Drew Warshaw, Democratic Candidate for NYS Comptroller, March 27th, 2026

0:00America leads the world in medicine development. It matters. We get new medicines first nearly three years faster. Five million Americans go to work because we make medicines here at home and not relying on other countries keeps us safe. But China is racing to overtake us. Will we let them or will we choose to stay ahead? When America leads, America cures. Let's tell Washington to keep us in the lead. Learn how at americancures.com. Pay for by Farma. Hi, I'm Tom Eschen and welcome to the award-winning power and politics podcast. It's the conversation about the issues that are impacting you the most with the people that are making the decisions, the advocates that are calling for change, and everyone in between and holding them accountable along the way too. Today we sit down with Drew Warshaw. He's a candidate for New York State Comptroller on the Democratic side. So he joins that crowded field at a bucket deco alongside Raj Goyle and challenging that incumbent Tom DiNapoli. We spoke into all those on power and politics. So Warshaw though potentially could have the best chance against DiNapoli

1:03if there is one at this point. All those challenges still need to get on the ballot by the way. So we do sit down with Drew Warshaw. He just made his way through the capital this week talking about some proposals he's had for affordable housing. And then we also get into more about the pension fund. How he would handle that when it comes to investing, divesting, and what he wants to get out of it for New Yorkers. And we also get into auditing as well. Where he would start there in a very interesting conversation comes from that. As always, you can watch this as a YouTube video on our YouTube page, CBSX Albany, or as always, a podcast on our power and politics podcast page. Chat, I think it's time to book that trip to Walt Disney World Resort. You know, you work so hard. I think it's time to give yourself a little TLC. Like, when's the last time you had fun? We could hop in a light cycle, eat food from all over the world at Epcot. We could even build those lightsabers you've always wanted. Like, let's make plans for real this summer. Find your

2:04moment at Walt Disney World Resort. We are joined today by Drew Warshaw. He's a Democratic candidate for New York State Comptroller. Thanks so much for coming on. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me Tom. You're in the state capital making an announcement this week. What was that for and how does that fit into the greater portion of your campaign here as now we inch closer to April than now closer to the primary in June? Sure. Well, today we announced the largest single affordable housing fund in the United States of America, $20 billion to create 200,000 homes that New Yorkers can actually afford to invest that money right here in New York all across New York State because this is not just a city problem. This isn't everywhere problem. And the biggest single challenge that New Yorkers face is they can't afford to live in New York. And the New York State Comptroller can actually do something about it and we propose a $20 billion housing fund to do just that. $20 billion, where does that come from? So that comes from the public pension fund of the state of New York, the third largest public pension fund in the United States. And so this would be investment capital that could go into homes, new homes and to preserve homes that are in danger of

3:10flipping out to market rate and keep them affordable. This announcement in terms of the grand scheme of your platform here, why is this such a big focus of how you want to approach this office of State Comptroller, not every day someone would equate that with affordable housing? Sure, I mean. I appreciate that. Yeah. Because we're in a raging affordability crisis and someone can actually do something about it. One person sits on $300 billion. And over the last 19 years, that person has not seen it as their job to address the affordability crisis. In fact, the affordability crisis has gotten worse under his watch. And I think we need a State Comptroller who will use every lever of power and every money that he is sitting on to address the affordability crisis and housing is right at the top of that list. Yeah, we'll get into, of course, auditing and some other aspects of the office. But let's begin here now that you've brought it up in terms of affordable housing idea and proposal, the pension fund. Yeah. Obviously, this gives us a bit of a layer of the onion when

