After New York City’s new mayor was inaugurated on January 1, should federal funds still go to the Big Apple?
What the bill does
The MAMDANI Act would ban federal funds from New York City while newly elected Zohran Mamdani is mayor.
The bill’s acronym, MAMDANI, stands for Moving American Money Distant from Anti-National Interests.
Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA1) introduced a House version on November 7, three days after Mamdani won the general election on November 4.
Notably, the bill only appears to apply to Mamdani himself – not even a potential mayor who would share similar beliefs. If Mamdani were ever to resign or take another political position, his spot would be filled by the city’s Public Advocate: currently Jumaane Williams, who himself endorsed Mamdani.
Context: Who is Mamdani?
In June 2025, Mamdani shocked the political establishment by winning New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary. The 34-year-old defeated former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, a more centrist moderate candidate who was projected to win.
Mamdani began his campaign with far less name recognition, as a representative in New York’s State Assembly, representing a part of the borough Queens. But almost overnight, Mamdani became “one of the five most recognizable names in the party,” according to political analyst Nate Silver. For example, Mamdani now has 11 million Instagram followers, compared to Cuomo with less than 1 million.
Mamdani has proven controversial, for multiple reasons. Here are five:
- Economics: His economic ideology of “democratic socialism” makes him arguably the most powerful person in America to espouse that philosophy – even more than Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY14). Both are certainly famous, but neither has held a top leadership role in quite the same way. Critics say socialism has wrecked economies such as Venezuela and Cuba, while supporters point to Scandinavian countries such as Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark.
- Israel: Mamdani also vowed to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for allegedly committing war crimes if Netanyahu ever sets foot inside New York City – likely to visit the United Nations. (In response, Netanyahu said he would still come to NYC under Mamdani’s tenure.) Mamdani also initially refused to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” though he later said he would “discourage” the phrase and wouldn’t use it himself.
- Law enforcement: In 2020, during the height of the George Floyd protests over race relations and police tactics, Mamdani tweeted: “We don't need an investigation to know that the N.Y.P.D. is racist, anti-queer, and a major threat to public safety.” (Though he backed off that position somewhat in a 2025 interview with Martha MacCallum on Fox News.)
- Dual citizenship: Mamdani moved to the U.S. in 1998 at age seven, becoming a U.S. citizen in 2018 – but maintains dual citizenship with both the U.S. and Uganda. Cuomo exploited this as an attack line: "Why would you keep a citizenship in Uganda?" Cuomo asked. "You are a citizen of Uganda, running for mayor.” (Since Mamdani was born in Uganda, he can’t become president.)
- Religion: Mamdani is arguably the most powerful and prominent Muslim-American politician ever, and the first Muslim mayor of New York City. Several prominent figures and politicians on the right have attacked him on that basis, including Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC1). “After 9/11 we said ‘Never Forget,’” Mace posted on X (formerly Twitter) alongside a photo of Mamdani. “I think we sadly have forgotten.”
Mamdani proved controversial even within his own party. U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is also a Democrat from New York, but wouldn’t endorse Mamdani for the general election.
What supporters say
Supporters of the MAMDANI Act argue that cities and states, which are supposedly better-run than New York City, shouldn’t bail it out or financially support policies they oppose.
“In the United States of America, a nation built on freedom, taxpayer dollars should not be used to fund communism and antisemitism,” Rep. Carter said in a press release. “Georgians want nothing to do with Mamdani’s radical beliefs, and their hard-earned money should not be wasted on programs that will bankrupt the financial capital of the world.”
“Any New Yorker with common sense is welcome to move to the great, FREE state of Georgia.”
What opponents say
Mamdani disputes characterizations of himself as either an antisemite or a communist.
“As mayor, I will always stand steadfast with our Jewish neighbors to root the scourge of antisemitism out of our city,” he posted on X (formerly Twitter). Also: “No, I am not,” he responded when asked by Kristen Welker on NBC’s Meet the Press if he was a communist.
Communism is a political system, while socialism is an economic system. Though the two have often been incorporated together in world history, most famously in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, they don’t necessarily have to be. Mamdani calls himself a “democratic socialist” to clarify that he prefers socialism as an economic system but democracy as a political system.
What has Trump said?
The day before November’s election, President Donald Trump suggested that he might withhold federal money from New York City unilaterally from the White House.
“It is highly unlikely that I will be contributing federal funds, other than the very minimum as required,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “It can only get worse with a communist at the helm, and I don’t want to send, as president, good money after bad. It is my obligation to run the nation, and it is my strong conviction that New York City will be a complete and total economic and social disaster should Mamdani win."
Mamdani responded that he didn’t take the ultimatum seriously.
