Young voters and volunteers fueled the 34-year-old Mamdani’s fast rise from a relatively unknown Queens assemblyman to mayor-elect of America’s largest city. A lot of them had time on their hands: New Yorkers aged 16 to 24 faced a 13.2% unemployment rate in 2024, 3.6 percentage points higher than in 2019, according to a May report from the New York state comptroller. 

New York City had a 5.8% unemployment rate overall in August, 1.3 percentage points above the US average. The city added roughly 25,000 jobs this year through September, compared with about 106,000 during the same period in 2024, according to city data.

Mamdani’s campaign pledge to lower the cost of living in New York resonated with voters struggling to find jobs and establish themselves at a time when rents have stayed high and income growth has slowed. Now he’s looking to hire an unspecified number of roles across 60 agencies, 95 mayoral offices and more than 250 boards and commissions, with senior roles a priority, according to his transition team.

The typical size of the New York City mayoral staff — commissioners, communications, operations and community affairs — is about 1,100, according Ana Champeny, vice president of research at the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit finance watchdog. City government in total hired 39,455 people in 2024, according to New York City data.

Applications for roles in Mamdani’s administration have come from workers of all experience levels and from a wide range of backgrounds and industries, said Maria Torres-Springer, co-chair of the mayor-elect’s transition team. About 20,000 of the applicants came from out of state.

When Barack Obama was elected US president in 2008, workers submitted more than 300,000 job applications to his administration. Blair Levin, who co-led the technology transition team for Obama, said he received around 3,000 of those resumes. He whittled the pool down to 75, a relatively easy task because he needed applicants with specific tech and economics skills, he said.

Without invoking the term “AI,” Torres-Springer said the applications would be filtered using “the typical technology that any big corporation would have in an applicant-tracking system.” The resumes will then be sorted and matched to different agencies.

Mamdani’s avid use of social media, which helped him connect with young people during his campaign, has continued into his transition efforts, creating excitement — among young people especially — about the prospect of joining his administration.

“The average age does tell a particularly interesting story in two ways,” Torres-Springer said. “It might be because of volatility in the job market but it’s also because I think we are attracting, the administration is attracting, New Yorkers who may not have considered government in the past.”

Take David Kinchen, a 28-year-old data engineer who moved to New York from northern Virginia three years ago. Since getting laid off from a job in fraud detection at Capital One, he has applied for more than 1,000 roles and completed at least 75 interviews without an offer, he said. Kinchen volunteered for Mamdani’s campaign and applied to the administration, highlighting his tech credentials and a passion for photography. 

“I did data engineering, so I could help with database decisions. There was also a creative option on the application, since I could work as a staff photographer too,” Kinchen said. 

Another applicant, 22-year-old Aurisha Rahman, has struggled to find a job since graduating with a civil-engineering degree from Hofstra University on Long Island. 

“The job market is even worse than it was last fall,” Rahman said. Mamdani’s resume portal was one of the few places she found open to entry-level applicants.

Rahman, who was born and raised in Queens, said she wants to give back to the city where she was raised and wouldn’t be picky about a position. “Whatever they need, I’ll do it. I don’t care,” she said. “Right now, it’s better to be busy with something than nothing.”

Ru, who has served as chief brand officer and been with the company for 20 years, is planning to retire on Jan. 1, according to a statement. He will continue to serve on the board. 

Sweetgreen’s share price has dropped nearly 80% since the start of 2025, while consumers have bristled at perceived high costs of the company’s food. Fast-casual chains have also broadly struggled in recent quarters. Operational stumbles, such as removing fries only months after they were introduced, have contributed to the market losing faith in Sweetgreen’s current management team.

Ru, who started the company alongside current Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Neman and Chief Concept Officer Nicolas Jammet, has overseen the company’s marketing and restaurant design. While Sweetgreen’s concept has been touted as innovative in the restaurant world, that creativity has sometimes hindered efficient operations.

The company has yet to turn a profit since going public in late 2021 and has amassed net losses totaling more than $500 million in the period. Despite this, the chain has continued to aggressively expand, with its store count growing 90% over the past four years.

The growth hasn’t led to better financial performance. Cava Group Inc., which sells Mediterranean-style bowls, has expanded more quickly than Sweetgreen while posting consistent quarterly profits.

Prioritizing branding and restaurant development has led to higher operating costs and hasn’t translated into increased foot traffic. Sales from existing restaurants has contracted three consecutive quarters, including a 9.4% drop most recently, the most since 2021. Analyst expect that trend to continue, and worsen, in the fourth period this year after the company warned weak traffic trends have continued.

In August, Neman said only one-third of locations were “consistently operating at or above standard,” while the remainder fell short on sourcing, cooking and uniformity.

This year, the company sold off its kitchen automation unit to Wonder Group Inc., generating $100 million in cash. That technology was supposed to help get restaurant unit economics under control and speed up service but was sacrificed to help shore up company finances. Sweetgreen will maintain a licensing agreement to use the tool.

In 2014, Ru told the business journal from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania that he and his partners started Sweetgreen with a single location in Washington DC. He said that the landlord initially hung up on him but eventually relented after months of pestering. He said the group came up with five business principles, including “win, win, win” and “keeping it real.”

In 2022, he told Marketing Brew that Sweetgreen seeks “intimacy at scale” as it expands while talking about the company’s collaborations with tennis player Naomi Osaka and NBA player Devin Booker.

Daniel Chu, the company’s founder and chief executive, was charged in an indictment unsealed in Manhattan federal court with directing multiple executives since 2018 to defraud investors and lending institutions. The fraudulent schemes included fabricating data and making false statements, according to the indictment.

A defense lawyer for Chu did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Chu, 62, of Miami, was arrested in Florida, while David Goodgame, 49, of Waxahachie, Texas, the company’s former chief operating officer, was arrested in Texas. It was not immediately clear who will represent Goodgame at an initial court appearance.

U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton told a news conference that Chu repeatedly lied to banks and other credit providers as he turned fraud “into an integral component of Tricolor’s business strategy.”

He said the collapse of the company dealt a blow to car-buying customers who needed the services of a lending business that catered to people with troubled credit histories.

“Of course, if you have something like this happen, if you have fraud in that area, it becomes harder for those people to get auto loans,” Clayton said.

According to the indictment, the scope of the fraud was revealed in late August when lenders confronted Chu and other executives about Tricolor’s collateral.

Chu and others accused of carrying out the fraud initially tried to conceal it, saying the collateral issues were due to an administrative error, the indictment said. After those efforts failed, Chu extracted over $6 million from the company, spending some of it on the August purchase of a multimillion dollar property in Beverly Hills, California, the indictment said.

On Sept. 10, Tricolor filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy because it owed over $900 million to the company’s largest lenders, the indictment said.

Chu could face a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison and a maximum of life behind bars if he is convicted on the top charge of running a continuing financial crimes enterprise. Other charges include conspiracy, bank fraud and wire fraud. Goodgame was charged with conspiracy, bank fraud and wire fraud.

Authorities also announced that a former chief financial officer and a former finance executive at Tricolor had pleaded guilty to charges on Tuesday in Manhattan and were cooperating with the government.