New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has announced his very own Commission on Government Efficiency — or COGE, as he's calling it — modeled after Elon Musk's federal DOGE. There's just one small wrinkle: the guy running it is a career George Soros operative, and the entire panel is stacked with progressive activists.
Because nothing says "cutting government waste" like handing the scissors to the people who built the bloat in the first place.
Mamdani tapped Patrick Gaspard to chair the commission. If that name rings a bell, it should. Gaspard is a longtime Democratic operative who served as president of George Soros's Open Society Foundation — the same outfit that has poured billions into left-wing causes from defunding police to open borders. He's not exactly the guy you call when you want to trim the fat. He's the fat.
The rest of the panel? Not a single Republican. Not one conservative voice. Not even a token moderate to keep up appearances. It's wall-to-wall progressive activists — the kind of people who think "efficiency" means finding faster ways to redistribute your tax dollars.
As Fox News reported, Mamdani unveiled COGE on May 28 as a direct response to Musk's federal DOGE initiative, which has actually identified and cut billions in wasteful government spending. Mamdani apparently watched Musk slash bureaucratic nonsense from Washington and thought, "I can do that too" — then proceeded to do the exact opposite.
Let's be crystal clear about what's happening here. A self-described socialist — a man who has spent his entire political career advocating for bigger government, more spending, and more programs — is now cosplaying as an efficiency hawk. This is like putting the fox in charge of henhouse security and expecting him to file an honest incident report.
The whole thing is a rebranding exercise. They're not cutting government. They're relabeling it. COGE isn't going to find waste — it's going to find ways to redirect funding toward progressive pet projects and call it "streamlining." When Elon Musk's DOGE identifies a useless federal program, they shut it down. When Mamdani's COGE identifies one, they'll rename it and double the budget.
And the Gaspard pick tells you everything you need to know about the actual mission. The Open Society Foundation doesn't do efficiency. It does influence. It does activism. It does ideology wrapped in nonprofit paperwork. Putting a Soros man in the chair is like hiring an arsonist as your fire chief — sure, he knows where all the fires are, because he started half of them.
The timing is no accident either. Musk's DOGE has been a genuine political winner for the Trump administration, and Democrats know it. Voters love the idea of someone actually going through the books and cutting the garbage. So instead of competing with real reforms, Mamdani created a knockoff — the Dollar Store version of government efficiency.
Here's my prediction: COGE will issue a glossy report in six months recommending that New York City spend more money on "equitable infrastructure" and "community investment" — which is progressive code for the same programs that have been failing New Yorkers for decades. The commission will find zero waste, propose zero cuts, and declare the whole exercise a triumph of good governance.
New Yorkers deserve better than a socialist mayor playing dress-up with Soros's rolodex. But hey, this is the city that elected him. Elections have consequences — and sometimes those consequences come with a laughably transparent acronym.