Fortune talked to both of them, Drew Warshaw and Raj Goyle, and the two longtime acquaintances, if not friends, had a clear message: The time for a change is now.
The irony is that they may be each other’s biggest obstacle. Both are running against the same 20-year incumbent. Both make nearly identical arguments about fees, fiduciary failure, and a $300 billion fund that has been pointed in the wrong direction. And both are drawing from the same pool of progressive Democrats who, for the first time in two decades, are paying attention to this race—with days left to decide.
Warshaw, 45, told Fortune that he’s running because “this is the way my brain works.” A former New York politico, holding positions in the New York governor’s office and the Port Authority, along with a career in business in renewable energy, Warshaw said his business school training was the motivating factor behind this campaign.
“No one in 20 years ever asked and answered this question: How has the third-largest investor in the United States of America performed? How’s he done? Like, no one measured it, no one quantified it.” After pulling the annual report of the pension fund, he got to the page that started listing all the investment managers and the fees associated with them. Then Warshaw decided to calculate all 664 names: The total fee bill for a single year was roughly $1 billion (technically, $1.1 billion for 2024 and $862 million for 2025).
“On the first day of Columbia Business School,” Warshaw said, “they tell you: It’s really hard to beat the market. It’s even harder to do it net of fees. It’s impossible to do it net of fees over a long period of time.”
DiNapoli’s office confirmed that its fund uses outside managers, “though not nearly as many as [Warshaw] fabricated,” and confirmed that the fund has paid out about $1 billion in fees, which it called “a low percentage and entirely in line among pension funds our size, another fact held up by independent reviews.” The comptroller’s office noted that the state Department of Financial Services ranked New York’s investment expenses 33rd among 74 large public pension funds surveyed. “The number of managers we use has grown over time because the amount of money managed has doubled. And in today’s unpredictable financial markets, you must diversify and not put your eggs all in one basket—absolutely key to our success.”
Goyle implicitly agreed with Warshaw but dismissed his efforts as obvious. “You don’t need footnotes and a white paper to document the fact that we should not be giving non-transparent locked-up money to managers who don’t perform, period,” the 51-year-old told Fortune. Goyle said the “corrosive nature of fees” is well-known.
DiNapoli often defends his tenure by noting the pension is one of the best-funded in the country. He’s right—and his challengers say that’s exactly the problem. In New York, full funding isn’t a sign of investment skill; it’s the law. When returns fall short, the state raises taxes to fill the gap.
“The pension fund is fully funded, but it’s the law,” Warshaw said, “and he [DiNapoli] brags and he says, ‘Oh, it’s one of the best-funded pension funds in the nation.’ And he’s right, it is. But he leaves out the part that it has to be.”
Goyle’s critique goes beyond investment returns into the question of how the office has been used—and who has benefited from it.
Warshaw was careful to distinguish his critique from the populist Wall Street attacks that defined an earlier era of New York politics. “Eliot Spitzer called Wall Street corrupt,” he said. “I’m calling them unnecessary. That’s a far more existential critique.” DiNapoli’s $12 billion in fees, by that logic, isn’t a scandal—it’s a mistake.
Then there is the question of what the fund actually owns.
With SpaceX’s inclusion in the Nasdaq 100, Goyle explained, many millions of people will be forced to buy SpaceX shares, even as the small float allows “insiders” to “manipulate the stock.” Goyle said these are all “dangerous steps that the Nasdaq has taken,” and DiNapoli has been silent.
When asked about the counter that Palantir and SpaceX are highly valued growth stocks that can make a lot of money for New Yorkers, Goyle insisted that it’s not all about that: “Public pension funds mean that we have public values involved.”
Warshaw’s path to this race runs through the places where New York’s biggest problems actually live. He served as deputy to Eliot Spitzer’s chief of staff in Albany, was chief of staff at the Port Authority during the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, spent nearly a decade in renewable energy finance, and most recently served as co-CEO of Enterprise Community Partners, the largest affordable housing nonprofit in the country. He claimed he was never the run-for-office type before—more the operator behind the operator. What changed was watching the housing crisis worsen every year he spent trying to fix it from inside a nonprofit, while a single official sat on $300 billion two hours up the thruway.
“The cavalry is not coming,” Warshaw said. “The cavalry is us.”
Goyle’s biography runs in a different direction entirely. Although he was born in upstate New York, he grew up in Wichita and became the first Indian American elected to the Kansas state legislature in 2006, fighting off a Koch-backed candidate to do so. “I’ve been fighting the Koch brothers ever since I was in fourth grade,” he told Fortune. “I’m running because I strongly believe we need better Democrats, Democrats who fight and who don’t fold.”
Goyle said he was one of Zohran Mamdani’s early supporters when he ran for assembly in 2020, and that the New York mayor has “resonated” because he “put his finger on the daily struggles of New Yorkers,” something that has “very little to do with ideology or a label from the political class.” The most exciting thing about Mamdani, he added, is that he has gotten people to “believe again” that the government can actually do things that make people’s lives better.
When Fortune noted that the anti-government waste argument is a common right-wing talking point, particularly beloved of Elon Musk, Goyle insisted there was no contradiction. “I hate inefficiency anywhere I find it,” he said. “And I believe this is what really troubles many people about politics generally, about the corporate sector. People don’t trust Wall Street [and] they shouldn’t, and when I’m comptroller, I will certainly very much energize the waste, fraud, and abuse audits to make sure that there isn’t a dollar that we’re spending that’s inefficient.”
The two challengers have a history, and it has gotten awkward on the trail. Goyle said he has met DiNapoli during the campaign but doesn’t know him well, but he knows Warshaw “very well personally.” When Fortune asked if they were friends, he said, “Yes, we were,” but declined to say whether that still holds. Warshaw said they first met in Washington, D.C., about 20 years ago, when they both worked at the progressive think tank the Center for American Progress, before Goyle moved back to Kansas and Warshaw moved back to New York.
Goyle offered a pointed observation about what sets the two apart: “Drew started his career climbing the pole of Albany,” he said, claiming that he was the only person in the race who didn’t come from the culture of New York’s capital.
When asked whether he and Warshaw would still be friends after the primary, Goyle paused. “We’ll see,” he said. It was the most unguarded moment in an otherwise disciplined conversation.
“If you and I didn’t do our job for 20 years, we’d be fired,” Warshaw said. “This is the greatest story never told,” he continued, likening it to Robert Caro’s classic about New York politics and the mid-century statesman Robert Moses: “It reminds me of The Power Broker, but this guy’s incompetent instead.”
“The great irony and the tragic circle here is that it’s working Americans who are actually funding their own destruction,” Warshaw said, “through no-name administrators…who are moving all this money to a middleman who we no longer need to expose ourselves to the growth of the economy.”
