The one other lesson Mexico’s story teaches is that the best way a government can deal with gridlock is simply to break it.
That shouldn’t sound like a profound revelation. It’s pretty obvious why the optimal way to fix a problem is to actually resolve it.
Sometimes doing so just isn’t possible, however. Dealing with the United States’ dysfunctional federal government is one such case. To excise all the petty partisanship and rampant self-dealing that have infected America’s national policymaking apparatus, you’d have to establish new standards, set new rules, and create a new ethic of governance. And then—God help you—you’d have to find partners in both parties willing to cooperate.
Often leaders facing such problems can’t wait for those kinds of conditions to materialize. They don’t have time for the ideal solution; they need fixes now. What they need, in other words, is a work-around.
This was a scenario New York City confronted in traumatic fashion on September 11, 2001.
Minutes after the planes had lanced down through the clear blue sky, panicked officials began scrambling to interpret the events. Even before the fires had burned out, 9/11 had come to mean many different things to many different people. The United States was under attack. The nation was at war. The oceans would no longer protect it. US foreign policies could lead to, and had just produced, some searing unintended consequences. And the threat of Islamist terrorism was worse than most Americans had realized.
Michael Bloomberg—the billionaire media mogul and philanthropist then running for mayor (he’d be elected two months later)—understood all that. But even before winning the November election, he’d draw two other, grim conclusions.
The first was that the city he’d soon take charge of—with its world-famous monuments, its throngs of tourists, its huge and densely packed population, its thousands of fragile glass towers, and its many aging bridges and tunnels—was a uniquely tempting target for al-Qaeda. And as experts warned, the group still had the city in its sights.
Bloomberg’s second conclusion was even scarier: New York City couldn’t count on anyone else to protect it. The federal government wasn’t working; it had failed the city once and would likely do so again. (Albany, home to New York State’s perpetually corrupt legislature, was even less reliable.) The nation’s new president, George W. Bush, was a Harvard MBA who’d campaigned on his supposed competence as a manager. But nine months into its term, his administration was already proving inept, especially when it came to national security (and worse was still to come). In the months prior to the attacks, for example, Bush and his top advisers had brushed off explicit warnings from outgoing Clinton staffers about the deadly storm sweeping out of the Middle East.
But Bush wasn’t New York’s only problem; America’s legislative branch had also failed it. As the blue-ribbon 9/11 Commission would later conclude, in the years before the attacks Congress had been so distracted by its petty partisan fights that it “gave little guidance to executive branch agencies, did not reform them in any significant way, and did not systematically perform oversight” of the intelligence community.
In the absence of adult supervision, the CIA, the FBI, and their kin had fumbled badly. For example, in one of many lapses, the FBI had overlooked a frighteningly prescient July 2001 memo from its Phoenix office warning about Qaeda operatives enrolling in US flight schools.
All this was going through Bloomberg’s mind as he prepared to take office, and the message he drew from these failures was stark. As New York entered a new, more violent era, it shouldn’t expect Washington to “come riding to the rescue,” as he later put it. Instead, it would have to work around the federal government and do something no modern American city had ever attempted: try to defend itself, by itself.
Doing so would mean completely rewriting a great many rules, including the very definition of the mayor’s job. The old division of labor—in which City Hall focused on local issues like schools and garbage pickup while Washington handled the big stuff, like defense and diplomacy—was finished. New York needed a whole new paradigm of government.
It was an enormously difficult challenge, and one that should have been just as enormously intimidating. But the famously brash and cocky Bloomberg—who, before turning to politics, had built a multibillion-dollar media empire from scratch—was used to those.
Besides, he had no other choice.
As you’d expect, the new mayor’s first preoccupation was how to strengthen the thin blue line that stretched around the five boroughs and their eight million inhabitants. Even before taking office on January 1, 2002, he went looking for a visionary cop who could help him keep New York safe.
It only took Bloomberg a few days to find his man. Ray Kelly was a career NYPD officer who knew both policing and New York City in his bones. The son of a milkman, Kelly had joined the department as a cadet and had quickly climbed the ranks, eventually holding every one of its command posts. He even looked the part of the quintessential cop: a Vietnam vet, Kelly stood ramrod straight and had a weight lifter’s build, a silvery brush cut, and the kind of mug you’d expect to see in an old gangster film.
