Zohran Mamdani is just weeks away from being inaugurated as New York City’s next mayor. He’ll be the most important American socialist to ever hold executive office. So naturally, many are wondering what he can actually accomplish.

For a Mamdani administration, success would mean at least two things: effectively running the city government and implementing a significant portion of his progressive agenda. Both are tall orders. New York City is notoriously hard to govern, with a sprawling municipal bureaucracy of more than 300,000 city workers serving 8.5 million New Yorkers who are famously harsh judges of their mayors. More challenging is the new mayor’s list of ambitious proposals, which includes free buses, free childcare, a rent freeze, and new affordable housing construction, all paid for by taxes on the rich.

The political hurdles to enacting the Mamdani agenda are widely understood. In Albany, much of that agenda will run up against New York governor Kathy Hochul, a centrist Democrat who has consistently opposed taxing the rich. In Washington, there’s President Donald Trump, who may use the federal government to undermine the new administration by withholding funding, deploying Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on the city streets, or finding other ways to make life hard in New York.