Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s progressive incoming mayor, is now on the national stage like few other mayor-elects before him. The 34-year-old just completed a surprisingly cordial White House visit with President Donald Trump, after a crushing upset over the once standard-bearer of New York state politics, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
To date, Mamdani has not spoken out specifically about the roughly 6,000 children and youth and their 40,000 families in the city’s child welfare system. And he has yet to announce whether there will be a leadership change next year at the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), which oversees foster care and youth justice programs. His campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
But this week, Mamdani announced his transition team, which includes Melanie Hartzog, a longtime advocate for New York City foster youth, as one of its four co-chairs. The 29-member Committee on Social Services he named includes others with notable child welfare experience, including Vanessa Leung, of the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families, Michelle Jackson of the Human Services Council representing child-serving workers and Ann Marie Scalia of the JCCA, which runs 37 foster care-related programs and residential treatment facilities across the state.
Among them, there is support for Mamdani to retain Jess Dannhauser, the current ACS commissioner.
“Jess Danhauser, as commissioner, has really done some amazing work in transforming the child welfare system, really embracing families and how to keep them together,” said Hartzog, president of the nonprofit New York Foundling. She called his leadership “extraordinary.”
Mamdani’s one-time rival, former Mayor Eric Adams, agrees.
“We owe it to Mayor Zohran Mamdani to do his announcements,” Adams said in response to an Imprint reporter’s question at a Nov. 13 press conference.
But at the event highlighting the city’s expanded programs for aging-out foster youth he added: “If it’s not broke, don’t try to fix it.” Adams said Mamdani “would be blessed to have Jess stay on and continue the work that he and his team are doing.”
A spokesperson for Dannhauser would say only that he is “interested in continuing to improve outcomes for children, youth and families and looks forward to supporting the success of the Mamdani Administration, in whatever capacity that takes shape.”
There are critics of Dannhauser’s tenure — among the most vocal, opinion writers at the New York Post. Last December, they called for the commissioner to be fired for “putting ‘racial justice’ over the welfare of children” and for promoting “Dannhauser-style wokism.”
Although Mamdani hasn’t said much on the campaign trail about foster care, in the last two years he co-sponsored critical pieces of legislation that aim to scale back the number of families that come into contact with Child Protective Services — populations that are disproportionately Black and low-income. Among his legislative efforts are three bills that would: curb anonymous reporting to the child protection hotline; provide Miranda-style warnings to parents under investigation; and ban nonconsensual drug-testing of pregnant and birthing moms. Only the anonymous reporting bill passed the Legislature this session, and it hasn’t been signed into law yet.
In a 2022 human services budget hearing, Mamdani questioned former Commissioner Sheila Poole and Gov. Kathy Hochul on their plans to cut funding from neighborhood settlement houses — community-based organizations that provide health care, child care and job training in underserved neighborhoods. He also pointed to other programs that were set to lose funding: kinship care services for foster youth and Safe Harbor, a program for youth at risk of trafficking, and called for an increase in funding for child care workers and universal child care.
“Nothing should be out of reach when it comes to our children,” Mamdani said at the hearing.
New York City has seen dramatic reductions in the number of children in foster care since 2010, when there were roughly 17,000 foster youth in the city. That number has consistently fallen under Dannhauser’s leadership, child welfare experts said. His agency is also credited with providing increased access to child care vouchers and expanding school-based foster care prevention services and the Fair Futures program, which offers mentoring, financial assistance and stipends to foster youth attending college or vocational training.
To date, Mamdani’s still-in-formation administration includes retaining Jessica Tisch as police commissioner.
He also announced a plan for a new Department of Community Safety with Tisch, which would focus on expanding mental health services, affordable housing, and educational programs such as Summer Rising for youth.
“All of these shifts have really continued New York’s long effort to ensure children’s safety without separation. Mamdani would do well to continue that.”
— Nora McCarthy, NYC Family Policy Project
In a proposal put together this summer by Narrowing the Front Door — an advocacy group that aims to reduce foster care entries — advocates for low-income children and families urged the incoming administration to create a Division of Family Well-Being within the community safety office. This new division would create family support programs that operate separately from the city’s child welfare agency, to encourage families to use them without fear of CPS intervention.
Hartzog, whose prominent nonprofit has a long history serving the city’s foster youth, said she’d like to see the new mayor continue the focus on expanding foster care prevention services. This should include respite care programs for caregivers and “family enrichment centers” that provide classes, activities and a space for parenting discussions, she said.
Hartzog pointed to Mamdani’s pledge to fight for universal child care and establish a government-subsidized grocery store in each city borough as contributing to those efforts.
Such approaches are “not about disrupting families, but how to support them,” Hartzog said. “They need all of those additional supports, and the mayor-elect gets that right. The affordability agenda is about every family, and he makes no distinction between whether you’re a child in foster care or you’re a family in that community.”
Advocate Nora McCarthy, director of the NYC Family Policy Project, praised Mamdani’s social services transition team members and their focus. But she said she would have liked to have seen a young person with foster care experience or a parent advocate among them.
She added that although the total number of children in foster care has fallen in New York City, the rate of CPS investigations — a good many that are unfounded and cause unnecessary trauma within families — still remain high, especially among Black and brown families.
“We’ve seen real efforts to reduce investigations that have borne fruit, and dramatic drops in court supervision and important reductions in foster care, particularly for newborns,” McCarthy said. “All of these shifts have really continued New York’s long effort to ensure children’s safety without separation. Mamdani would do well to continue that.”
CORRECTION: Dec. 2, 2025. This story has been updated to clarify when Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral transition team and its co-chair Melanie Hartzog were named.
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