Kelly had first made NYPD commissioner in 1992, toward the end of the David Dinkins administration, but then had left New York to run the US Customs Service and serve as Bill Clinton’s under secretary of the Treasury (where he oversaw the Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms). Kelly had used his years in Washington to cultivate close ties to some very powerful people there. The experience had also taught him how the nation’s capital worked—and more important, how it didn’t. “I’d seen the federal government up close,” Kelly told me recently. “It is, by definition, lethargic; it doesn’t move.” That understanding would prove critical as he returned to the NYPD to take on a new role that Mitchell Moss, an urban studies professor at New York University, has described as the city’s “secretary of defense, head of the CIA, and…chief architect all rolled into one.”
Moss’s language may sound hyperbolic, but if anything, it understates the complexity of the challenges Kelly and Bloomberg faced.
First, there was the question of resources. As both men saw it, New York was now walking point—“The federal government isn’t at the front. It’s cowering in the back corner of the room,” Bloomberg would fume. Yet taking the lead in the city’s defense would be dauntingly expensive, especially given that 9/11 had devastated New York not just physically and psychologically but also financially. The attacks and the subsequent panic had cost the city some 140,000 jobs as workers and businesses fled to the suburbs. In 2002 the city’s comptroller would estimate New York’s total economic losses at between $83 billion and $95 billion; by the next year, the city would face its biggest deficit in thirty years.
Next, for all the fear in the air, the new administration had very little sense of the precise threats it actually faced. As Kelly returned to his old desk at police headquarters, he was dismayed to discover that his department was flying virtually blind. The cops there “didn’t know what was going on in our own city, let alone the rest of the world,” he later recalled.
Much of the blame for this confusion fell to the US intelligence community, which was infamously stingy about sharing information within its own bureaucracy, let alone with local police. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, then mayor Rudolph Giuliani had sent a squad of NYPD detectives down to DC to gather whatever intelligence they could. But the FBI and CIA gave the cops such a runaround that they were soon recalled, empty-handed.
Another part of the problem was internal. New York City was no stranger to terrorism; though few today may remember it, Islamist extremists had attacked the World Trade Center once before. In February 1993, they’d set off a bomb under the North Tower, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand. The attack had led the Giuliani administration to make some improvements in how the city responded to disasters. Yet as Christopher Dickey recounts in his book Securing the City, the idea had long “settled in on the city’s law enforcement agencies that stopping terror attacks was beyond their competence; basically a job for the ‘three-letter guys’ ”—cop lingo for the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and so on. “The police could joke about the Feds being ‘Famous But Incompetent,’ ” Dickey writes, but only they “seemed to have the resources and the direction to take on foreign threats.”
As a consequence of such deference, what little counterterrorism work was being done in the city back in late 2001 was handled by something called the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). Supposedly a collaboration between the FBI and the NYPD, in reality there was little joint or collaborative about it. The Feds totally dominated the handful of New York City cops assigned to the unit, relegating them to subsidiary, even menial, roles. And according to Thomas Reppetto, the former dean of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, “When the FBI obtained information on a possible threat, it was closely held, and the NYPD detectives on the task force were forbidden to disclose it to their department superiors.” On the rare occasions when the bureau did share information, it invariably came too late. In one notorious episode, the JTTF had seized the computer of a terrorist suspect that had turned out to contain a trove of clues about Qaeda operations targeting New York. Yet the FBI hadn’t shown the files to anyone in the NYPD command for six weeks—a lifetime in the counterterrorism business.
Bloomberg and Kelly were determined to change all that, and as quickly as possible. But how could New York City actually do so, given the vastly greater power and deeper pockets of the federal government? After all, the national intelligence community spent about $50 billion each year, about ten times the NYPD’s entire budget, and the CIA alone employed one hundred thousand personnel, more than twice as many as did New York’s police.
Outmanned and outgunned, Kelly nonetheless decided to beard the lion in its den. He sent one hundred cops, led by a smart but famously abrasive bulldog of a police chief named Phil Pulaski, marching over to the JTTF. Their job, as Kelly later described it to me, was to “muscle their way” onto the task force and demand full access to whatever information the FBI had. Predictably enough, Kelly’s pushiness, combined with Pulaski’s manners—on arrival at JTTF headquarters, he immediately declared himself the new boss—infuriated the bureau, which sent the FBI’s assistant director to Kelly’s office to complain. But to almost everyone’s amazement, the plan also worked, and the detectives were soon sending back reams of fresh intelligence.
