Just days into his term, Mayor Zohran Mamdani scored a significant win when he and Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a pathway to universal, free child care in New York. For New York City, the pathway begins with major investments in “2-Care,” free child care aimed at 2-year-olds.
By all appearances, Mamdani and his team are adopting a reasonable and responsible strategy: communicating an ambitious end goal while designing a step-by-step process to get there. This increases the likelihood that Mamdani will be able to avoid stumbling blocks around promising too much too quickly; in New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is already running into a major challenge as the state legislature threatens to meet less than 10% of the budget request needed to fully fund that state’s universal free child care initiative.
That said, Mamdani still has difficult choices ahead, as any new policy inevitably brings tradeoffs. Here, I highlight five areas that are likely to prove thorny.
Elliot Haspel is a Senior Fellow at Capita.