4:13it comes to your approach to this fund. And obviously, the Comptroller over the years has touted it as being the best managed by independent entities and then they're doing a job of keeping it consistent and reliable. Yeah. Where do you fit in all of that? Well, what's incredible is we're in the financial capital of the world. And no one in 19 years has ever asked to answer the question, how is the third largest investor in the United States of America, which is who the New York State Comptroller is? How's he performed? How's he done? And so we actually ran the numbers. We did the math and you can quantify his performance. And when we did, it turns out over the last 19 years, he's underperformed his own market benchmarks by 39%. And in the process, he paid $12 billion. The hundreds of Wall Street bankers, private equity managers and hedge fund managers to deliver that underperformance. And you're right. It is one of the best funded pension funds in the whole country. And he brags about that. But what he leaves out is it has to be. It's the law. It's in the

5:13New York State Constitution. Our pension fund is guaranteed by the state constitution. The question becomes, how is it funded? Is it funded because he's a good investor? And we have a lot of investment income. Well, it turns out he's not. So how is it funded? Turns out it's funded off of the backs of New York property taxpayers and public school teachers and firefighters and nurses who've all seen their taxes go up to fill Tom's and Apples and his hundreds of Wall Street bankers underperformance gap for 19 years. And it's cost them as our report shows on our website. It shows that taxpayers have had to pay an extra 59.1 billion dollars of higher property taxes and higher state income taxes in the middle of an affordability crisis all to plug his underperformance. So yes, I would do that job very differently. What would you do differently? Other than the housing, obviously, you addressed that at the beginning here. Yeah. And you know, I want to be very clear about this. I would fire the 664 Wall Street bankers who have not done their job. Because if you and

6:14I didn't do our job for 19 straight years, what would happen to us? We'd be fired. Instead, the state controller has made these guys millionaires. Literally millionaires. He has paid them 12 billion dollars. Just 1.1 billion dollars last year alone in taxpayer funded fees for them to not do their job. So I would fire them and I would replace them with a diversified set of practically free index funds. This is investment 101. This is literally how people tell you to invest. And he is doing the exact opposite. And he is enriching Wall Street bankers in return off of the backs of New York taxpayers and public school teachers. And this is really important. This is the largest wealth transfer that no one knows anything about. That no one knows anything about because he's been there for 19 years and no one has ever challenged him from ordinary taxpayers to a bunch of bankers who haven't even done their job. I'd imagine he would argue that these measures he's taken, these moves he's made with the fund are in that to mitigate risk,

7:19mitigate risk. And just charging of that and erupting that could potentially risk this pension fund. And people at the end of the day, what they've invested in, how do you avoid that with what you just proposed there? It's a great question. So two ways you avoid that. One, you diversify. So we're not talking about putting all our eggs in one basket. We're talking about diversifying across all the asset classes. So that we're going to continue. And the other thing we're going to do is we're going to make sure that we're not paying these fees because it is impossible to beat the market net of fees. And that's the first thing they teach you on business at business school. The first day, it's really hard to beat the market. It's really hard to beat the market net of fees. And he's hired 664 bankers to do that. And he's given our tax dollars to them with the promise that they will beat the market net of fees. And guess what? They haven't even come close. And as a result, taxpayers have had to bail them out. So we can diversify. We will. We will absolutely

8:20do that. We will not put all our eggs in one basket. And the pension fund will actually earn a higher rate of return at a lower cost to the taxpayer and to the public school teachers out there and nurses and firefighters and all the public employees. Diversifying in terms of trying to look and spread the wealth, I guess, for lack of a better term, then you get to some of the things that have come up in this campaign. The plant here, investing in Israel bonds, Israeli bonds, I should say, where do you stand on some of those things? Because I know the comptroller's office has said, well, we're trying to maintain this fund and we don't want to make it political. We've heard some other candidates say that to another whatever this is they might have. But for you, where's that stand? Yeah, great, great question. So we can't have politics in this fund. We have a fiduciary duty. And the stake in control over the last 19 years has ignored that fiduciary duty and has brought politics into this. And I'll give you just three examples. One, fossil fuels. Fossil fuel companies are not just killing the planet. This is really important. Fossil fuel companies are killing our pension fund. We put out a study. We did the math. Put the social policy