While these materials proved valuable, however, they didn’t solve New York’s problems. Merely knowing what the FBI knew might not be enough to protect the city, given the likely gaps in the bureau’s own knowledge; it had, remember, missed numerous clues in the months preceding 9/11. So Kelly and Bloomberg decided to build their own intelligence and counterterrorism apparatus.
At the time, the NYPD already had something called an Intelligence Division. Despite its name, however, the unit was a backwater that did virtually no counterterrorism work. It was, Kelly scoffed, merely an “escort service” that spent its time shepherding dignitaries and visiting VIPs around town—a job other cops derisively referred to as coat holding.
To transform the Intelligence Division into something worthy of its name, Kelly turned to a man who, like him, knew how the federal government worked, but who, unlike him, was also intimately familiar with spycraft and counterterrorism. David Cohen may have looked unimposing, more like a bespectacled accountant than James Bond (or even M). But the explosively profane Bostonian had spent thirty-five years at the CIA, where he’d served as both its chief of analysis and its master of spies—the only person in agency history to hold both posts—before being sent to New York City as station chief, which is where he and Kelly first met.
Hired just a few days after his new boss, Cohen set to work right away. “It was like putting tires on a speeding car,” he later recalled. Drawing heavily on his CIA background, the new intelligence chief created an Analytic Unit and filled it with young Ivy Leaguers, a former Supreme Court clerk, and refugees from the State Department, the UN, the World Bank, and Wall Street. Their job was to serve as a sort of in-house brain trust and help street cops comprehend the nuances of Islamic practice and the subtleties of tribal culture. He also created units dedicated to tracking suspicious financial movements, studying foreign media, and trolling through jihadist chat rooms. He dispatched agents to infiltrate suspected radical hangouts. And he set up something called Operation Nexus to monitor and advise local businesses—ranging from chemical wholesalers to salvage yards to scuba shops—that might prove useful to would-be terrorists.
Cohen’s division would eventually reach a force strength of about six hundred. To supplement it, Kelly also created an entirely new Counterterrorism Bureau under the command of a slick-haired former Marine Corps general named Frank Libutti. If Cohen’s Intelligence Division was to serve as the city’s mini-CIA, Libutti’s Counterterrorism Bureau would become its Department of Homeland Security. Working out of a futuristic headquarters—picture blinking electronic maps, flashing news tickers, and huge monitors streaming Arabic-language TV broadcasts—the Counterterrorism Bureau focused on threat assessment: finding and hardening weak spots in New York’s landmarks, public and private buildings, and infrastructure. (It was security objections from this unit that forced the first redesign of the Freedom Tower.) The bureau also ran regular training programs for city, state, and federal officials. It initiated the now-familiar bag checks at subway entrances. And in order to keep would-be attackers off guard, disrupt their attempts to recon possible targets, and simply put the fear into them, it sent Hercules Teams—elite squads of officers clad in battle armor and strapped with automatic weapons—careening around town in black SUVs, to descend without warning on vulnerable locations like the Empire State Building, Times Square, or Columbus Circle.
Turning the nation’s largest police department into something that was “part think tank, part detective agency, [and] part paramilitary organization,” in the words of Lydia Khalil (a Cairo-born veteran of Cohen’s Analytic Unit), required huge and sometimes wrenching attitude adjustments at City Hall and NYPD headquarters. After all, municipal policing had traditionally focused on investigating crimes after they occurred. As William Bratton, who would succeed Kelly in 2014, once put it, “for 30 years, [the police] measured…our success by how many arrests did we make, how many 911 calls did we answer, and how quickly did we respond to them.” The NYPD and other police departments left deterrence to the courts and the prisons and the identification of foreign threats to the nation’s intelligence agencies. Even terrorist attacks, such as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, had been treated as isolated events and dealt with after the fact.
Throwing all that out the window, as Bloomberg and Kelly did, made sense for a lot of reasons. But it also involved serious risks.
The first was electoral. Because New York’s resources were far from infinite, every cop the administration put on the counterterrorism beat meant one fewer officer available to deal with run-of-the-mill crime. Had this shift in manpower led to a citywide spike in muggings, violence, or other street offenses, it could have abruptly ended Bloomberg’s experiment—and his tenure. (As it turned out, ordinary crime, which had hit record lows during the Giuliani administration, continued to drop.)
