How Kathy Hochul learned to ditch cooperation and embrace power

Hours after taking office in August 2021, during her initial address as the first female governor of New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul made a promise to New Yorkers. “The final priorities outlined today are simple: Get this state working again, focused without distractions,” she said. “And that begins with a dramatic change in culture.”

That culture was multifaceted. Hochul had just taken over from former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, her onetime boss who resigned amid numerous allegations of sexual harassment, which he has denied. Cuomo had a reputation as a hard negotiator and a micromanaging bully – a longtime Albany insider once described Cuomo as someone who would “sit there and pull the wings off the fly and laugh” as a metaphor for his dealings with the state Legislature. Hochul said that would change under her leadership. “We’ll have a fresh and collaborative approach,” she said. “I’ve already reached out my hand in friendship to many elected officials who too are eager for a new relationship with the state.” (Cuomo did not respond to requests for comment.)

Hochul also promised to change Albany’s infamously opaque style of governance, where budgets are negotiated behind closed doors, major policy items get jammed into bills with unrelated issues and freedom of information requests languish for years without being fulfilled. “In a new era of transparency, one of my hallmarks of my administration … will focus on open and ethical government that New Yorkers can trust,” she said.

Nearly four years later, with a budget already over a week late, Hochul seemed to make a “mission accomplished” declaration. “I changed the culture,” she asserted in April while discussing policy wins she achieved in past budgets. But she wasn’t talking about transparency or cooperation. She argued that the Legislature didn’t have “an aggressive individual” like her before “driving results.” Hochul got the state “working” again through policy victories earned from games of budget chicken, as the spending plan became more and more delayed.

The strategies employed by Hochul have represented a change of pace compared to her predecessor, who prided himself on timely budgets after the late budgets of George Pataki. While it’s not exactly the culture change she promised, the governor does appear to have made her mark on how Albany operates. But in other ways, the overbearing culture of the state Capitol may have wound up changing Hochul more than she has changed it.

Early in her tenure, it seemed that Hochul wanted to make good on her promises of better collaboration with the Legislature. State Sen. Liz Krueger recalled the way the new governor reached out to her in 2021 to work together on getting the nascent cannabis industry off the ground. “I worked with her people, and I was actually pretty damn pleased that, of all the things she needed to be working on in her first literal week as the governor, that was one of the things that was on her list to follow up with,” Krueger told City & State. “After all those years of Gov. Cuomo, quite honestly, that was quite refreshing.”

Differentiating herself from Cuomo and setting a new tone served as a core theme in Hochul’s early weeks and months as governor. A former staffer recalled that Hochul was conscientious about reaching out to lawmakers, elected officials, advocates and other stakeholders who may not have had access to the governor under the previous administration. They described “a real openness to collaboration” when she first took office.

A different former staffer also used the term “openness” to describe Hochul’s approach to stakeholder meetings in 2021. They said “the only limitations were on time and priorities” when setting up meetings. “I think she genuinely wanted to be different,” one former Hochul adviser told City & State.

But the honeymoon period didn’t last long. “As we got into the budget, it became clear that she wanted to take a page out of Andrew Cuomo’s book,” said one of the former staffers, adding the governor seemed to make “a total 180.” The 2022 budget cycle offered a preview for what would become Hochul’s trademark negotiating style as governor: surprise and delay.

In late March 2022, just days before the April 1 deadline to pass the budget, Hochul suddenly introduced a 10-point public safety plan that included tweaks to the state’s bail laws. The proposal was not part of either the governor’s executive budget proposal nor her 30-day amendments. The introduction of the new policy item and Hochul’s sudden insistence so late in the process that it must be in the final budget threw lawmakers and legislative leaders for a loop. Hochul’s penchant for last-minute policy ideas got even worse in subsequent budget cycles; this year, she continued to suggest new policy items well after the April 1 budget deadline.

One Democratic Albany insider described the 2022 budget process as “peaceful,” noting that the Legislature managed to resist making major changes to the 2019 criminal justice reforms and the governor didn’t play hardball with them. But things changed after Hochul’s tough 2022 election fight. The governor won with the tightest margins in a gubernatorial election in two decades – beating Republican challenger Rep. Lee Zeldin by only about 6 points – in a year when Democrats lost control of the House thanks in part to losses in New York. Hochul’s underperformance was widely blamed on voters’ concerns about public safety, particularly the 2019 criminal justice reforms. After playing nice with the Legislature in 2022, Hochul seemed to have had enough. “We saw it as she had intuited a lesson that if she accommodated the Legislature too much, she was going to eat shit,” the Democratic insider said. “And she didn’t want to eat shit anymore.”

