Mamdanis DOE accused of stonewalling over hundreds of contracts worth massive $12B

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Department of Education was accused Monday of “stonewalling” the City Council’s audit of hundreds of agency contracts worth a staggering $12 billion.The council requested a full audit of DOE deals from the Mamdani administration in March — but were told that coughing up the information would “take months” due to the 600 contracts existing on “a secure system that very few people have access to.”“This is again basic, rudimentary data that DOE should be providing to the council, and I’m not sure why we’re getting stonewalled,” Council Speaker Julie Menin charged during the tense budget hearing, after DOE Chief Procurement Officer Elisheba Lewi gave the excuse.“I just find this troubling, that of the 600 — we’re not asking for a printed copy, we’re asking for a file of the contracts,” Menin fumed.“I mean, this should take like an hour of work to do.”Follow live updates on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialist agenda and the latest in NYC politicsMamdani pledged on the campaign trail to “cure procurement” and bring DOGE-style audits to wasteful agency contracts, specifically focusing on the bloated DOE, which is set for a record $43 billion budget.

But five months into Mamdani’s admin, the DOE has yet to audit a single contract and education officials acknowledged during the hearing that procurement reforms remain in “preliminary stages” with no timeline for implementation.Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels, meanwhile, is facing scrutiny of his own over a no-bid contract he signed while he was a district superintendent on the Upper West Side, The Post previously reported.Samuels, while serving as head of District 3 in 2023, inked a $180,000 contract with non-DOE-approved vendor Sean Kreyling — then split the payments into $25,000 checks in an apparent attempt to evade city financial oversight, a recent Special Commissioner of Investigation report found.Samuels’ former deputy superintendent, Mar...