“I will address that threat for what it is: it is a threat. It is not the law,” Mamdani said the day before his election. “Too often, we treat everything that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth as if it is already legal, just by virtue of who is saying it.”
“This funding is not something that Donald Trump is giving us here in New York City,” Mamdani continued. “This is something that we are, in fact, owed in New York.”
A few weeks after the election, Trump and Mamdani met for the first time at the White House, in a meeting described as “surprisingly cordial,” with Trump adding, “I’ll be cheering for him.”
What happens now
The bill has not yet attracted any cosponsors, not even any fellow Republicans.
It awaits a potential vote in either the House Appropriations or Oversight and Government Reform Committees.
Similar legislation
At least three similar pieces of legislation have been introduced by congressional Republicans in response to Mamdani.
A different MAMDANI Act
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY17) introduced an unrelated bill also called the MAMDANI Act in July.
Though it wouldn’t actually change public policy, it would require the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) to conduct a study on government-owned grocery stores. Mamdani wants to create a pilot program, establishing five such taxpayer-funded grocery stores, one in each New York City borough.
The acronym MAMDANI in this bill stands for Measuring Adverse Market Disruption And National Impact.
The bill’s supporters argue that Mamdani’s plan would establish too much government control and potentially raise prices.
“Government-run grocery stores raise serious questions about market fairness and taxpayer accountability,” Rep. Lawler said in a press release. “The [bill] ensures we carefully assess the potential impacts of such proposals before public funds are committed, or they risk undermining local businesses and disrupting supply chains, ultimately leaving consumers worse off.”
Opponents counter: the plan is “a public option for produce, an understanding that for far too many New Yorkers, groceries are out of reach, and the importance in city government of reasonable policy experimentation," Mamdani said.
The bill has attracted one cosponsor, fellow New York Republican Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-NY2). It awaits a potential vote in the House Judiciary Committee.
Sovereign Enforcement Integrity Act
The Sovereign Enforcement Integrity Act would ban Mamdani from ordering Netanyahu’s arrest if the Israeli leader comes to New York City.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY21) introduced the House version on September 16. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) introduced the Senate version two weeks later, on September 29.
Technically, the legislation would ban any government or law enforcement officer working for a state, territory, or municipality – such as a mayor or a police officer working for a mayor – from arresting anyone based on an ICC (International Criminal Court) warrant. The ICC issued such an arrest warrant for Netanyahu in 2024, contending his government committed war crimes during its invasion of Gaza.
The bill’s supporters argue the U.S. shouldn’t carry out arrests on behalf of an international institution for which they’re not even a member.
“The United States is not part of the International Criminal Court," Rep. Stefanik said in a press release. "That is why I introduced the [bill] to protect American sovereignty and prohibit radicals like Mamdani from illegally arresting the leader of our democratic ally Israel."
Opponents counter that if Trump won’t arrest Netanyahu, then Mamdani should.
“It is my desire to ensure that this be a city that stands up for international law,” Mamdani told the New York Times. “This is a moment where we cannot look to the federal government for leadership. This is a moment when cities and states will have to demonstrate what it actually looks like to stand up for our own values, our own people.”
The legislation has attracted two House cosponsors, one Republican and one Democratic: Reps. Mike Lawler (R-NY17) and Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ5). However, no Senate cosponsors have yet signed on.
It awaits a potential vote in either the House or Senate Judiciary Committees.
A resolution about socialism
In November, the House voted 285-98 on a symbolic concurrent resolution from Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL27) to “denounce the horrors of socialism.” 86 Democrats voted in favor, while no Republicans opposed it.
While the concurrent resolution was ostensibly about socialism in general, the House vote was intentionally scheduled the same day as Trump’s meeting with Mamdani.
The resolution’s supporters argue that socialism has produced terrible results, in both the past and present.
“It has never delivered justice or equality, only fear, censorship, poverty, and broken nations. I represent thousands of families who fled their homelands because socialist regimes promised paradise and delivered prisons,” Rep. Salazar said in a press release. “Today, the House is making it clear: we will not allow socialism’s failed ideology to take root in the United States.”
Opponents counter that the resolution is a scare tactic to demonize some of America’s most popular and successful institutions and policies.
“This very resolution goes further by using the specter of socialism to undermine some of the most important government programs in our country like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA43) said in a House floor speech. “These are programs that help everyday Americans put food on their plate and care for their children.”Jesse Rifkin is a freelance journalist with The Fulcrum. Don’t miss his report, Congress Bill Spotlight, on The Fulcrum. Rifkin’s writings about politics and Congress have been published in the Washington Post, Politico, Roll Call, Los Angeles Times, CNN Opinion, GovTrack, and USA Today.
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Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.