New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has appointed Lina Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission, as chair of the city's Economic Development Board (EDB). The announcement, made at a Wednesday press conference, also named Tony Shorris as the next leader of the Economic Development Corporation (EDC), the nonprofit that serves as the city's official economic development agency and its largest landlord with over 60 million square feet of property under its control (The Guardian).

Khan called the appointment a "deep honor" at the press conference. She previously chaired the FTC during the Biden administration, where she was the youngest person to hold the position and the first of South Asian descent. After earning her JD from Yale Law School in 2017, Khan built a reputation around antitrust scholarship and enforcement before joining Columbia Law School, where she currently serves as an associate professor. Her transition into municipal economic policy began during Mamdani's mayoral transition, when she co-led the transition team alongside Maria Torres-Springer (Crain's New York Business).

Shorris brings a different profile to the EDC. He first joined New York City government in 1979 and now serves as a partner at McKinsey & Co. He was also a member of Mamdani's transition team, alongside Dean Fuleihan (Crain's New York Business). Shorris recalled that his first meeting with Mamdani occurred in the fall of 2025 (The Guardian).

Mamdani, sworn in as mayor on January 1, 2026, previously represented the 36th New York State Assembly District, covering Astoria, Ditmars-Steinway, and Astoria Heights (NYC.gov). He established the city's first deputy mayor for economic justice rather than appointing a traditional deputy mayor for economic development, a structural choice that frames the EDB and EDC appointments within a broader reorientation of the city's economic policy apparatus (The Guardian).

The EDC's scope is considerable. Its capital division manages roughly 100 active projects representing about $6 billion in construction investment. The EDC board has approved major initiatives including Hudson Yards, the High Line, the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island, and the city's ferry system. Khan played an early role in reviewing candidates for the EDC president position before Shorris was selected (The Guardian).

The pairing of Khan and Shorris places two distinct orientations at the top of the city's economic development infrastructure. Khan's work at the FTC centered on reinvigorated antitrust enforcement and scrutiny of market concentration, and her academic output has consistently argued for structural approaches to competition policy. Shorris, by contrast, brings decades of municipal government experience and a private-sector consulting perspective from McKinsey. How those orientations interact in practice, particularly on questions of land use, procurement, and development incentives across the EDC's vast portfolio, will depend on the specific policy directives the mayor's office issues and how the EDB chair's agenda interacts with the EDC president's operational authority.

The structural context matters here. The EDB sets strategic direction; the EDC executes. By installing Khan as board chair and Shorris as the day-to-day leader of the corporation, the mayor has separated governance from operations while placing both roles in the hands of people who participated in his transition. The creation of a deputy mayor for economic justice rather than economic development signals that the mayor's office intends to evaluate economic policy through a distributional lens, and the appointments suggest that antitrust frameworks and equity considerations may be applied to local development decisions that have historically been assessed primarily through growth and job-creation metrics.

What remains undefined is the specific policy agenda the EDB will pursue under Khan's leadership. The EDC's existing pipeline of roughly $6 billion in active construction projects was established under prior administrations, and redirecting that pipeline, or applying new criteria to future approvals, would require both board-level coordination with the EDC and alignment with the deputy mayor for economic justice. The institutions Khan and Shorris are now tasked with leading have shaped the physical and economic landscape of the city for decades. The next phase of that work will be informed by a different set of priorities.