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<\/p>\nWarshaw says 18-year incumbent Tom DiNapoli \u2014 who has never faced a primary election opponent \u2014 has done a poor job managing the state’s $291 billion pension fund. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Drew Warshaw, candidate for New York State comptroller.<\/p>\n
New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli has been the state\u2019s chief financial officer for 18 years.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s long enough, according to Drew Warshaw, who hopes to compete the first contested primary election DiNapoli has faced in his long tenure.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s \u201cone of the most powerful offices in government,\u201d Warshaw said in an interview with Investigative Post this week. And yet \u201cvirtually no one has ever heard\u201d of it, many \u201ccan barely pronounce\u201d it, and even fewer could name the man who\u2019d held the office since 2007.<\/p>\n
The office\u2019s power, Warshaw said, derives from its stewardship of the state\u2019s $291 billion pension fund and its oversight of \u201canything that touches the state tax dollar.\u201d<\/p>\n
DiNapoli has failed to exercise the office\u2019s potential in both areas, he said, and those failures hit New Yorkers squarely in the wallet.<\/p>\n
Warshaw has three major criticisms of DiNapoli\u2019s performance:<\/p>\n
He says DiNapoli has done a poor job overseeing the state\u2019s pension fund, significantly underperforming the market while paying $12 billion in fees to Wall Street money managers.\u00a0
\nHe faults the comptroller\u2019s office for its failure to return unclaimed funds to New Yorkers. That pot of unreturned money has grown from $7 billion to $20 billion since DiNapoli took office, though there\u2019s only $100 million on hand to pay out claims. The rest has been swept into the state\u2019s general fund to help balance budgets.
\nHe argues the comptroller\u2019s office should use its audit powers in ways that will more directly save taxpayers money \u2014 for example, scrutinizing the Public Service Commission\u2019s oversight of utility rates.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s sitting on all this power and all this money, and the affordability crisis is getting worse and worse and worse, and we can actually do something about it,\u201d Warshaw said.<\/p>\n
DiNapoli, a Long Islander, has been in public service his entire adult life.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He was elected to his local school board at age 18 and worked as a legislative staffer in the Assembly and in Congress. He served 20 years in the Assembly until 2007, when his colleagues in the state Legislature appointed him to succeed Alan Hevesi, who was forced to resign the comptroller\u2019s office and later sentenced to jail on corruption charges<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Since then, DiNapoli has been returned to office four times without significant opposition. Warshaw declared his intention to break that streak in May and in July announced his campaign had raised just over $1 million.<\/p>\n \u00a0As of its most recent disclosure filing in July, DiNapoli campaign committee had less money in the bank than Warshaw \u2014 just over $600,000 \u2014 but he\u2019ll have no problem raising more. He has all the advantages of an incumbent.<\/p>\n Warshaw\u2019s public-private pedigree<\/p>\n Warshaw, 44, graduated from Cornell University, where he co-founded a student organization called Democracy Matters, which lobbied for campaign finance reform in Albany. He joined Eliot Spitzer\u2019s 2006 campaign for governor and served as deputy chief of staff in that scandal-abbreviated administration.<\/p>\n After Spitzer\u2019s resignation in 2008, Warshaw spent four years with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, working on the reconstruction of the World Trade Center \u2014 a project he said exposed him to \u201cpeak government dysfunction, with agencies battling for turf, and private developers, insurance companies and the whole thing.\u201d<\/p>\n He earned an MBA at Columbia University, then spent eight years working for a company that built solar farms around the country. From there he joined Enterprise Community Partners<\/a>, a nonprofit affordable housing developer. He worked there until May, when he quit to run for state comptroller.<\/p>\n Warshaw said Enterprise \u201craised and deployed $2 billion every year,\u201d but the company was barely making a dent in the shortage of quality, low-cost homes.<\/p>\n \u201cThe bottom line was, we were losing. The affordability crisis was getting worse,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n He decided to run for comptroller, he said, so that instead of lobbying officials \u201cto be faster, smarter, cheaper, better,\u201d he could work the levers of government himself.<\/p>\n \u201cI truly believe the cavalry is us,\u201d Warshaw said. \u201cI don\u2019t think anyone else is coming. I think it takes people like us, individual humans, getting into positions of power that control power and money and then using it for people without it.\u201d<\/p>\n The underperforming pension fund<\/p>\n New York State\u2019s pension fund is \u201cthe third largest pool of public capital\u201d in the country, Warshaw said, funded by contributions from municipalities and their employees across the state.<\/p>\n The state comptroller is steward of the $291 billion fund and its investments. Warshaw contends DiNapoli has done a poor job, underperforming the market while paying billions in fees to Wall Street brokers.<\/p>\n \u201cWe compared him to his own benchmarks,\u201d Warshaw said, referring to the annual fund reports the comptroller\u2019s office issues. \u201cAnd it turns out he\u2019s underperformed his own benchmarks by 39 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n Warshaw said that underperformance has resulted in higher local taxes. State law requires that the pension fund be fully funded. If the returns on the fund\u2019s investments don\u2019t achieve that, local governments and their workers must make up the difference.