BY NICK GARBER – New York Focus<\/p>\n
This story originally appeared<\/a> in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter here<\/a>.<\/p>\n A program making it easier to hire government workers has helped fill more than 50,000 jobs across New York state. But Mayor Eric Adams\u2019s administration quietly abandoned a brief attempt to join the program in the face of union opposition \u2014 leaving a raft of vacancies in New York City government that now threatens to hobble the agenda of Mayor Zohran Mamdani.<\/p>\n In 2023, reeling from an exodus of public sector workers, Governor Kathy Hochul took a radical step: allowing state agencies to hire many employees without undergoing the many-months-long civil service exam process. The following year, her administration allowed local governments to opt into the emergency effort, called NY HELPS, and the vast majority of counties took her up on it.<\/p>\n New York City tried to opt in, too. It was a prime candidate: Vacancies in the city\u2019s 300,000-person government have hovered around 4.5 percent since 2024 \u2014 more than double the pre-pandemic level. Agencies have reported that a lack of staff has prevented them from inspecting housing<\/a> and restaurants<\/a>, administering public benefits<\/a>, upholding environmental standards<\/a>, and more.<\/p>\n In September 2024, under then-Mayor Eric Adams, the city proposed a list<\/a> of 51 different job titles it wanted to exempt from exam rules under NY HELPS, corresponding to hundreds of government jobs. The list was diverse, including everything from electricians and X-ray technicians to building inspectors and school-lunch supervisors.<\/p>\n Union resistance<\/p>\n But the proposal was nipped in the bud thanks to resistance from organized labor, which argued that the program could let unqualified hires sneak in through nepotism or by lying on their resumes, and be unfair to existing government workers who were hired under the old system. Weeks after the proposal, a slew of city unions sued<\/a> the city to block NY HELPS.<\/p>\n \u201cThe system they were proposing \u2014 although it has some merits \u2014 the downside is, what about the individuals that studied for years to take these exams?\u201d said Joseph Colangelo, president of the auto workers\u2019 union Local 246, which signed onto the lawsuit along with powerhouse unions DC37, the United Federation of Teachers, and Teamsters Local 237. \u201cThe beauty of the system is it gives everyone an equal opportunity for employment.\u201d<\/p>\n The city relented quickly. Less than a month after the suit was filed, in November 2024, the city told the unions it \u201cwould no longer proceed with its proposal,\u201d according to a court filing by the unions. Citing that promise, the unions dropped their suit in January 2025. The case and its resolution received little public notice at the time.<\/p>\n The agreement doesn\u2019t legally bar Mamdani from taking another look at NY HELPS, which is set to expire in June. It\u2019s far from certain that he will, given his close political ties to DC37 and other unions. But persistent short-staffing could severely impede his agenda.<\/p>\n The city\u2019s Housing Preservation and Development department, which would be charged with financing the 200,000 affordable homes that Mamdani wants to build in a decade, has a whopping 13 percent vacancy rate that has slowed project reviews and made it more expensive to build, experts say<\/a>.<\/p>\n Other short-staffed agencies include the Department of Buildings, which will play a key role in the coming years implementing policies like the carbon-emissions law Local Law 97, which Mamdani strongly supports. The Department of Social Services, which administers benefits to the low-income New Yorkers at the center of Mamdani\u2019s affordability agenda, has come under severe strain as it copes with a 12 percent vacancy rate, or more than 1,500 positions, New York Focus and THE CITY reported<\/a> in December.<\/p>\n Even the agency that oversees hiring is short-staffed. The Department of Citywide Administrative Services, which administers and scores the city\u2019s civil service exams, is nearly 17 percent vacant.<\/p>\n \u201cIt shouldn\u2019t take more than 18 months from the time you take a civil service exam to receiving a start date or getting a promotion. But that\u2019s what happens essentially every single time,\u201d City Council member Lincoln Restler said during a 2024 hearing on the city\u2019s vacancy crisis. \u201cThis is not how hiring should work in the 21st century.\u201d<\/p>\n ‘Improve the system’<\/p>\n Mamdani\u2019s top aides have acknowledged the need to speed up hiring \u2014 especially after his transition received an influx of more than 70,000 resumes from would-be government workers following his November victory.<\/p>\n \u201cHow you hire, how we speed that up, how we make sure agencies are delivering services where they haven\u2019t been allowed to hire up \u2014 those are all things that we need to do immediately,\u201d Mamdani\u2019s First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan told reporters at a December event.<\/p>\n Asked whether the new administration would be open to changing civil-service rules, Fuleihan said he was \u201cwilling to have conversations with everyone, including union partners, about how we improve the system.\u201d<\/p>\n Reached for comment, the mayor\u2019s office deferred to the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, which acknowledged Adams\u2019 decision to drop NY HELPS but did not address whether Mamdani might revisit it.