After four years of sabotaging the American economy from Washington, D.C. — and getting beaten in the 2024 elections for their trouble — many of the most progressive stars of the Biden administration have reassembled the band in New York City, now with a new frontman, Zohran Mamdani.
His administration’s lineup most notably includes former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan (a darling of the progressive Left) as board chair of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, and Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su, former President Joe Biden’s former acting Secretary of Labor, who, having left a graveyard of jobs back in California, could not obtain Senate confirmation. Under this supergroup, governance in the Big Apple is proceeding about as well as one might expect, which is to say not well at all.
Recently, Mamdani endorsed the Delivery Protection Act, a proposal whose title expresses its sponsors’ gauzy intentions while having very little to do with its likely effects. (It is a useful, if deceptive, sales tactic of the retail politician.) The act would, inter alia, require delivery companies, such as Amazon and FedEx, to employ “last-mile” delivery drivers directly instead of contracting with independent delivery services.
“Corporations like Amazon build billion-dollar business models by insulating themselves from accountability through a system of exploitative subcontracting,” Mamdani said in a statement. The economically literate might interject that firms, even supremely successful firms, operate just as everyone else does: by providing goods and services valued by someone else for which they receive compensation. But, alas, the economic sensibilities of Adam Smith seem to be as absent from New York as the net 114,000 (domestic) residents who departed the city in 2025. Mamdani et al lack the foresight necessary to anticipate the myriad distortions that ripple outward from regulatory misadventures.
Yet distortions will, in fact, ensue irrespective of whether enthusiastic regulators are capable of predicting them. The DPA would increase the cost of business, and the impact of the proposal would jar not only the regulated firms but their workers and customers. Amazon alone contracts with 40 last-mile deliverers, and a company spokeswoman warns that the act “threaten[s] the small businesses that deliver to customers, putting the jobs of more than 5,000 of their employees at risk and forcing us to consider relocating delivery operations outside of the city.” Other opponents of the DPA allege that the proposal endangers 10,000 jobs. An industry that largely employs non-college-educated racial minorities — some of the very groups progressives profess to care for — is soon to learn that the warmth of collectivism, however snug and comforting from afar, invariably scorches those unfortunate enough to be touched by it directly.
Consumers, meanwhile, ought to anticipate higher prices or degraded delivery services — perhaps both. A recent study predicts an increase of up to $5.20 per package, or $664 per year, should the DPA become law. When New York City established a threshold for compensating app-based food-delivery drivers, consumers — quite literally — paid the price.
“The average consumer fee on a NYC restaurant delivery rose from $4.05 per order in Q1 2022 to $6.73 in Q1 2024, a 66% increase,” the Chamber of Progress, a trade association, reports. The sort of New Yorker who, like Mamdani, graduated from Bowdoin College or a similar institution might shrug and pay such fees, but regulatory impositions are by nature regressive — an additional $5 spent here and there means far less to the affluent and well-educated than to the working class.
The DPA suits the Mamdani administration perfectly. The mayor dislikes most things capitalist. Khan dislikes big business generally and Amazon in particular. But it is Su’s ideological hobbyhorse — a dislike of gig work — that, like a compass for political economy, points the way to the largest beneficiary of the proposal: the Teamsters, whose 2023 contract with the United Parcel Service resulted in tens of thousands of layoffs.
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“The National Labor Relations Act doesn’t allow sub- and independent contractors to unionize,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board notes. “By banning the subcontractor model, the bill could enable the Teamsters to unionize Amazon drivers and couriers.” Should the DPA become law, jobs are likely to be lost, but not Teamster jobs, and that pleases the union’s leadership.
The DPA serves as an exact image of DSA governance: ideology realized, displaced working-class workers, and artificially high prices for consumers, to the benefit of one of America’s most politically influential and legally coddled cartels: organized labor.
David B. McGarry is the research director of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.