Fresh off a tough election fight and raring for a win, Hochul instead suffered one of the most public and embarrassing losses of her tenure. Hochul needed to fill a vacancy for chief judge of the state Court of Appeals, the leader of the state’s judicial branch who would shape the direction of the courts. In an astonishing defeat, the first of its kind, the state Senate rejected her first choice of Judge Hector LaSalle both in the Judiciary Committee and in a full floor vote. A few months later, the 2023 budget dragged into May for the first time since 2010, as Hochul pushed for more expansive rollbacks to bail reform. 

People with knowledge of the nomination at the time said that members of the state Senate had tried to dissuade Hochul from sticking with LaSalle when it became apparent that he did not have the votes. But just like U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Hochul nevertheless persisted. “On the heels of a reelection, you should be able to get anything you want,” one Albany insider said. “And when legislators said ‘no’ … instead of trying to work it out, (Hochul) bashed them over the head.” One of the former Hochul staffers said that outreach about LaSalle didn’t begin until after she had chosen him, and the pick even took her own staff by surprise. “There had been no discussion whatsoever with any members of the Legislature or labor about this guy,” the staffer said, adding that they think Hochul has learned from the experience, but “she certainly hasn’t built trust in the process.”

This year, lawmakers finally finished passing the state budget on May 8 – nearly 40 days after the April 1 deadline, making this the most delayed budget in the past 15 years. While the governor has been quick to assert that average New Yorkers don’t care about a late budget as long as it’s good – a position supported at least partly by recent polling – there’s a reason that Cuomo ran in 2010 on the promise of on-time budgets. For decades, increasingly delayed spending plans, which sometimes stretched into the summer, were a perennial display of the dysfunction that plagued Albany.

Cuomo succeeded in making Albany “work” again by delivering timely budgets. Hochul reversed course, sacrificing the statutory requirements for government functioning in favor of an “aggressive” stewardship of the Legislature to get her policy agenda approved.

This year’s budget was a success for Hochul, who was able to squeeze more policy than ever into the budget and force legislative leaders to at least compromise on all of her biggest priorities – including changes to the state’s discovery laws, a school cellphone ban and expanding involuntary commitment. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that observers agreed with the claims she made during negotiations. “Just because she says that she’s a strong leader, leading the Legislature doesn’t make it so,” said the Albany insider. “It’s like giving yourself a nickname. It doesn’t count if you give it to yourself.”

Many people who spoke with City & State agreed that dealing with Hochul has been an improvement over her predecessor on a personal level. “The governor’s changed Albany culture in that she’s not a – she’s a much nicer human being, and she’s not a, you know, vindictive sociopath,” said John Kaehny, executive director of the good-government group Reinvent Albany. But that doesn’t mean that Hochul is a wholesale improvement over Cuomo. Kaehny said she has “absolutely not” improved the secrecy of Albany or fostered more open and democratic government. “In fact, I would say that as the governor … evolves politically, she’s getting worse,” Kaehny said, using this year’s budget as an example. “It’s about her and her senior advisers finally understanding how to fully use the powers of her office, constitutionally and politically, to get her way.”

State Sen. Gustavo Rivera agrees Hochul is a better person than Cuomo, whom he also called a sociopath. But he said he’s fed up with the current governor nonetheless. “I don’t think she’s a terrible human being, but I got to tell you something,” Rivera told City & State. “It is irresponsible and upsetting that you have somebody who is taking such an adversarial stance with the Legislature.” He said he once tried to “figure her out,” but has since given up on the attempt. “There’s many instances in which I tried to get into a better place with her and her administration, because I don’t want to be fighting with her. This is not where I want to be,” Rivera said.

And he’s not the only one miffed with the governor right now. While voting on budget bills, state Sen. James Skoufis gave a 17-minute speech that squarely took aim at Hochul and her heavy-handed approach to the budget. “I strongly do not believe that this budget … is in any way a reflection of a functioning democracy,” he said from the floor. “This, today and tomorrow, is what I would characterize as a disgraceful close to this process, an authoritarian process.” Skoufis went on to say that the coequal nature of the legislative and executive branches “no longer exists in any way shape or form.”