<\/p>\n \u201cPart of our mission is to ensure that city agencies have pools of qualified candidates to serve vital roles\u2014we are always open to exploring new avenues to meet recruitment needs,\u201d DCAS spokesperson Dan Kastanis said in a statement. \u201cAfter meetings and discussions about the proposal, we ultimately decided not to continue pursuing the NY HELPS program.\u201d<\/p>\n As of last month, state agencies had hired 38,362 workers<\/a> through NY HELPS \u2014 equal to more than 20 percent of the state\u2019s current workforce, though not all are necessarily still employed. City and county governments had hired another 14,295 people. Fifty-two of the 57 counties outside the city opted in, as have cities including Albany, Rochester, Troy, Kingston, and Ithaca.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s helped out tremendously with titles that we just had such a difficulty filling,\u201d said Michael Lalli, Director of Operations of Albany County, which has made about 1,500 hires through the program.<\/p>\n \u201cYou had this red tape bureaucratic process of getting people to sign up for an exam, wait a couple weeks [or] months, take the exam, wait a few more months, get their score,\u201d\u00a0Lalli said. \u201cAnd it turned it basically into, \u2018hey, do you meet the minimum qualifications of the position? Can you show that, whether through experience or education?\u2019 And we\u2019ll put you in the job in a week.\u201d<\/p>\n Experts urge big changes<\/p>\n New York City has a similarly sluggish civil service system, which leaves candidates for city jobs stuck in years-long limbo. For the 80 percent of city jobs that require an exam, people must apply to take one of more than 100 different tests, sometimes wait years for the relevant agency to schedule an exam, usually pay a fee, then\u00a0wait<\/a> about a year for the city to release lists of people who did well enough on the exam to apply for jobs. City agencies then have to consider the top-three scoring applicants for each job, before moving down the list.<\/p>\n Gabe Paley, a former technology adviser to Hochul, is among the experts who have urged<\/a> Mamdani to take a hard look at that process. Paley, who has praised the HELPS program, said that Mamdani will struggle to hire many of the ambitious people flocking to join his administration without changes to the current exam-based regime.<\/p>\n \u201cThe whole system is designed to uphold principles of merit and fitness, and it\u2019s just not doing that right now,\u201d Paley said.<\/p>\n Labor leaders disagree.<\/p>\n Henry Garrido, executive director of DC37, the city\u2019s largest municipal union, told New York Focus that he is proud of his union\u2019s efforts to kill the HELPS program. Rather than blame the civil service system, Garrido attributed the city\u2019s staffing crisis to uncompetitive wages, strict oversight of hires by the city\u2019s budget office, and the hiring freeze imposed by Adams in 2023 to save money during a budget crunch \u2014 which remains partially in effect under a \u201ctwo-for-one\u201d model that only lets a position be filled once two employees have left.<\/p>\n \u201cWe here at DC37 believe the civil service system is a path for upward mobility that doesn\u2019t discriminate,\u201d Garrido said.<\/p>\n The future of NY HELPS is unclear, with the statewide program set to expire in June unless it is renewed. Hochul made no mention of it in her January executive budget, except to highlight how it has helped the state\u2019s workforce grow by more than 3,000 people since last year. Mamdani has limited power to change hiring rules on his own, since much of the city\u2019s civil service system is structured by state law.<\/p>\n But the state is in the midst of another more lasting shift in how it hires for government jobs. The state\u2019s Department of Civil Service is phasing out its traditional multiple-choice exam in favor of questionnaires about each applicant\u2019s background and work history.<\/p>\n Those \u201cTraining & Experience\u201d exams currently make up about 40 percent of all tests the department administers, but T&Es are set to replace nearly all traditional civil-service tests under a \u201ctransformation\u201d plan<\/a> that lacks a firm timeframe. It wouldn\u2019t make a difference in New York City, however, since the change would apply only to state government jobs and to local governments that rely on the state to administer their exams.<\/p>\n The state aims for the revamped hiring process to eventually take just \u201ca couple of weeks,\u201d Timothy Hogues, commissioner of the state Department of Civil Service, told New York Focus last year. Besides being much quicker to process, T&Es could help make the state\u2019s workforce more diverse. In an initial pilot at some state agencies, candidates of color have scored better on T&Es compared to traditional civil service exams, according to a 2023 state-commissioned report<\/a> by the SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government.<\/p>\n But state-level unions have begun sounding the alarm about the shift. The Public Employees Federation, which represents some 55,000 state workers, cautiously supported NY HELPS when it was first proposed in 2023, saying it would help its members who were being overworked at short-staffed agencies. But PEF has come out against<\/a> the move to T&Es, arguing it would let applicants exaggerate their qualifications and potentially disadvantage marginalized groups who lack college degrees.<\/p>\n Colangelo, the city auto workers\u2019 union\u00a0leader, said he considers T&Es to be \u201cNY HELPS on steroids.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn my opinion, we\u2019re going back over 100 years to the spoils system,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n