New York City's Department of Education is sitting on $12.9 billion in outside contracts and refusing to show the City Council the paperwork — and the only people being told to wait are the taxpayers footing the bill.
Council Speaker Julie Menin fired off a letter July 9 demanding Chancellor Kamar Samuels produce 579 contracts the Council has been requesting since March — 352 that DOE itself flagged as no-bid, plus another 227 for so-called mandated services. Four months in, the agency has handed over two-to-three-page summaries for 60 of them. No full contracts. No real timeline. Just excuses.
This isn't a staffing problem. It's a power problem. Menin put it plainly: "It strains all credulity to say that DOE does not have the staff and technical ability to download these contracts into a file and make them available to the Council." She said the job should take "no more than a few hours of work." The mayor's office shot back that it would take "thousands of hours" — time they claim would be "better spent delivering for students."
Delivering what, exactly? The DOE is the largest slice of the city's budget, and nobody outside the building can see where the money goes. At a June 8 hearing, DOE's chief procurement officer claimed the contracts sit in a secure system accessible to "very few people" and that pulling them could take months. The agency also said vendors needed time to "redact sensitive information." So the public's contracts are hidden behind a secure system, and the vendors — the ones getting paid — get to decide what's sensitive. That's not oversight. That's a racket.
Then there's Chancellor Samuels himself. Before his current post, as superintendent of Manhattan's School District 3, he was accused of bill-splitting — breaking up contracts to dodge the competitive bidding threshold required for larger deals. The Office of the Special Commissioner of Investigation is probing those actions. Samuels says he did it for the students, not for personal gain. Mayor Mamdani is standing by his chancellor. Neither the Daily News nor AM New York pressed hard on what, exactly, those contracts funded or who the vendors were — the kind of detail that would let the public follow the money.
Menin didn't raise the Samuels investigation in her letter, focusing instead on the broader rot: a system where billions walk out the door without competitive bidding and the people's representatives can't even get a PDF. She noted, pointedly, that the Council could subpoena the records.
That's the real question. The Council has the hammer. Why hasn't it swung it? Menin gave DOE until July 16 to produce a timeline. If the agency blows past that deadline the way it has every other, we'll learn whether the oversight is real or just theater — and whether $12.9 billion in no-bid contracts is a bug in the system or the whole point of it.
