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Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s newly formed “mass engagement” arm will shell out cushy, six-figure salaries — totaling nearly $2 million in taxpayer cash — to more than a dozen activist-minded hires, The Post has learned.
The Mamdani administration is seeking to fill 14 spots in the loosely defined Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement that aims to bring the Democratic Socialists of America’s mobilization model to City Hall.
The slate of well-paid worker bees will be tasked with building out a volunteer system for local advocacy campaigns, both citywide and for individual boroughs, through “co-governance,” according to job postings released earlier this month.
The descriptions for the various gigs — including campaign directors, borough directors and community liaisons — all read like a playbook from the NYC-DSA’s ground game that helped elect the young democratic socialist to the city’s highest office.
“The Soviet politburo called, they want their job announcement back,” one Democratic strategist quipped.
It’s not known how much City Hall has allocated for the mayoral office aside from the roughly $1.6 million in salary for the open positions — and the more than a quarter of a million dollars for the commissioner, longtime DSA member Tascha Van Auken.
Van Auken, who served as Mamdani’s field director during the mayoral campaign, will lead the office that’s broadly billed as being “responsible for strategizing, coordinating, and executing on engagement that reaches the masses of everyday New Yorkers.”
“I’m old enough to remember when the mayor’s office didn’t need co-governance with anyone.”
One newly created post, deputy director of co-governance — which comes with a comfortable $150,000 salary — particularly raised eyebrows in political circles.
That person will be tasked with creating “internal Co-Governance training to build interagency understanding of co-governance best practices and alignment for transforming relationships with the community,” and training for communities to ” to engage and drive mass governance projects and campaigns.”
The language is almost identical to what NYC DSA co-chair Grace Mausser called for in her manifesto last year, “Building Municipal Socialism in New York With DSA.”
“We have a model for winning mass campaigns; we have a model for true co-governance with legislators; now we will bring our experience to city hall,” she wrote, calling for the DSA to infiltrate the city’s political ranks.
Another listing that took some insiders back was the campaign director post — paid between $140,000 and $150,000 — that they said mirrors the work of political campaign staffers.
One of the duties was to “develop strategy, process, and metrics of success for scalable campaigns that help New Yorkers join town halls, training, canvases, and other events that forge relationships and leadership development among regular New Yorkers.”
“Why doesn’t the mayor just call it the ‘Director of Re-Election Political Get Out of the Vote Using Government Money’ and just get it over with?” another Dem operative raged.
Its unclear whether the office will be limited to these 15 total spots or if Mamdani plans to grow the ranks further in the future.
The new job postings come as Mamdani cries poverty to Albany, calling on Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state Legislature to hike taxes on the wealthy over the Big Apple’s purported $5.4 billion budget gap.
City Hall did not comment.
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