E.J. McMahon

Founding Senior Fellow

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

McMahon’s writing and research focuses 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 JournalThe New York TimesBarron’s, the Public Interest, the New York Post, the New York Daily NewsNewsday 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 also 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

#NYCoronavirus: The Cuomo administration is about to begin running up charges on that $11 billion credit card the Legislature handed the governor in the new budget. Under the budget's the Education, Labor and Family Assistance budget bill, Cuomo is authorized to borrow up to $11 billion this year in the form of up to $8 billion in bond anticipation notes (BANs) and $3 billion from “line of credit facilities and other similar revolving financing arrangements.” Read More

#NYCoronavirus: Governor Cuomo is invoking his "emergency" powers to unilaterally defer a 2 percent pay hike otherwise scheduled for most unionized state government workers during the new fiscal year. Read More

#NYCoronavirus: The Legislature isn't just delegating emergency spending control powers to Governor Cuomo as part of the new state budget.  It's also handing him a deficit-financing credit card with an $11 billion limit. Read More

#NYCoronavirus: The coronavirus pandemic has just claimed its first big institutional victim: the New York State Legislature, which handed Governor Cuomo broad and unprecedented leeway to "adjust or reduce" state spending in the fiscal year that began today. Read More

#NYCoronavirus: The negative economic after-effects of the pandemic seem likely to rival if not exceed those of the Great Recession of 2008-09. But as New Yorkers face massive job losses, falling incomes, sagging property values and widespread economic insecurity, they'll have one layer of protection they sorely lacked in the last downturn: a tight cap on local property tax levies, instigated by Governor Cuomo in 2011. Read More

#NYCoronavirus: The $2 trillion federal stimulus bill on its way to passage today does not actually shortchange New York in any general sense—but it does seem to clearly dash Governor Cuomo's vain hopes for a budget bailout, which is why he is so unhappy about it. Read More

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