E.J. McMahon

Founding Senior Fellow

Edmund J. McMahon was the Empire Center’s founding senior fellow.

McMahon’s writing and research has focused on improving New York’s economic competitiveness and promoting greater transparency, accountability and fiscal responsibility in state and local government. He has authored or co-authored major studies on public pension reform, collective bargaining, population migration, budget trends and tax policy in New York. His influential “Blueprint for a Better Budget,” published in January 2010, featured a number of recommendations subsequently implemented under Governors David Paterson and Andrew Cuomo. McMahon also was a leading advocate of an across-the-board cap on property taxes in New York before it was enacted at Governor Cuomo’s initiative in 2011.

McMahon has published numerous articles and essays in publications including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Barron’s, the Public Interest, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, Newsday and the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. His frequent radio and TV interviews have included appearances on CNBC, Fox News Channel and Bloomberg News, as well as on regional cable and broadcast outlets throughout New York State.

McMahon’s professional background includes nearly 30 years as an Albany-based analyst and close observer of New York State government. As chief fiscal advisor to the Assembly Republican Conference in the early 1990s, he drafted a personal income tax reform plan that would become the basis for historic tax cuts enacted under Governor George E. Pataki. Previously, as research director of the Public Policy Institute, he worked on the Institute’s counter-budget proposals and developed the template for New York’s school report cards. He also served as a deputy commissioner in the state Department of Taxation and Finance and as a vice chancellor of the State University of New York.

McMahon is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which he joined in June 2000. In January 2005, he opened the Institute’s Albany-based Empire Center project, which became an independent nonprofit think tank in 2013. He was the Empire Center’s founding president and became research director in the fall of 2016.

Earlier in his career, he was a staff writer and columnist for the Albany Times Union and The Knickerbocker News.

McMahon is a graduate of Villanova University.

Latest Work

Without This Fix, It’s Not Reform

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • New York Post
  • March 10, 2012
  • Commentary

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is insisting that Gov. Cuomo “negotiate” his plans to reform New York’s outdated pension systems with the public-employee unions — which misses the biggest point of reform. Read More

Hunger Hypocrisy in New York

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • Washington Examiner
  • March 15, 2012
  • Commentary

President Obama recently announced his intention to restrict what can be sold in private vending machines at public schools as a way to address the obesity crisis among children and youth. Read More

Medicaid AWOL From Budget Debate

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • Newsday
  • March 22, 2012
  • Commentary

Over the next few days, as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and the legislature negotiate the final details of a state budget for fiscal 2012-13, New Yorkers will be hearing very little about Medicaid -- a subject that used to dominate the headlines out of Albany this time of year. Read More

Unions v. NY Youth

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • New York Post
  • March 23, 2012
  • Commentary

Soon after he was elected governor 16 months ago, Andrew Cuomo made a point of publicly touring a state juvenile-detention center in the Mohawk Valley, west of Albany. Read More

The Perils of Cuomo’s Medicaid Reform

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • New York Post
  • April 4, 2012
  • Commentary

The Cuomo administration’s Medicaid-reform strategy is riskier than most New Yorkers realize in good part because it doesn’t reform the Empire State’s longstanding practice of seeking to grab every federal Medicaid dollar it can get. Read More