New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani may be making headlines and doing a press conference with the president in the Oval Office, but he’s not the only Gotham politician with ties to the Democratic Socialists of America making political waves.
Brad Lander, the city’s progressive comptroller and a former DSA member himself, has turned New York’s $270 billion in public pension funds into the centerpiece of his political strategy. In April, he told every asset manager handling those funds to submit “Net Zero by 2040” plans or risk losing their contracts. While it looks like climate policy on paper, in practice, it’s a political gamble tying the retirement savings of city workers to Lander’s broader ambitions.
Lander is expected to run for Congress next year, likely challenging Rep. Dan Goldman in the 10th District. Around City Hall, his climate memo — released in the waning days of his time in office — is seen as a campaign tool, a way to raise his national profile and position himself as the left’s standard-bearer in New York’s continued shift toward progressive governance.
The timing is significant. The Wall Street Journal reported the Federal Trade Commission has opened an antitrust investigation into Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis, the two firms that dominate how institutional investors vote on shareholder issues. Regulators are examining whether the firms coordinated to promote environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals in ways that could violate competition and antitrust laws. Recently, the White House announced efforts to further rein in the duopoly’s domination of corporate proxy voting.
Lander’s memo instructs city asset managers to rely on those same firms to “engage” companies on climate targets. While federal regulators question whether the advisers act like a cartel, New York’s top pension official is pushing to embed their practices into city investment policy.
Most major investment firms have scaled back ESG activism in response to political and legal pressure. For example, Vanguard has not supported a single environmental or social shareholder proposal for two years and withdrew from the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative in 2022. BlackRock recently stated its support for corporate environmental or social proposals fell to just 2 percent in 2025.
The remaining “big three” asset manager, State Street, appears to be making some moves in the opposite direction. Shareholders approved nearly 46 percent of environmental and social resolutions in 2022 and 2023. This spring, State Street launched a new “Sustainability Stewardship Service” that echoes the push from Lander in pressuring companies to disclose net-zero targets, diversity data, and explicit DEI policies.
State Street and Lander appear to have close ties. His office tapped a State Street veteran to help oversee pension investments when he took office.
To some on Wall Street, that looks like an intentional alignment. Lander’s pension directives reinforce State Street’s marketing image as the “responsible” alternative to more cautious firms. Each benefits from the other: Lander potentially gains a financial partner willing to advance his climate agenda, and State Street maintains a powerful municipal client even as red states move to blacklist it over ESG activism.
The political risk is clear, but so is the financial one. New York’s pension funds cover more than 700,000 current and retired city employees, including firefighters, police officers, and teachers. Many have criticized Lander for politicizing investment decisions.
Richard Brower, a retired firefighter and former union president, accused Lander of “politicking with our pensions” instead of delivering the strongest possible returns to retirees. He said even small return losses can mean the difference “between security and struggle” for those who spent their lives serving the city.
That concern has already started to bubble up into the courts. In Wong et al. v. New York City Employees’ Retirement System, retirees unsuccessfully sued the city’s pension managers for allegedly breaching fiduciary duties by prioritizing political and climate goals over returns. The plaintiffs’ legal team included former U.S. Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, whose legal brief argued that fiduciaries cannot “abuse their control over plan assets” by subordinating financial performance to activism.
This story is not just about ideology. It is about how a city official with congressional ambitions is using public money to build a political platform while federal regulators question the financial mechanisms he is embracing.
It is also a test case for how far New York’s leaders are willing to go in aligning progressive politics with financial power. Figures like Mamdani and Lander are reshaping what was once a pragmatic Democratic establishment into something more activist and socialist in character. Whether that approach can coexist with the realities of running the nation’s financial capital may determine the city’s future for decades to come.