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Hi there—I’m Elizabeth Wilkins, president and CEO of Roosevelt Forward.
New York City had a summer for the books, and not just because of Knicks and World Cup fever. All season, Mayor Mamdani’s administration plowed ahead on childcare, on rent, on grocery prices, and they capped it all off on Labor Day with the announcement of the nation’s first Office of Worker Power [ [link removed] ].
Since taking office in January, the mayor and his team have modeled what the next pro-democracy governing moment could look like at the federal level.
What does it look like when an economic vision, institutions, and people are all laser-focused on making life better—more affordable, more meaningful [ [link removed] ], and even more fun [ [link removed] ]—for working people?
Julie Su, New York City’s deputy mayor for economic justice, has a lot to say on that. I was extraordinarily lucky to work alongside Julie in the Biden administration—I was chief of staff at Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission while Julie was leading the Department of Labor, where Roosevelt Forward’s now-director Allison Zelman [ [link removed] ] served as Julie’s chief of staff.
Julie immediately stood out as a different kind of policymaker: someone who wasn’t cut from the Washington ecosystem, wasn’t status quo–oriented, and wasn’t afraid to break some glass for the constituents she was supposed to serve. I could list a lot of accomplishments, but one of my favorites is that Julie’s Department of Labor returned $1 billion [ [link removed] ]—that’s billion with a B—to workers in enforcement actions.
Results like that don’t come from putting an institution on autopilot and assuming it’ll do its job. They require a public servant who relentlessly pushes the institution to serve the public.
It’s been a thrill to see Julie do just that in New York, and to chat with her about what she’s been up to.
This interview took place on June 16, 2026, and has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Elizabeth Wilkins: You're in the middle of one of the most exciting political projects in our country right now, Julie. How's it going? How does it feel? What feels like it's working, and what are your challenges?
Julie Su: Well, thank you, Elizabeth. It has been amazing in all the ways that you can expect.
It is very much the mayor’s vision that we should be measuring the health of our city and the health of our economy not by how much aggregate wealth there is, or what records have been broken in terms of the economy as a whole, but whether it’s just. And that means, is it working for working people? Is it a place where the people who love the city and help to make it run can afford to live in it? And is government doing everything that we need to do to make sure that those things happen?
And I have been asked so many times, if you’re the deputy for economic justice, do you actually care about growth? Do you actually care about economic development? And I realize now that that reflects just how long we have allowed economic development to result in injustice, right?
Ultimately, it’s a reflection that you can’t possibly be thinking about growing the economy if you care about justice, which to me is crazy. But it’s been a very common question, so I will say we are laser-focused on saying yes, what does economic justice have to do with growth? Everything.
And what does economic justice have to do with how government should operate? Also everything. I’m excited about being in a space where the kinds of questions that we are asking ourselves are not about how to tinker at the margins, how to fix things a little bit here and there, but how to really rethink what government is capable of and what people deserve.
What does economic justice have to do with growth? Everything. And what does economic justice have to do with how government should operate? Also everything.
And the idea of a good life [ [link removed] ], I love that framing because that’s really our framing too. It’s not just little things here and there. It’s not just, can we bring down the cost of a little bit here and bring up wages a little bit there, but what does it mean for people to live a good life? It’s about time. It’s about joy.
Within economic justice is not just economic growth, it’s not just enforcing the laws to protect consumers and workers in the city. It’s also arts and culture and making sure that those who create and and express themselves can live in the city, but also that everybody can enjoy the things that make New York City such a world-class destination.
So those are goals and dreams that I am very thrilled to be a part of. As the mayor said on the day that he was inaugurated, “moments of great possibility have been promptly surrendered to small imagination and smaller ambition.”
So every day I feel challenged both to be really imaginative and to be really ambitious in terms of what we can accomplish. It’s awesome.
Elizabeth: OK, so there’re already so many cool things that you guys have done. You’re rolling ahead on public grocery stores; you’re rolling ahead on childcare. Sam Levine [ [link removed] ], who is the commissioner for worker and consumer protection, is a friend, and he’s done some incredible rulemaking and litigation.
I want to give you a moment to pick one or two markers that you guys have put on the ground and just talk about what it takes to do something in such a different way.
How do you move government to do something that it hasn’t done in the past? Both to use imagination and then actually get the results.
Julie: I think it takes vision. I’m a new New Yorker. I moved to New York City for this position, for this ambition, for this imagination, and for everything that we all, I think, believe it means well beyond New York City. This is the testing ground for what is possible, what can be done especially in a moment where the country is really pushing so hard to go the other way.
But I feel like even from far away I was watching the clarity of vision for this mayor, and on the day that he won his election, the way that people in the room were able to articulate exactly what he said he was gonna do was really remarkable.
We have to bring down costs in order to make the city affordable. The cost of rent, the cost of food, the cost of transit, the cost of childcare—all of these things are very, very clear.
So the vision is there. I think the idea of institutions is also creating new positions to focus on different things. I have spent my whole adult life in the world of labor. I’ve been enforcing labor laws in California, I was the labor secretary for Governor Newsom. I was the labor secretary for President Biden.
