Raj Goyle isn’t in Kansas anymore. In fact, after leaving that state 15 years ago, he has lived in New York with his spouse, Monica. They have two daughters, both of whom are teenagers, and the family calls New York City home.
Goyle is an attorney, co-founder of the legal technology company Bodhala, and a former Kansas state legislator who is running for “the most powerful office you’ve never heard of.” That office, which is responsible for fiscal oversight and management of the state budget, pension funds, and procurement, is the Office of the New York State Comptroller. The position may sound tedious, but its influence is immense—the state budget alone tops $250 billion.
“Bringing value and outcome to a voter is how you win the loyalty and the support of a voter to a political party,” Goyle said in an interview. “Democrats need to be delivering for our voters, not just scaring them about the other side, and that’s why I’m running for comptroller.”
He further maintains that harnessing the power of the comptrollership to deliver for New Yorkers “can go a long way toward restoring the Democratic Party brand.”
How? Goyle goes into detail in his platform, where he highlights what New York’s chief financial watchdog can and should be doing more of to wield that power effectively. The topline of his vision is a comprehensive plan to audit the state’s investor-owned utilities, and otherwise leverage the comptroller’s office to improve energy affordability. Goyle has also committed to divesting the $300 billion New York State Common Retirement Fund from fossil fuel companies, international bonds, and the surveillance company Palantir, while ramping up investments in affordable housing across New York.
But in order to unseat incumbent New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, Goyle will need to come out on top in the Democratic primary on June 23. Given that New York is a reliably blue state—the last Republican governor left office in 2006—the results of the upcoming Democratic primary will likely determine the general election as well.
What’s more, the primary is shaping up to be a three-way competition pitting DiNapoli—who has been in office since 2007, making him the second-longest-serving comptroller in New York history—against Goyle and another progressive challenger by the name of Drew Warshaw, a lifelong New Yorker and former co-CEO of the national nonprofit affordable-housing developer Enterprise Community Partners (ECP).
Goyle has been endorsed by the Progressive Victory Fund, Zephyr Teachout, Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), New York Communities for Change (NYCC), Sunrise Movement NYC, and the Muslim Democratic Club of New York. His campaign contends that “Raj has solidified himself as the leading progressive challenger,” citing the endorsements in an email to supporters this week.
Despite this, City & State reported that Goyle failed to advance to the second round of voting at a Working Families Party (WFP) state committee meeting earlier this month. Although Warshaw and DiNapoli did advance, the committee voted against endorsing either candidate for comptroller.
Warshaw secured the most WFP support out of any candidate, but it apparently wasn’t enough. According to City & State, he had the backing of “several advocacy organizations who are WFP members and have sway over the voting process,” including Make the Road Action—a “major affiliate” of the party that endorsed Warshaw after the vote.
GOYLE AND WARSHAW SHARE a strikingly similar vision for the comptroller’s office, but it is instructive to consider where their platforms diverge.
Both candidates believe in exercising the power of the comptroller’s office to scrutinize utility companies for saddling ratepayers with excessive costs. Goyle has been explicit about his intention to audit those companies directly, whereas Warshaw’s platform has focused on auditing the New York Public Service Commission (PSC), which regulates the state’s investor-owned utilities.
Goyle has also made clear that, as comptroller, he would leverage the office’s existing authority to audit PSC-approved spending, state contracts, subsidies, and tax breaks tied to utilities and high-load users, including data centers. During our interview, he argued that the PSC has not been “properly audited in 20 years of the incumbent, which is an absolute outrage.”
The comptroller’s office already audits the PSC, as well as municipal utilities like the New York Power Authority, but DiNapoli has never directly audited an investor-owned utility. To do that, Goyle has plans to push for new statutory authority allowing the comptroller to conduct utility fairness audits of rate-case claims and performance.
“We need a state comptroller who will look at every penny … to make sure that if these companies say they need the money, they better damn sure need that money—and if they don’t, it comes back to us,” Goyle said. “That’s what ratepayers need, a watchdog in Albany, because everybody’s asleep at the switch.”
Warshaw’s approach to energy affordability, chronicled at length in a City & State op-ed he authored last month, shoots straight for the heart of the investor-owned utility financial model.
Publicly traded companies finance capital expenditures through a blend of debt and equity; utility companies are no different. Regulated utilities are considerably low-risk businesses. Not only do they have a captive customer base, but their overall revenues are set by regulators. In a rate case, regulators determine the rate of return, or overall revenue a utility can recover in the form of rates, and return on equity, which is the profit margin guaranteed to shareholders.
“The higher that return, the higher your bill,” Warshaw observes. “It’s that simple.”
Unlike the cost of debt, the cost of equity is not directly observable and must be estimated. This becomes a key variable, and the way that additional capital expenditures translate into higher profits. Consequently, utility companies have an incentive to overinvest in capital-intensive infrastructure over less costly alternatives.