Bloomberg’s habit of ignoring and excoriating Washington was also politically dangerous, even for someone as rich and powerful as he. As the mayor and his police chief took over one job after another traditionally performed by the federal government, they rarely asked anyone’s permission. That approach (with its dangers) was demonstrated most dramatically in 2002, when the NYPD decided to start sending officers abroad—another first for a metro PD. With Bloomberg’s go-ahead but without even mentioning it to the State Department or any other federal agency, Kelly would ultimately post detectives to eleven foreign cities, ranging from Abu Dhabi to Paris to Singapore to Santo Domingo. (Over the years, New York City cops also visited Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, and Turkey, as well as the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.) On arrival, these officers would embed themselves in local police departments and start forging the kind of comfortable cop-to-cop relationships that would give them quick access to critical data if and when those cities were hit.
This was a hugely provocative move—among other reasons, because the FBI already had its own people based overseas. Sure enough, when bureau officials found out about the new policy, they were furious—so much so that they subsequently blocked other American cities from trying to follow New York’s lead. (They never managed to stop the NYPD, however. As as one high-level police official told The New Yorker’s William Finnegan, “Do you think anybody in Washington has the balls to tell Ray Kelly he can’t do something he decides to do?”)
Yet even the Feds had a hard time arguing with Kelly’s results. When terrorists set off four bombs on the Madrid rail system in 2004, New York was able to get an officer on the ground within eighteen hours, and that allowed the NYPD to tweak its own security protocols the same day. Similarly, when the London Tube was attacked the next year, a New York detective was already riding the system and was thus able to send his first report on the bombers’ tactics and methods home within the hour—real-time intelligence that led to more quick changes to New York’s own security precautions.
Such successes made it difficult for federal officials to do much more than grouse, and there is no evidence that the city was ever directly punished for its temerity. Yet it certainly didn’t buy it much goodwill in Washington either. September 11 had thrown the US government into a frenzy. In its aftermath, Congress had held endless hearings and then reorganized the US intelligence community. Bush launched the Global War on Terror, invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and dramatically increased US military operations abroad and intelligence collections overseas and at home. Yet for all this activity, Washington never seemed to try especially hard to help New York City directly—or at least, that’s how the Bloomberg administration saw things.
Apart from the lack of intelligence sharing, New York’s biggest gripe involved money. Many of the mayor’s initial funding requests were rejected. And when Washington did open the spigots, the corrupt and pork-based system Congress used to dole out cash ensured that the city got less than it needed while other, more isolated locales got more than they could spend. In 2004, for example, Washington gave Wyoming seven times as much funding (in per capita terms) as it did New York. And Congress actually cut antiterror grants to New York City in 2006 by about 40 percent—while increasing disburse ments to towns like Omaha, Nebraska, by the same proportion. “We’re still defending the city pretty much on our own dime,” a thoroughly embittered Kelly complained around that time. That wasn’t strictly accurate. But it wasn’t entirely off base.
Yet for all the frustration Washington caused the Bloomberg administration, going it alone, as Bloomberg and Kelly felt they had to, turned out to confer a number of powerful advantages.
Chief among them was speed. Free from the need to consult with anyone else, the Bloomberg administration made and executed decisions with little debate, creating, in Cohen’s words, the smallest “air gap between information and action” he’d ever experienced in government. Michael Sheehan, a former Green Beret who replaced Libutti as head of the Counterterrorism Bureau in June 2003, has described working for New York during this period as closer in tempo to the Special Forces than it was to the federal bureaucracy. To illustrate the point, he recounts how the department first made its controversial call to send its officers abroad. Cohen initially raised the idea with Kelly at one of their daily 8:00 a.m. meetings. The commissioner said that it sounded like a good idea. And that was that for about two weeks, until the intelligence chief, wanting confirmation before taking such a big step, raised the subject again. Kelly’s response was fast and impatient: “I thought we discussed this already,” he snapped. “When will your detective be in London?” (The officer was there three days later.)