9:24aside. I happen to believe in climate change. I think we should fight it. I think these companies are killing us right now. Put that aside for a second. They're also killing the pension fund. They have lost the pension fund. $15 billion over the last 15 years. Had he divested from fossil fuel companies 15 years ago, we'd have $15 billion more in the pension fund. So it is the right thing to do as a pure fiduciary matter. And he refuses to do it despite all of the evidence. And then whether it's foreign bonds or Palantir, we got to get out of this stuff. We have ridiculous high concentration. And if you want to talk about a fiduciary duty, we have a massive concentration risk in just four countries. We have half a billion dollars in Palantir, literally the IT backbone of ICE. It's a massive risk and we can get out of that. Why is that a risk? To me, because think about, it has these massive government contracts. They basically are feeding off of Donald Trump and his private militia. And what happens at some point

10:29when that money train starts drying up? That company is going down. And yet we have a half a billion dollar concentration in one single company. You also think the forum, even though that could be a good investment that the foreign bonds as well. To me, it's about diversification. The idea that he's picked and choose these four countries is like picking and choosing stocks. This thing does not work. It makes no sense. And that's why we ought to diversify across a set of practically free index funds. To save taxpayers their money and earn a better rate of return for the pension fund. And again, the pensioners, their benefits are constitutionally guaranteed. They're going to get paid. The question is, how much is it going to cost taxpayers and how much is it going to cost those public employees in contributions? Yeah. And I did want to ask this. It's a bit adjacent and correct me from wrong. But there has been the talk right now, currently, about tier six. And I saw some estimates that could add four billion dollars in pension costs. Where do you stand on that?

11:30I think we need to fix tier six. I think the reason why we got tier six, this is all connected. This is because Tom Thin Appley mismanaged our public pension fund. And we would have literally, and our report, again, on our website, drewworshot.com, 51-page report, does the math. We would have $107 billion more in the public pension fund. Had we fired those bankers 19 years ago when he was appointed by his colleagues in the assembly? Had we done that 19 years ago, we would have $107 billion. Tier six was invented. It was created by this artificial idea that we didn't have enough. We would have had enough money. And so in my mind, we should fix tier six. The first thing we should do is fire the 664 bankers who've been made millionaires while public schoolteachers now coming in to the hardest job in America are being asked to put their wages into the retirement when these bankers are making off with millions of dollars and not even doing their job. So you see some of the cost estimates of the fixed tier six,

12:33because you've seen some of those productions, I'm sure, of how much it could cost local municipalities, the state and everyone in between. The remedy to that would be the firing. Cut out the Wall Street middleman, Tom. Cut them out. They're fat. They are sucking value. They are not adding value. We don't need them. And we are making them millionaires off of the backs of working New Yorkers. It's the greatest story never told. It is the most tragic story never told because we've had one person for the last 20 years who just refuses to stop paying these Wall Street bankers. And I will do it very differently. Let's get to auditing now. And because I think that obviously that's a big arm of the office and that's a big topic. So we can't get to every audit you would want to do here in the next 20 minutes or whatever it's going to be. Where do you start? What do you look at? That places maybe that I think people look at Medicaid as one. And there has been, there seems to be almost a couple of years coming out of the comptroller's office right now. Is there something you would do differently there? Yeah, a few of the things that I would audit.

13:34We can't get to all of them. One is the fact that a private equity-owned company PPL is now the sole contractor overseeing an $11 billion personal health care program. And this was a poor procurement process in the first place. The comptroller claims that he had nothing to do with it and his hands were tied. Let's give the benefit of the doubt on that. Where has he been for the last year? The contract has been in effect. Why hasn't he audited them? So for my money I would start there with PPL. I would also audit the 14 municipalities and counties that right now are colluding with Donald Trump's private militia ICE who have entered into agreements who are using our public tax dollars literally to subsidize Donald Trump's private militia, to terrorize New Yorkers and to kidnap them. And our public tax dollars are going to these 14 municipalities and counties to do that. And he has not audited a single one of them.

