A MAXIMALIST VISION OF MAYORAL POWER

WILL LINA KHAN PUSH THE NEW YORK MAYOR TO GET CREATIVE WITH EXPANDING HIS POWER?

- ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN

WHEN NEW YORK Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announced his transition team the day after the election, one name stood out as a harbinger of mayoral misconduct: Lina Khan. Khan, who headed the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) under President Joe Biden, was one of the team’s four co-chairs.

“The poetry of campaigning may have come to a close last night at 9, but the beautiful prose of governing has only begun,” said Mamdani in a November 5 speech. “The hard work of improving New Yorkers’ lives starts now.”

When it comes to helping improve ordinary people’s lives, Khan is hardly up for the job—not if her history is any indication.

Khan’s influence will likely lead Mamdani's office to get creative—and perhaps unconstitutional—in applying existing laws and authorities to enact big-ticket items on Mamdani’s agenda, such as city-run grocery stores, free child care and bus rides, and nearly doubling the minimum wage.

She could also prompt the city government to poke its head into all sorts of areas, some of them rather minor, under cover of enforcing antitrust statutes. Semafor’s Liz Hoffman reported in November that Khan hoped to help Mamdani go after everything from hospital drug prices to high-priced stadium concessions with “a 56-year-old NYC prohibition on business practices deemed “unconscionable”—a designation expansive enough to delight any regulator.”

In an interview with