Another huge advantage of New York’s solitary approach was the lack of red tape—an asset highlighted by the differences in city and federal government hiring policies. One of the biggest reasons the US intelligence community had missed so many warning signs prior to 9/11 was that it hadn’t understood them. In the years immediately preceding the attacks, the FBI had employed so few bilingual staffers that it had failed to translate about a third of all the Arabic-language wiretaps it collected. These included a conversation recorded on September 10, 2001, in which a Qaeda operative told a colleague that “tomorrow is zero hour.”
The problem wasn’t that the United States lacked Arabic, Dari, or Pashto speakers (though few Americans studied those languages in college). The problem was that the federal government wouldn’t hire them. It subjected all job applicants to absurdly strict background checks that made it needlessly difficult for foreign-born Americans to get security clearance. Almost all aspiring agents with dual citizenship or close family members living abroad were rejected, as were 90 percent of those hoping to work as translators.
The NYPD had very different rules. The department had long served as a key avenue of advancement for New York’s wildly heterogeneous immigrant population. And in the days after 9/11, Kelly enhanced and exploited the department’s already polyglot nature: by screening all new hires for their language skills and willingness to work undercover, and by placing recruiting ads in foreign-language newspapers. The result was that “we were able to get people who were from the backstreets of Karachi, who were able to speak the dialects,” Kelly told me. By 2002 the force boasted sixty fluent Arabic speakers—nearly twice the number the FBI would reach three years later—and by 2009 the NYPD had 1,697 linguists on staff certified in fifty-six languages, including Bengali, Dari, Farsi, Fukienese, Hindi, Pashto, Punjabi, Russian, and Urdu. Even the Feds would come to acknowledge New York’s superiority in this area: at different points in the last decade and a half, the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, and the Defense Intelligence Agency have all asked the NYPD for help navigating foreign languages and cultures.
Within just a few years, all these assets and innovations would allow the Bloomberg administration to create what Brian Michael Jenkins, a counterterrorism expert at the Rand Corporation, has called a “cutting-edge” security operation that “should be emulated across the country.” Bloomberg and Kelly did overreach multiple times, and some of their innovations sparked intense controversy—not just from disgruntled federal agencies but also from minority and civil liberties groups, which took issue with the department’s sometimes overbearing scrutiny of New York’s Muslim community and its mosques. One particularly egregious program run by the Intelligence Division, which involved sending undercover cops into Muslim neighborhoods to eavesdrop at restaurants, stores, and mosques, produced so much ill will—without generating a single solid lead—that it was recently shut down.
Yet for all the controversy, Bloomberg and Kelly still proudly argue that the city foiled at least sixteen known attacks during their tenure, and possibly more that they never knew about. While critics dispute the tally, the fact is that New York never suffered a single successful follow-on attack during the mayor’s three terms: something few would have thought possible in the frightening months following 9/11.
Bloomberg’s reinvention of the NYPD—with its colorful cops, soldiers, and spies, its heavy weapons, its international intrigue, and its high-tech intelligence work—is the most dramatic example of how, during his three terms in office, his administration dealt with dysfunction above it by working around the obstacle. But it is far from the only one. Stasis in Washington and Albany directly caused, or left unaddressed, a raft of other problems New York City also had to contend with under Bloomberg’s watch. And simply complaining about them wasn’t an option, though Bloomberg did plenty of that too. As he liked to remind the public, state and national politicians have the luxury of being able to spend their days squabbling, but “the mayors of this country still have to deal with the real world.”
Of all the episodes that illustrate how he and the city managed to do so, three stand out for their ambition.
The first was climate change. Under normal circumstances—that is, when governments work the way textbooks say they should—safeguarding the environment is just the kind of job best left to the national authorities. Only they have enough reach and muscle to comprehensively address a problem of that scale. Yet in 2007 the Bloomberg administration—which, given New York’s watery and low-lying location, was particularly sensitive to climate issues—got fed up with the slow pace of progress in Washington and decided to do what it could itself. Under an initiative called PlaNYC, the city launched 127 different efforts aimed at increasing New York’s resilience and at slashing its greenhouse-gas emissions. To reach its target of a 30 percent reduction in carbon output by the year 2030, PlaNYC imposed strict new conservation and efficiency regulations on city buildings, taxis, and garbage trucks; proposed a congestion-pricing scheme similar to London’s, which would increase tolls to cut the number of CO2-spouting cars allowed into Manhattan; and (among many other things) made preparations for the introduction of sewage-eating mollusks into New York’s polluted harbor. In the years that followed, some of the more esoteric ideas (although not the mollusks) were shot down or tripped up on logistical hurdles. Yet by 2014—just seven years into PlaNYC’s twenty-three-year time frame—New York City had already made impressive strides, cutting its carbon emissions by almost 20 percent, lowering its sulfur dioxide levels by 69 percent, building more than three hundred miles of new bike paths, and planting close to a million new trees. None of that would be enough to save the world. But the city was doing its part.
