make them pay, and we can give you all these free services that other people pay for, that does not work. If they point her at where does the government spend its money and what’s the value it gives residents, she could do incredible things.”

The Mamdani transition has kept Ms. Khan’s work quiet, even from other city leaders who might be inclined to help. Julie Menin, the Democrat expected to lead the City Council come January, said she would be eager to collaborate with the incoming mayor to use the city’s powers to protect workers and crack down on abusive corporate practices — if asked.

Ms. Menin, a former regulatory lawyer, led an expansion of the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection under former Mayor Bill de Blasio. She headed a staff of lawyers who implemented and enforced a mandatory paid sick leave program, and protections for carwash workers and freelancers.

She said she wanted to use the Council’s subpoena power for the first time to investigate corporate business practices, as well.

“We can be sure we are attracting new business to our city and have some of the strongest worker protections in the country,” she said. “These two ideas are not mutually exclusive.”

Benjamin Oreskes contributed reporting.

Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in the New York region for The Times. He is focused on political influence and its effect on the rule of law in the area’s federal and state courts.

David McCabe is a Times reporter who covers the complex legal and policy issues created by the digital economy and new technologies.

Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government.

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