And always, [the conventional wisdom was that] labor is in one place and the economy is in another, and then you have to battle out which one matters more. And it was the mayor’s vision to say no, those things are the same thing.
It’s not like economic stability and what’s good for working people is here, and what’s good for the economy as a whole is here and, and you have to figure out which one matters more. They are one and the same, and so building institutions to come together to fulfill this vision is really super exciting.
Always, [the conventional wisdom was that] labor is in one place and the economy is in another, and then you have to battle out which one matters more. And it was the mayor’s vision to say no, those things are the same thing.
There’s a real focus on bringing people into government who have been on the sidelines before. [Bringing people into] decision-making positions, people who are most directly affected by economic policy but have not been at decision-making tables. So I think all of those things create a mix in which we’re really focused on actually delivering those things because the mayor knows you gotta deliver.
That’s the whole purpose of government. And I know it’s a little bit radical today, but the whole idea of what he’s called pothole politics was the idea that you have to be able to fill the potholes in order to gain the trust to do the other big things that maybe people are not so sure government should be in the business of doing. And so we filled 100,000 potholes in the first 100 days.
I think there’s been a bit of forgetting what government is actually supposed to do. And so now the idea of pothole politics, in my interpretation, is that we have to fill the potholes in our economy overall—and we have to think about 100,000 potholes that we can fill in a limited amount of time.
So grocery stores is a really good one, right? We’ve named two locations out of five to build a city grocery store that will markedly bring down prices, which will require city subsidy. And I get people who say all the time, why should the city subsidize, through land and through money, people’s food? And my answer is, I can’t think of a better thing for the city to subsidize than whether people can afford basics.
Elizabeth: And what has the city been subsidizing up until now? Like what’s the bar, guys?
Julie: Right, because development has resulted in some expansive skylines but really ever-shrinking lives for many New Yorkers, and we’re saying that that’s not good enough.
Elizabeth: OK, I want to close on this: There’s a real tension between the expertise you need in bureaucracy, to make it work, and the fresh ideas and urgency of thinking that you want from the outside. You and Allison struck that balance incredibly well at DOL. Can you talk about how you’re doing it in New York?
Julie: So I will say, a lot of credit goes to the mayor. I think he really has that philosophy, and I think his campaign helped demonstrate that you need to not just include people who’ve been left out of policy but really center them in decision-making positions in order to understand why the economy hasn’t worked for so many people and what it would take for it to work.
So, a lot of that is it. Again, it’s become so mysterious I think because people have been so bad at it, but it’s really not that mysterious that if you want different outcomes, you have to think about different inputs. And so our goal has been to really hire people who have deep expertise in the areas that we care about, but also lived experience in it. People who are gonna tell you what they need from a grocery store are gonna be different if they’ve struggled to afford healthy food in their neighborhood than if it’s more theoretical.
So this administration is filled with lots of people who’ve done workers’ rights advocacy, people who’ve organized tenants to run the mayor’s office of tenant protections, who then say things like, let’s go all across all five boroughs and do listening sessions on rental rip-offs and allow people to feel like they can speak from from their heart about what they’ve been through in a safe space that will then inform policy.
So much of that is different, and I even hear from a lot of folks who’ve been in City Hall and around for a long time that they’ve never seen this before, and I think the neat thing is, when you’re around people who are thinking imaginatively, other people start to do that more and more.
It’s the wonderful synthesis of people pushing each other to be better, and so that’s a lot of the spirit of this administration.
The other thing I will say is, having been around in government for some time now, there have been times where we were gonna do something—maybe it’s a big enforcement action, maybe it’s a policy around junk fees—where to be honest, I kind of expect the mayor to say, “Do we actually need to go that far? You know, maybe can we wait until year two?” But that is not his approach. I’ve never heard that once from him.
And so the idea of, how do we actually make the kind of change that people deserve, that those who’ve been so angry are hungry for—I think it’s about really pushing ourselves, and having good people is really, really important to that.
And it’s not just good people in appointed positions. I think the other neat thing that I’ve learned from being in government now for many, many years is people used to tell me, oh my god, it’s the career folks who are gonna get in your way. The people at career levels, they just wanna hang out the way they’ve been doing stuff forever, and they’re not gonna let you do anything—and that has actually not been my experience at all.
At the beginning, there’s always some skepticism about what the politicals care about, but that skepticism I now realize is really well earned, because a lot of politicals come in, and they’re not there to actually help the agency to succeed. They’re there to figure out where their next stop is gonna be.
So for the careers to be skeptical of that, more power to you. But if you come in and you’re like, I really just want you to unleash your full power, I want you to look at the authorities, the powers, the things that you’ve had that you wanted to use—the reasons why you came into government in the first place—and do those things, people love it and embrace it. And they’re able to do amazing things that I wouldn’t have thought of because they know their work better than I ever will.
Fireside Stacks is a weekly newsletter from Roosevelt Forward about bold economic ideas and the people who put them into motion. If you enjoyed this installment, consider sharing it [ [link removed] ] with your friends.
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