Zohran Mamdani’s first staff picks show he’s going full speed ahead… to disaster

Don’t expect 1st Deputy Mayor-designate Dean Fuleihan to rein in an ounce of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani worst urges: He imposed no such restraint when he worked for Bill de Blasio.

Plus, Zoh’s pick for chief of staff, his longtime right hand Elle Bisgaard-Church, will be a voice of the same unreason that’s guided Mamdani’s entire political career to date.

The problem being that an assemblyman’s failings easily pass without notice, whereas 8 million New Yorkers suffer when a mayor screws up.

Those with a will to pull wool over their eyes will take solace in Fuleihan non-disastrous service as a top aide to then-Speaker Shelly Silver and other legislative poohbahs, yet his time as budget director and 1st deputy under Blas showed zero fiscal restraint.

It’s not just that the city budget soared 18% (from $72 billion to $85 billion) on his four-year watch; it’s that the mayor’s most foolish pet projects all exploded in waste under Dean’s supervision.

• De Blasio city-run ferries ran a double set of books, reporting $524 million in expenses when a comptroller’s audit found $758 million; the per-ride subsidy was 50% larger than reported in Blas’ final year.

• Fuleihan also failed to impose any fiscal discipline on First Lady Chirlane McCray’s woeful ThriveNYC, which burned $850 million on mental-health programs to no evident benefit to anyone except the folks they employed.

• He also oversaw de Blasio’s bogus “Citywide Savings Initiatives” which set aside the long-established PEG rules for finding efficiencies for a host of bogus “savings” that centered on re-estimating costs rather than reforming operations — and Blas’ ridiculously overoptimistic “replace Rikers” plan, which is now taking twice as long and costing more than twice as much to build (smaller) replacement jails.

In short, Mamdani tapped a “watchdog” who was a lapdog for de Blasio and can be expected to be as bad or worse now.

He’s not so much a green-eyeshades wise man as a willfully-blinkered old fool.

Meanwhile, the true toughness will come from Bisgaard-Church, the commissar enforcing the progressive party line on everyone at City Hall.

Various would-be voices of reason are angling to get responsible types into Mamdani’s brain trust, but the new mayor plainly means to have a staff who’ll cheer his step.

In other words: It’s full speed ahead . . . until the fairy dust runs out.