Then there was infrastructure building: another traditional task for national governments. During the twentieth century, the vast majority of America’s great construction projects were commissioned and funded at the federal level. In New York City, for example, it was Washington that either paid for or underwrote the construction of both airports, the FDR Drive, the Lincoln Tunnel, and the Triborough (now Robert F. Kennedy) Bridge. But in recent years, congressional infighting and a miserly and shortsighted fixation on budget cutting have all but ended this once-proud tradition. So when the Bloomberg administration decided in 2007 that it needed to extend the No. 7 subway line in order to improve access to the Hudson Yards, a planned commercial and residential district on Manhattan’s West Side, it didn’t even bother asking anyone else for help. Then deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff, who led the city’s effort, described the administration’s thinking to me: “We saw that there was no possible way we would ever get [federal] money for this, and that if we actually wanted to do something on the West Side, we were going to have to do it completely on our own.” So despite the daunting $3 billion price tag, the city moved ahead with the venture. According to Moss, the NYU professor, had City Hall tried to get help from above, the rail extension would have met a “terminal death.” The only option was to go do the thing by itself. (The new service opened for business in September 2015.)
An even bigger venture into traditional federal territory came in the realm of higher education. Like the United States’ highways, bridges, airports, and tunnels, most of the country’s big state universities (and some of its best private ones) were created and bankrolled by Washington. Even New York’s so-called City University wasn’t founded by the municipality. (It was chartered by Albany, which still pays most of its bills.)
In 2008, however, after New York was hit hard by the Great Recession—in fifteen months the city lost thirty-six thousand Wall Street jobs and $2 billion in taxes—the Bloomberg administration decided it needed to diversify New York’s finance-heavy economy. After consulting with more than three hundred CEOs and a long list of experts, New York’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) determined that the best way for the city to reduce its reliance on bankers was to become a haven for high-tech innovation. And the best way to do that, EDC determined, was to train a whole new generation of local engineers and other techies. So in 2010, the city launched its Applied Sciences NYC initiative: a competition to build several new STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) campuses in New York. Some twenty-seven of the world’s best universities—eager to tap into New York’s size, wealth, and prestige—applied, and after a rigorous, multiround selection process, the Bloomberg administration picked four winners.
Within a few years, these projects stand to revolutionize the city’s educational landscape. Carnegie Mellon is building a new center for digital media in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. An international consortium led by New York University (which also includes the elite Mumbai-based Indian Institute of Technology) has set up a Center for Urban Science and Progress in downtown Brooklyn. Columbia has established a new Data Science Institute uptown. And on Roosevelt Island, an underused sliver of land between Manhattan and Queens, Cornell University and Israel’s Technion Institute of Technology are constructing a big new campus for applied media, health, and engineering studies.
EDC predicts that these projects will create tens of thousands of new construction jobs in the short term, and, when completed, will increase the number of engineering graduate students in New York by 120 percent. That’s a huge jump, and one that could well transform the city into an entrepreneurial tech and research hub on par with powerhouses like San Francisco and Boston—just as the Bloomberg administration hoped.
It’s hard to imagine any of these initiatives—in policing, climate, infrastructure, or higher education—being undertaken by an ordinary city under ordinary circumstances. New York, of course, has never been ordinary, and neither were the circumstances it found itself in over the last decade and a half. Yet that doesn’t explain how Bloomberg and his team were able to pull off what they did. Leaders hoping to follow his example are going to have to look at their tactics in closer detail.
The mayor’s first secret, according to Doctoroff, was his intuition that it is not only generally necessary but also often preferable to avoid asking the state or federal government for help. Given how hard it is to get Albany or Congress to do anything constructive, odds are that such assistance won’t be forthcoming, and requesting it will likely just delay a project indefinitely. Far better, Bloomberg figured out, to simply act, and to make a virtue of independence. Both New York’s experiment in counterterrorism and its success with the No. 7 subway line extension confirm the wisdom of that approach; had the city tried to pursue either of these projects through normal channels, it would probably still be waiting for an answer.