14:38I would audit the Department of Financial Services. This is the largest regulator of insurance companies in the United States because insurance companies are not regulated by the feds in Washington DC. They're regulated right here in New York State. How are they doing? We have no idea because they have never gotten a top to bottom audit of their insurance capacity. And I know how they're doing. Insurance companies are doing great because it's their business model to take our money and to never give it back. And that will change when I'm in New York State Controller. You know, there's been a lot of conversations now during this campaign about the power of the office when it comes to auditing. And I think there's the different interpretations of that. What's yours? I think it's extraordinarily powerful. I think you have an opportunity to frame a debate. You have the opportunity that no New Yorker has access to in terms of the data and in terms of the information. You have the ability to ask and get answered any question you want. I think it's an enormous power. And it just, unfortunately, I think has not been

15:40energized and used to lower costs for working New Yorkers. Another example is I would audit the building code. And I announced this today in the capital. I would audit the New York City and New York State Building Code. This is one of the silent killers of anything but particularly homes that New Yorkers can afford. It's gold plated. They keep adding requirement after requirement. They never subtract. And I would actually audit the building code and people say, oh no, you can't, you can only audit state agencies. We can audit anything that touches a tax dollar which is everything. If you're thoughtful about it and you're creative about it. And so we would propose a model building code that we believe would cut the costs of construction, not just housing. Of anything that touches dirt in New York by 15%. And we would do that to address this affordability crisis. So if we are serious about that, we actually have the tools and we need to start using them. The Public Service Commission, another one of others have called for it. He did bring up a point in my conversation when I was saying, well, we did that. And then they actually came out and I got ahead of our audit. And that was an example of sort of using the power of that

16:44office. You know, would you address the Public Service Commission? Because I think people often say, you know, look at that. But then the legislature has a role here too. And I think that might be lost on some of it when it comes to the power of the comptroller compared to the power of the legislature. How do you weigh all of those things? I think if any New Yorkers looked at their electricity or their gas bill recently, they would know that the audit power of the state controller has done nothing to address those costs. And I was in the electricity business for eight years. I built renewable energy all over the country. And I fought these utility monopolies every step of the way. And their model is broken. I was up in Rochester. Rochester gas and electric proposed a one year 36 percent, 36 percent one year increase to their electricity bill. That is an admission of failure. And we have a state controller who has 3,000 people who work for him. And we should be auditing the Public Service Commission and the Department of Public Service and anyone who has any authority over those electricity bills that we can get to the bottom of them.

17:48And I actually have experience that I would bring to the table. But doesn't the legislature aren't they the ones that decide what happens with the PSC? The governor really. Yeah, I would say the governor appoints the Public Service Commission and staffs the Department of Public Service. But one of the things that I think we need is someone who has experience fighting these utilities. And we actually have someone who does that who can get in there and go toe to toe with these guys because they have the asymmetry of information, the amount of money that they lobby Albany with. I mean one of the sick jokes of these utility monopolies is the lobbying bill for all their expensive lobbyists. They put in to our rate base. They are allowed to charge us for that. Why isn't the state controller standing on out there saying, enough, this is enough. And we have one of three statewide offices who is not called that out and is not making a thing,

18:51is actually saying, oh, we're actually doing a good job. No one is doing a good job right now. Our electricity bills are going through the roof and we need to do more about that. I believe there's a bill actually to help recommend rectify that in the legislature. You mentioned the lobbying. That's an offshoot. We'll get to that later. Are you stuck staring at your W2? Our tax refund worry is holding you back. You probably have FOMO. The fear of messing up. The fix? Using turbo tax on into a credit karma. They find every credit and deduction to help you get every refund dollar you deserve. Or your money back. It's time to overcome your fear of messing up and get your taxes done right. Start filing today in the credit karma app. The renewable part. Obviously, you're working with NRG energy. Working in that renewable energy sector, community solar. Obviously, we're having a big conversation right now about the climate law. You mentioned climate change earlier in this conversation. Is there anything the

