For months, city Comptroller Brad Lander has centered his mayoral campaign on a promise to end street homelessness among severely mentally ill people. This week, he followed up on that campaign pledge by releasing a plan — through his government office, at an event staffed by public employees.
Mixing campaign activities with government work is illegal, since city employees are barred from working for outside interests while on the taxpayer’s dime. There is no indication that Lander ran afoul of that rule by releasing his plan through official channels, but there is obvious overlap between the supposedly separate worlds. Although Lander’s document makes no mention of his City Hall bid, most of its recommendations could only be implemented by a sitting mayor. And within hours of its rollout on Monday, Lander’s campaign sent a fundraising email that described the plan as something he would implement “as mayor.”
Three ethics experts told Crain’s they saw no problems with the way Lander released the set of policies. But the process is an example of how sitting elected officials can use the channels of city government to spread their message in a way that benefits their privately-funded campaigns — with a blurry line sometimes separating the two.
“It’s tricky for a public official who also has responsibilities that are adjacent to the campaign,” said Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor and former chair of the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board, who noted that Lander’s day job as comptroller involves auditing city agencies and recommending improvements. “But especially as we move into campaign season, if he’s talking about something that he doesn’t actually have responsibility over, it looks a lot more like a campaign statement.”
Of course, Lander is not the only incumbent officeholder running in this year’s mayoral election. The June 2025 Democratic primary field also includes three state lawmakers — state Sens. Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos, and Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani — as well as Mayor Eric Adams himself. The similarities between candidates’ official statements and their campaign rhetoric can be less than subtle.
For example, when Myrie was appointed last week to chair a powerful Senate committee overseeing criminal justice, his government office released a statement that wouldn’t have been out of place on the campaign trail given this year’s emphasis on safety.
“As a born and raised New Yorker, I know our city and parts of our state feel less safe than they used to,” Myrie said. “New Yorkers deserve leaders at every level of government who give public safety the focus it deserves.”
The greatest power of incumbency belongs to Adams, who commands dozens of city agencies and a vast $115 billion government that he can use to remind voters of his accomplishments. At the end of 2024, many of the departments under his command blasted out press releases touting their work from the prior year, saying they had met their commitment to “Get Stuff Done” — a slogan Adams has also used as a candidate.
The campaign vibe was hard to miss at Adams’ most recent State of the City speech this month, where he packed the venue with political allies and chided his rivals for their past support for cutting the police department budget.
Adams also freely discusses his campaign at government events, including his weekly City Hall news conferences where he speaks from behind a mayoral lectern. That changed for a brief moment in August, when Adams’ then-chief counsel, Lisa Zornberg, cautioned reporters against asking political questions — citing guidance she had received from the Conflicts of Interest Board.
But Zornberg abruptly left her City Hall job weeks later — after reportedly urging Adams to fire aides who were swept up in federal probes — and the ban on political questions seemed to vanish with her, leaving reporters free to quiz the mayor about politics.
‘New leadership at City Hall’
Lander, for his part, has never been an ally of Adams’, and his job requires him to scrutinize City Hall. But the comptroller’s rhetoric has grown noticeably sharper since he announced his mayoral candidacy in July. Following Adams’ State of the City speech, Lander called for “new leadership at City Hall” in a statement sent by his government office.
“New Yorkers want honest, effective leadership, not pomp and circumstance and empty promises,” Lander added. “They want a mayor who is focused on their problems, not his own.”
Chloe Chik, a spokeswoman for the comptroller’s office, said that the homelessness plan released Monday “builds upon several years of audits” that the office has done on similar topics.
“The charter-mandated role of the comptroller is to perform oversight and hold mayoral agencies accountable especially when City Hall is not meeting goals to serve New Yorkers, no matter the officeholders or election calendar,” Chik said.
Lander’s government scheduler is also doing the same work for his mayoral campaign in a paid capacity, while several other government employees are volunteering for the campaign, Chik said. Such personnel overlaps are not uncommon — Adams’ 2021 campaign manager Frank Carone went on to serve as his chief of staff and was long expected to spearhead the mayor’s 2025 re-election bid, although his current role has not been specified.
Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, and John Kaehny, executive director of Reinvent Albany, said they took no issue with how the comptroller’s office handled Monday’s report.
“I take it for granted that elected officials do things, as officeholders, that help their chances at getting re-elected,” Kaehny said. “That’s the way it’s supposed to work in a democracy.”
When politicians have gotten in trouble for mixing campaign and government work, the transgressions have tended to involve clear-cut uses of city time and money for campaign business. Charles Hynes, the Brooklyn District Attorney who was unseated in 2013, later came under federal scrutiny over whether he had used money seized by criminal defendants like drug dealers to pay a political consultant. (That investigation was later dropped without charges being filed.)
The Conflicts of Interest Board also fined Hynes $40,000 for using his government account for campaign purposes, and penalized one of his deputies for doing campaign work from her government office.
And just this week, former Mayor Bill de Blasio was ordered by a judge to repay $475,000 in taxpayer money spent by the New York Police Department on security for his ill-fated presidential campaign in 2019. De Blasio had ignored guidance from COIB that the city would not cover the travel costs for officers who accompanied him to campaign stops in Iowa, Illinois and South Carolina, The City reported.