Of course, there are good reasons why most cities still do look to their state capitals or Washington for assistance: only they seem to have the resources for really big jobs. Bloomberg discovered that that’s not always true, however; the necessary means sometimes can be found elsewhere. Still, going it alone is enormously difficult, and requires a number of other tricks to pull it off.
First, you have to become extremely creative at finding new sources of money. During its long tenure, the Bloomberg administration developed a remarkable skill for striking partnerships with philanthropists and the private sector. City Hall convinced wealthy donors like Sting and David Rockefeller to bankroll the planting of the city’s million new trees, for example. And it persuaded the nonprofit New York City Police Foundation to cover the living expenses of the detectives it stationed abroad. In cases where philanthropy wasn’t enough, the administration was even more inventive. To pay for the rail extension, Doctoroff came up with a complicated and entirely novel area-specific bond issue that was guaranteed by future tax revenues from the rehabilitated Hudson Yards. The city showed similar savvy regarding its massive educational initiative. Seth Pinsky, former head of the EDC, told me, “Unlike most new campuses being set up these days in places like Singapore or Dubai, the vast majority of costs are being borne by the universities themselves.” And of those that aren’t, most still won’t come out of the municipal purse. In order to persuade Columbia to spend some $80 million on its new data center, for example, the Bloomberg administration offered the school $15 million in incentives, but these took the form of cheap leases for city buildings, reduced electricity bills, and loan forgiveness—not cash. The city did have to promise the new Cornell-Technion center $100 million in infrastructure improvements. But that sum was a pittance compared with the project’s overall price tag of $2 billion.
To find creative solutions, of course, you need some very creative people. Another key to Bloomberg’s success is his ability to surround himself with brilliant, unconventional thinkers and doers. The mayor consistently hired the best people he could find for any given job, and he rarely worried about whether or not they possessed conventional credentials. For example, neither Cohen, Libutti, nor Sheehan had any police experience when Kelly brought them on board, yet all had other assets that served the city extremely well. Something analogous could be said of Doctoroff, an investment banker who’d never worked in city politics before Bloomberg tapped him in 2001. And there are many other examples (including a few failures like Cathie Black, the media executive whom Bloomberg named schools chancellor in 2011 and was forced to replace just a few months later).
Of course, once you’ve hired the right people you need to get the most out of them and keep them around. That’s harder than it sounds, for as anyone who’s worked in government will tell you, even the sharpest minds can be quickly ground down by bad management, excessive bureaucracy, and risk aversion (the pay scale doesn’t help either). Bloomberg managed to avoid most of these problems by giving his lieutenants an uncommon amount of freedom, encouraging them to think big—and then standing by them if and when they failed big. Over the years, a significant number of his administration’s most ambitious schemes would be defeated, sometimes in humiliating fashion. Congestion pricing was killed by Albany, and Bloomberg’s attempt to lure the Olympics to New York, to build a new sports stadium on Manhattan’s West Side, and to ban large sugary sodas also went down in flames. Yet because the mayor had embraced all these attempts and considered them well planned and well executed, he never fired anyone for these failures.
To illustrate the point, Doctoroff described to me how, during the city’s fight to build a new stadium, the plan came under intense attack by Cablevision—one of the city’s two big cable providers and, not coincidentally, the owner of Madison Square Garden. In 2005 the firm began running strident ads opposing the project and denouncing the mayor just when Bloomberg was running for his second term. Things got so ugly at one point that Doctoroff approached his boss and said that they should just drop the whole business, since the stadium wasn’t worth the price of an election. Bloomberg, Doctoroff recalls, “looked at me with an anger I’d never seen before, and said, ‘I don’t ever want to hear you say that again. We got into this together and it’s the right thing to do, so we’re going to pursue it no matter what.’ And after it went down to defeat about two months later, with Mike’s popularity falling along with it, his only response was to turn to me and say, ‘Okay, now what’s plan B?’
“You have no idea what kind of loyalty that breeds,” Doctoroff told me, “and more important, how it encourages people to take risks.”