<\/p>\n His analysis also found that DiNapoli\u2019s office paid $12 billion in fees to nearly 700 outside investment managers \u201cto try to beat the market,\u201d which he said seldom pans out over the long term. Taxpayers would be better served if the money were parked in low-cost index funds.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not going to try and get greedy and beat the market and light taxpayer money on fire anymore. We\u2019re going to take the market return and we\u2019re going to focus the resources of the office on a million other things to lower costs for New Yorkers.\u201d<\/p>\n For example, he said, he\u2019d like to leverage the pension fund to lower the cost of housing.<\/p>\n Currently, Warshaw said, the pension fund has $30 billion in real estate investments. He\u2019d like to direct $10 billion of that into an affordable housing fund.<\/p>\n \u201cWe invest that in homes that New Yorkers can actually afford \u2014 here in Buffalo, in New York City, across Long Island, in central New York and Albany,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd everyone across the country is going to go, \u2018What are they doing in New York? I didn\u2019t realize we could do that.\u2019 And they\u2019re going to start doing the same thing. We\u2019re going to unlock billions of dollars to address the biggest domestic policy crisis that we have right now.\u201d<\/p>\n Returning New Yorkers\u2019 unclaimed funds<\/p>\n Another of the comptroller\u2019s duties is finding the rightful owners of unclaimed funds \u2014 inheritances, tax and fee refunds, lawsuit settlements, etc. \u2014 and sending them their money.<\/p>\n Here, too, Warshaw said, the incumbent\u2019s record is poor. When DiNapoli took office in 2007, the state held $7 billion in unclaimed funds. That number now stands at $20 billion.<\/p>\n In fact, the comptroller\u2019s office holds just $100 million to pay legitimate claims for lost money. Each year, the rest has been swept into that state\u2019s general fund to help balance budgets.<\/p>\n But that $20 billion remains a debt on paper, Warshaw said, and there\u2019s no statute of limitations on claims against it.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not his money, it\u2019s not the state\u2019s money, it\u2019s New Yorkers\u2019 money,\u201d he said. \u201cHe\u2019s taken our money, and instead of giving it back to us, which is in his job description, he\u2019s turned it over to the state to spend it on who knows what.\u201d<\/p>\n DiNapoli\u2019s office has said most of the money is unreturnable, because the legitimate claimants are dead or impossible to find. Warshaw waved off those excuses.<\/p>\n \u201cThey know your name, they know how much you\u2019re owed. They know your last known address. They have access to all this publicly available data, and they have this thing here in 2025 called AI,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Expanding the scope of audits\u00a0<\/p>\n Warshaw allowed that DiNapoli\u2019s auditors do yeoman\u2019s work watchdogging public finances, from the smallest lighting district to the biggest municipal governments in the state. The comptroller\u2019s office issues hundreds of audits every year and tracks municipalities\u2019 susceptibility to fiscal stress.<\/p>\n Still, he said he thinks there\u2019s more to be done with the comptroller\u2019s oversight power. He said he\u2019d like to audit the state\u2019s Public Service Commission, which has a history of approving utility companies\u2019 requests to increase electricity and gas rates \u2014 sometimes by double digits. Rochester Gas and Electric recently proposed a 36 percent rate hike, for example, which Warshaw described as \u201can admission of failure.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Similarly, he\u2019d like to audit the state\u2019s Department of Financial Services, which regulates the insurance industry.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd how are they doing? We have no idea,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are going to audit them, and we\u2019re going to understand why it seems to be the business model of insurance companies to take your premiums but to never pay them out.\u201d<\/p>\n Subscribe to our free weekly newsletters<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Two other Democrats have followed Warsaw into the comptroller\u2019s race in recent months. Raj Goyle<\/a> is a former Kansas state legislator who ran for Congress there in 2010 and now lives in Manhattan. Adem Bunkeddeko<\/a> is a two-time congressional candidate from Brooklyn.\u00a0<\/p>\n A crowded primary ballot favors the incumbent, but Warshaw said he prefers to see the influx of candidates as proof there\u2019s an appetite for change in Albany.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen someone is treating a job like a lifetime appointment, when they\u2019ve been there for 18 years, I think it is a good thing when other New Yorkers stand up and say, \u2018We could do better,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cHopefully, I am the preferred alternative.\u201d<\/p>\n This Friday, Investigative Post interviews Mayor-elect Sean Ryan at the Burchfield Penney Art Center at 7 p.m. Be there!<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \t\t\tposted 32 minutes ago – December 10, 2025<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Warshaw says 18-year incumbent Tom DiNapoli \u2014 who has never faced a primary election opponent \u2014 has done…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66627,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4241,9,11,10,49,51,50,87,34686],"class_list":{"0":"post-66626","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-albany","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-headlines","11":"tag-new-york-news","12":"tag-new-york-state","13":"tag-new-york-state-headlines","14":"tag-new-york-state-news","15":"tag-politics","16":"tag-state-comptroller"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66626\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}