19:53controller has? I mean, we heard the controller come out with his report that kind of helped sort of buoy this pullback from the governor when it comes to the climate law. We saw that from last summer. I might have been this one before. We're not going to reach these benchmarks. What role do you think the office should have when it comes to the climate and climate law and how this all looks? Yeah, I mean, one, the auditing function to be sure, to make sure that we are hitting our marks so that years later, we don't realize, oh, wait a minute. We actually didn't even try to implement the law that was passed by a democratically elected legislature. That's the situation that we find ourselves in. So if I saw that, to me, that is red blinking lights. And we make a very big deal about that. But the other, the other side of that is we got a divest from fossil fuel plants that and fossil fuel companies that are state controller refuses to do, even though they're losing the pension fund money. I can't possibly understand it. And, you know, one one argument that I've heard is that he has a seat of seat at the table to make

20:57Exxon mobile do what he wants. How's that working? How's that working out? It's not working out very well. It's like asking, you know, the company that sells Oreos to stop selling Oreos. They are programmed to do this. And if we are so worried that they are selling these hydrocarbons, we are so worried that they're selling these Oreos. And why are we buying these companies in the first place? We should get out. When it comes to you and your background, I do want to make sure you address this. It's on a campaign. A lot of stories recently about Elliot Spitzer, who you worked for. And his campaign contribution to you, $18,000. Is that something you're accepting? Is it something that you think is beneficial to you at the end of the day? I mean, look, we have to get the message out. So I'm grateful for his support. I'm grateful for all the support that we've gotten. We've qualified for the public matching program that as a college kid, I fought for to get public financing of campaigns. But, absolutely, I'm grateful for his support. And he was someone who is unafraid to take on Wall Street. He was someone who is unafraid to fight for the underdog,

21:59to fight for working New Yorkers. And I think we need that now more than ever. Despite his some of the things attached to him, those were not things related to fighting for working New Yorkers. Those were other things. And he has to speak to that. But he was a fighter for working New Yorkers. We need more of that, not less. All right. So you were in the Capitol today. What should we expect to do over the course? Obviously, you're petitioning to get on the ballot still. What should we expect now at the course the next few weeks and months as we head closer to June? Yeah. I mean, one of the things that we're trying to do is get the word out. So we are on social media every day at Drew for NY. So if you haven't signed up, if your listeners haven't signed up or your watchers haven't signed up, please check us out because we're trying to educate people on one of the most powerful offices in all of government, not just in New York, but in the United States of America. One person controls $300 billion. One person gets to audit a quarter of a trillion dollars that we spend every single year. And for the last 20 years, we've had the same person

23:02in the same seat. And so my hope is that through interviews like this and social media and elsewhere that we can get the word out that for the first time in two decades, literally a generation, New Yorkers finally have a choice. This is a statewide office. And I think that's important. I think for especially people upstate outside of New York City because we talked about this group that's running at Embunkadeco, Raj Goyle and yourself all looking to unseat the incumbent in this case, all from New York City, right? One way or another, or they're right now, what separates you? What makes you different than them that can appeal to not just people in Manhattan and rather people in Laoville, you know, at the same time? Look, I think our message that instead of giving our public money to private equity companies, we should invest in homes that we can afford. That is not a New York City message. That is a Buffalo message. It is a Binghamton message. It is a Utica. It is everywhere in between because we are in a crisis and we need to stay controller who is going to act like that. And we need to stay controller who's going to bring

24:05experience, whether it's running the largest affordable housing nonprofit organization in the United States. We talked about renewable energy and the fact that I was blessed to help rebuild the World Trade Center after 9-11 when we went in there and it was a 16-acre hole in the ground and it was peak government dysfunction and we actually got that built and helped to rebuild my hometown. I think that is the level of experience and that is the choice that New Yorkers have for the first time. So for my part, an office to address the costs of New Yorkers. That is not a New York City message. That is an everywhere message. Drew Worshaw, thanks once for your time. Appreciate it. Thank you.