Grumblings about Hochul’s political style and lack of predictability are nothing new in Albany. “He would never answer, right, but if you were to get the speaker on a lie detector, say, ‘Who do you prefer to work with more?’ I bet he’d say Andrew,” the Albany insider said. “I think that as an administration – forget Andrew personally – as an administration, his staff had a much better working relationship with the Legislature than the current administration.” Another insider said that while many members may not have appreciated being yelled and screamed at during the Cuomo years, there was at least a degree of workable transactionality that no longer exists. Susan Lerner, executive director of the good-government group Common Cause New York, told City & State that Hochul had “changed the culture to be less collaborative.”

Despite particularly tense budget negotiations this year, legislative leaders still have not outright criticized the governor publicly and have generally continued to publicly compliment the governor. Both leaders added their names to a recent press release praising Hochul’s “inflation rebate” checks, and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie even called this his best budget in over 20 years. “I have an extraordinary working relationship with Gov. Hochul, and one of things I admire most about her is that I know that when I say an issue is important to me or my colleagues in the Legislature she will seriously work with me to come to a solution,” Heastie said in a statement to City & State. “It doesn’t come down to a trade and she doesn’t seek to use it as leverage to extract something else.”

The leaders won’t back calls from their members for a constitutional amendment to give legislators more power in the budget. But they have made statements hinting at their frustrations. Before the budget passed, Heastie told Spectrum News that he was “not trying to go to war” with the governor. After its final passage, he said he “didn’t like the process,” which he considers unequal.

After Hochul surprised lawmakers for the second year in a year by unilaterally announcing a “general agreement” on a budget deal, state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins indicated a degree of resigned weariness in dealing with Hochul’s whims. “When you know what you know, when you know what people tend to do, then you’re not surprised,” Stewart-Cousins told reporters at the end of April. “I stay focused, as always, on completing the job, so I spend less time on reacting to what people want to do, as long as it’s not interfering with the job that we are supposed to be doing.” In the end, it took over a week after Hochul’s “agreement” for the budget bills to actually be printed and passed by lawmakers.

Avi Small, a spokesperson for Hochul, said she is willing to work with legislators who support her preferred policies. “What everyday New Yorkers care about is whether their state government is delivering results on kitchen table issues like public safety and the rising cost of living … Gov. Hochul is happy to work with any state legislators who share the governor’s key priorities of fighting crime and lowering costs, but she won’t back down from a fight if they stand in the way of delivering safer streets and a more affordable New York.”

On the good-governance front, Hochul’s promised “era of transparency” hasn’t exactly materialized. She signed some changes to the state’s Freedom of Information Law meant to streamline the process and made good on her promise to create a new ethics agency in the state. Hochul instituted new ethics and sexual harassment training requirements for staff as well. One of her former staffers also pointed to the thick firewall Hochul set up between her government and campaign sides. Unlike many other elected officials, Hochul does not have her government staff work off the clock on campaign matters, the staffer said. “I think it comes from a desire not to be the other guy and really practice good government,” the staffer said, referring to Cuomo.

But even that has its drawbacks. “Anything the governor talks about in those nongovernmental events never tracks back to the administration, because one hand has no idea what the other one does, to their detriment, the pendulum has swung so far,” the Albany insider said.

Despite the firewall, Albany observers view Hochul’s administration as particularly opaque. Kaehny, of Reinvent Albany, said Hochul has “totally changed” the culture of fear of the Cuomo era by finding her own way of asserting control in Albany and fully realizing the power afforded to her in the state constitution. “In some ways, what Hochul and her people are doing is saying, ‘You know, having the on-time budget as your signifier of competent government is actually not very smart for a governor,’” he said. For Hochul, it makes political sense to cram policy into the budget with little opportunity for proper debate. “It’s worse for the public. It’s worse for transparency,” Kaehny said. “But it’s politically logical.”

Beyond the budget, Hochul has leaned heavily on chapter amendments in her dealings with the Legislature. Rather than working with lawmakers before a bill passes to come to a compromise she would sign, Hochul often changes already passed bills once they hit her desk through private negotiations with leaders. “It’s even more secretive than our already faulty, not open legislative process,” said Lerner of Common Cause New York. “At least different legislators have a say in the final product.”

By design, New York has a very strong executive. Most of their power exists within the budget process, but the governor also has significant influence the rest of time – both statutorily and through custom. For example, legislative leaders will generally wait until a governor calls up a bill before sending it to her desk and starting the clock that necessitates her action. And Hochul is making full use of her power. “This is not an open collaborative situation, this is a much more imperial approach to being governor,” Lerner said. “We have a strong governor system, and we’ve seen different personalities abuse that system in different ways.” In other words, the more things change in Albany, the more they stay the same.