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Politics & Government

Politics & Government in New York

The Council, the Mayor, the Governor, the budget fights, and the agencies that run your day. This is the straight-government desk that anchors The Front Page, so it leads with the cleanest account of what happened, before anyone spins it.

Desks we analyze here: THE CITY, NYT Metro, City & State NY, Spectrum News NY1.

The coverage, newest first

9 stories
  1. June 26, 2026 Mamdani Sweeps the Primaries and Reshapes the City's Power Map The mayor endorsed three congressional candidates. All three won. The organization is already looking at 2028. 2/10 desks
  2. June 26, 2026 EBT Food Stamp Theft Drains Accounts Across the City, and Albany Has No Fix New York knows its food stamp cards are easy to steal from. It does not know how many people are being robbed, because it stopped collecting the data. 1/10 desks
  3. June 25, 2026 Frank Carone Arrested in Migrant Shelter Bribery The man who ran City Hall for Eric Adams is now charged with turning the migrant crisis into a personal billing cycle. 1/10 desks
  4. June 25, 2026 Mamdani's Congressional Sweep A year after taking City Hall, the mayor's machine ousted two sitting members of Congress and a borough president from his own party, and the general... 4/10 desks
  5. June 25, 2026 DSA Reshuffles Albany's Assembly Down-Ballot A dozen state legislative seats flipped in Brooklyn and Queens, clearing the path for housing and transit bills that Albany has blocked for years. 3/10 desks
  6. June 23, 2026 Mamdani turns his coalition on Congress The mayor bet his movement could move votes uptown and across the river. Tuesday night, most of the bet paid. 3/10 desks
  7. June 23, 2026 The shelter next door, and the audit that never came Two Brooklyn neighborhoods are suing to stop a shelter, and the man who was supposed to watch the spending is now running for Congress. 2/10 desks
  8. Saturday, June 20, 2026 Rent Guidelines Board freezes rent-stabilized leases at 0% The board that sets the rent for two million New Yorkers blinked, and a year of organizing ran into one vote. 2/10 desks
  9. Saturday, June 20, 2026 City Council passes a $112 billion budget, restoring library cuts The Council clawed back the cuts the Mayor proposed, and the branch libraries stay open six days. 3/10 desks

Politics & Government, explained

The questions New Yorkers actually ask.

Who actually runs New York, the city or the state?

Both, and the split is the whole story. The Mayor and the 51-member City Council run City Hall: the NYPD, the schools, sanitation, the city budget. But Albany, meaning the Governor and the Legislature, controls the things that quietly decide daily life here: the MTA’s money, rent law, and a big share of school funding. So a New York story is almost never just a city story.

What does the Mayor control versus the Governor, for my day-to-day?

The Mayor runs the agencies you actually touch: police, sanitation, the public schools, housing inspections. The Governor and the state Legislature set the rules the city has to live under: transit funding, rent regulation, criminal-justice law, and the state budget the city leans on. When the two fight, you feel it in your commute and your rent.

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