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Mamdani’s First 100 Days: There’s No Such Thing as a Free Bus

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Jarrett Stepman / @JarrettStepman

Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of "The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past." Send an email to Jarrett

“It seems that you eventually need a socialist to clean up the mess.”

That’s what the self-avowed socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani thought was a clever answer to Margaret Thatcher’s famous line about the problem with socialism being that you run out of other people’s money.

He said it at his “first 100 days” bash on Sunday.

Maybe the quip makes sense to the young, woke voters in Mamdani’s base who think that they transcend history (or more likely don’t know anything about it). Perhaps they believe just as many previous generations of leftists did that True Socialism hasn’t been tried.

But it’s become clear after Mamdani’s first 100 days in office that the “New Era” he’s promised doesn’t look much different than the old era, and his ambitious agenda is quickly running into the hard reality that even in New York, wealth is finite.

The city didn’t instantly implode the moment Mamdani walked into office, though that’s a low bar for success. New York is much bigger than one man, even a very powerful one.

Yet, there are warning signs that not only will Mamdani’s leadership produce poor results, but that Gotham is looking at long-term deterioration if he governs as promised.

If there is one thing socialists have truly perfected over the years, it’s exploiting voter dissatisfaction—whatever the cause—and creating a mess of historic proportions.

One of the signature promises of Mamdani’s campaign was that he would bring free buses to all residents in the city. That clearly isn’t happening this year and may never happen at all.

“Mamdani’s highly-touted demands for free buses has fallen to the wayside in both state and city budget proposals,” the New York Post reported in early April.

New York City Comptroller Mark Levine has warned that New York faces an over $7 billion deficit between this year and next and it looks like the bus was a casualty of that budget gap. It didn’t help that the state relies on the revenue.

The best Mamdani could come up with was a limited, pilot program. Hardly a revolution.

And that’s almost certainly a good thing.

Kansas City, Missouri tried a free bus program with federal COVID-19 relief money. What a scam that whole “pandemic relief” thing turned out to be, right? Once the federal money ran out, the local funding also quickly dried up. According to local residents, the New York Post reported, the buses became “unreliable, filthy, rolling homeless shelters.”

$30 Million Grocery Store … By 2029

Another one of Mamdani’s big promises was that he would open a government-run grocery store in each of New York City’s five boroughs, because you can’t truly experience the warmth of collectivism without a good old-fashioned bread line, right?

Mamdani announced during his first 100 days speech that the city would move forward with this awful idea by building a single store in East Harlem for $30 million and would finish all the stores by 2029 despite planning to burn through nearly half of the $70 million budget on this single location.

It’s a staggering amount of money to pay for a single store that will surely cost more to operate than it could ever make in profit.

But it makes total sense if you understand that Mamdani’s revolution is just to put the Democrat governing model on steroids.

I’ll make a few predictions here.

That dollar amount is just the beginning of the money that will be dumped into this project that is unlikely to even finish by 2029.

The money isn’t just being used to build the store, it’s to pay for all the union jobs and officials working on it. This will be New York City’s Grocery Store to Nowhere. Like the California “ghost” bullet train, the whole project is a cover to make sure the right people get paid rather than a serious project to create a functioning supermarket.

Disorder Increasing, Crime on Subway

While crime has generally been falling in New York and around the nation, there are worrying signs that urban disorder will drastically increase under Mamdani.

Mamdani blew his first serious test of governing when a big snowstorm pummeled New York shortly after he took office. Initially Mamdani insisted that the homeless encampments wouldn’t be torn down and that the city’s homeless population wouldn’t be forced to go into shelters.

The mayor eventually backtracked on the city’s homeless sweeps but at least a dozen people died of exposure in the brutally cold temperatures.

Perhaps more worrying is the potential for crime to spike back up again. There was a major surge in violent crime on public transit in the first few months of the year. Robberies are up by 21% compared to last year, according to NYPD data.

There have also been a few high-profile violent crimes that highlight all that’s wrong with the Left’s governing philosophy. In March, an illegal alien shoved 83-year-old Air Force vet Richard Williams and another man onto the subway tracks. Williams later died of his injuries.

In April, a machete-wielding manic calling himself “Lucifer” stabbed three people before being shot and killed by police.

It seemed that at least a few of Mamdani’s diehard supporters were more upset with the NYPD than the man taking a hatchet to fellow New Yorkers.

Does NYPD know how to disarm people without going straight to lethal force?Follow-up question: Has anyone else noticed that NYPD consistently reacts to a person with a knife by shooting them?? https://t.co/m9JWP69bcp— Talia Jane ???? (@taliaotg) April 11, 2026

Does NYPD know how to disarm people without going straight to lethal force?Follow-up question: Has anyone else noticed that NYPD consistently reacts to a person with a knife by shooting them?? https://t.co/m9JWP69bcp

If you wonder why it is that American cities have a crime problem, look no further than the mentality of that X post.

Springtime for Radicals

One final note about Mamdani’s early returns must be made.

On top of the poor policy decisions thus far, the new mayor has additionally surrounded himself with a collection of extremists and other sordid people.

Some of these radicals are serving in an official capacity, like his Marxist housing czar Cea Weaver who publicly dreamed about impoverishing white, middle-class homeowners. The city’s new racial equity plan hardly dispels the notion that this is Mamdani’s goal too.

Mamdani invited anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil to the governor’s mansion for Ramadan. The Syrian-born Khalil faces deportation by the Trump administration that has accused him of being a Hamas supporter.

That’s hardly surprising given that Mamdani’s wife has a growing record of supporting antisemites and pro-Palestinian terrorists on social media. Mamdani insists she is a “private person.”

One way or another it suggests that Mamdani has no desire to moderate or “normalize” in his time as mayor.

There are other nodes of power in New York City that will contain Mamdani, some will encourage him, but it’s increasingly clear that however things shape out in coming years the city will be worsened by his leadership. 

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