As effective a manager as he proved to be, Bloomberg’s biggest asset as mayor lay still elsewhere: in his radical, buck-stops-here sense of responsibility for the city’s welfare, and his almost ruthless determination to do whatever it took to advance it. A quintessential pragmatist, Bloomberg viewed political parties as encumbrances—he started his life as a Democrat, became a Republican to avoid a crowded primary in 2001, and then declared himself an independent in 2007. What he cared about were policies and ideas, not politics. “His secret was fairly simple,” one former high-level adviser told me after asking that I not mention his name. “It was literally, just do the right thing and don’t let shit get in the way.” Or as Bill Cunningham, Bloomberg’s former communications director, put it, Bloomberg “believed you get the data and [then] do what you believe is right. It was really like an experiment. Will people like someone who does what they believe in,” and not what the polls tell them to do?
In Bloomberg’s case, the answer was yes—at least most of the time. There’s no avoiding the fact that his police initiatives angered both federal agencies and local rights groups. Critics also blame him for allowing income inequality and homelessness to grow on his watch. And Bloomberg, who developed a sort of genius for needlessly offending people over the years, could sometimes act as his own worst enemy. While many New Yorkers found his refusal to pander refreshing—unlike ordinary politicians, for example, the mayor spent most of his weekends out of town instead of pressing the flesh at sweaty street festivals—his behavior could also grate, especially toward the end of his administration. Late-model Bloomberg became infamous for his tetchy press conferences—he once singled out and humiliated a disabled reporter, for example, to the horror of everyone else in the room. And though he won a third term in office after clumsily forcing a change to the city’s electoral law, Bloomberg “never seemed quite to get the outrage, even among friends, that greeted his Machiavellian move,” according to Benjamin Barber, the author of If Mayors Ruled the World.
Still, Bloomberg has achieved an extraordinarily lofty status since leaving office. Like the city he led, much about the man—his wealth, his homes, his spending, and his policies—now seem larger than life. And that points to the biggest challenge more earthbound politicians hoping to follow his lead will face. Bloomberg may have never given “a shit about what anybody else felt,” but that was because “he didn’t owe anything to anybody,” the former aide told me. Can other, less wealthy politicians afford such independence?
Bloomberg certainly seems to think so. In 2014 he used his own cash to set up a nonprofit consulting firm that aims to help other innovative leaders around the world follow his and New York’s lead on controversial issues like climate change.
Michael Bloomberg, however, is probably not the best person to judge whether other politicians can successfully follow the Bloomberg Way. Far more meaningful, therefore, are two unexpected endorsements his preference for pragmatic work-arounds received after he left office.
In 2013 Bill de Blasio ran for New York City mayor by casting himself as the anti-Bloomberg, a more caring and progressive alternative to the plutocrat incumbent. Yet since taking office, de Blasio has effectively embraced Bloomberg’s core insight that cities can and should do more themselves. In his first State of the City address, de Blasio declared that New York “cannot wait for Washington to act” and must not “let the gridlock there…serve as an excuse” for the failure to address problems like economic inequality and immigration reform. And his administration has since engaged both issues, by increasing the city’s minimum wage, for example, and by issuing New Yorkers municipal ID cards regardless of their immigration status.
Surprising as de Blasio’s tacit support was, the Bloomberg model has since found an even more powerful and unlikely adherent: President Barack Obama. Midway through Obama’s second term, the president got fed up with years of congressional obstruction and announced that he’d start going around the House and Senate whenever he deemed it necessary. Using his executive authority, Obama has since moved unilaterally to push for progress on immigration reform (by halting deportations in several types of cases); on criminal law (by releasing thousands of nonviolent drug offenders); and on gay rights (by banning federal contractors from discriminating on grounds of sexual orientation). And in August 2015, he launched his biggest solo initiative yet. Declaring that climate change is “exactly the kind of challenge that’s big enough to remind us that we’re all in this together,” the president took action on his own, directing the Environmental Protection Agency to force American power plants—the single largest source of US carbon pollution—to cut their emissions by 32 percent by the year 2030. Not only did the president’s move bear a striking resemblance to the centerpiece of Bloomberg’s own climate plan, which the mayor had unveiled eight years earlier, but it also represented a profound affirmation of the mayor’s fundamental credo: that the failure of others to act is no excuse for one’s own inaction, and that during difficult times, leaders—if they really hope to lead—must be ready to act alone, no matter the consequences.