As Warshaw points out, “if we lower the profit margin these monopolies are able to earn, we lower electricity bills.” One way to do that is by financing utility infrastructure at a lower cost of capital. What’s more, many long-term investors seem rather willing to take a modest haircut in exchange for stable, low-risk returns. Among those long-term investors are pension funds.
By co-investing the Common Retirement Fund alongside other, like-minded institutional investors, the comptroller’s office could help finance utility infrastructure at a lower cost of capital, which is exactly what Warshaw would do if he is elevated to the comptrollership.
It actually might work, as the move would “not reduce returns below what is needed to attract investment,” Warshaw writes. Rather, it “replaces a portion of higher-cost, short-term capital with lower-cost, long-term capital that specifically seeks lower-risk returns.”
Goyle’s plan involves leveraging the pension fund to improve energy affordability, too. As comptroller, he would file shareholder resolutions at Consolidated Edison and National Grid, two of New York’s major investor-owned utilities, linking executive pay and dividend increases to ratepayer outcomes.
“Rates keep going up,” he told the Prospect. “Someone has to drop the hammer on that, and I will.”
PENSION STEWARDSHIP IS a key pillar of the comptroller’s role and responsibilities. For his part, Warshaw has criticized the exorbitant, taxpayer-funded fees paid out to asset managers by the Common Retirement Fund. He essentially wants to cut out Wall Street middlemen by tilting the Common Retirement Fund’s asset allocation toward internally managed, low-cost index funds, and away from alternative asset classes like private equity and hedge funds, which are managed externally.
“Since the dawn of modern finance, these managers, on average, do not beat the market—and even when they do, they don’t succeed enough to cover their high fees,” Warshaw opined in a separate op-ed for Jacobin in March.
As Investigative Post reported, Warshaw’s own analysis found that, under DiNapoli, the pension fund has paid out nearly $12 billion in fees to hundreds of asset managers despite underperforming its benchmarks by 39 percent.
What’s more, DiNapoli was the subject of a New York Focus investigation earlier this month which revealed that, throughout his tenure, the incumbent comptroller “filed lawsuits securing hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements from corporations he’s accused of defrauding the state’s main pension fund.” Some of firms the comptroller’s office hired to litigate those lawsuits “have also contributed to his campaigns,” according to New York Focus, which acknowledged that the contributions are legally permissible; DiNapoli has reportedly sometimes “refused to accept donations from the law firms that seek to bring litigation on behalf of the pension fund.”
When it comes to the pension fund’s investments in international bonds, “my view is that we should cancel out the entire foreign bond portfolio and bring that money home to New York,” Goyle said. He contends that it would be prudent to reinvest those assets in corporate and municipal bonds, which not only offer superior, risk-adjusted returns, but also “help build our infrastructure.”
Within that bucket, the Common Retirement Fund has roughly $350 million invested in Israel bonds.
“Moody’s downgraded Israel bonds recently, and … we have an obligation to not fund human rights violations,” Goyle told the Prospect. “We should be criticizing human rights violations wherever they occur.”
Warshaw, a Jewish New Yorker, has also pledged to divest the Common Retirement Fund from Israel bonds, writing in The Forward last month that “most New Yorkers have no idea that their tax-funded pension fund, as invested by State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, helps finance Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wars.”
Finally, Goyle and Warshaw have committed to leveraging the pension fund to support affordable housing across New York. It’s a proven strategy, one that former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander carried out when Signature Bank collapsed in 2023, to grow workers’ retirement savings while simultaneously helping them, and their families, afford to remain in-state.
WARSHAW IS NO STRANGER to the affordable-housing crisis. His campaign website boasts that, as co-CEO at ECP, “he helped lead a non-profit that has created and preserved more than 1 million affordable homes.”
What you will not find on drewwarshaw.com is any mention of Bellwether Enterprise, which is, ironically, one of the nonprofit’s for-profit subsidiaries.
Warshaw served as co-CEO of ECP for five years before kicking off his campaign in May 2025. Three months earlier, Shelterforce reported that “for several years, Enterprise has been earning money from a for-profit subsidiary that regularly lends to companies whose business practices contradict Enterprise’s mission of preserving affordable housing.” Of course, that for-profit subsidiary is Bellwether Enterprise.
In 2012, ECP affiliate Enterprise Community Investment acquired a majority ownership stake in Bellwether Real Estate Capital, “then a Midwest-focused market-rate commercial and multifamily lender,” according to Shelterforce. ECP has always been and continues to be a nonprofit. While it no longer appears to have a majority stake in Bellwether, ECP’s most recent audit indicates that it still has majority voting power over the lender.
Shelterforce’s reporting chronicles Bellwether’s longtime lending relationship with Havenpark Communities, a manufactured housing–focused private equity venture notorious for “issuing large rent increases at its parks.” ECP has continued to benefit indirectly from Bellwether and, by extension, Havenpark, but the nonprofit claimed to have no influence over the lender’s strategy or standards because the lender operates as an independent subsidiary.
“Under our current leadership, Enterprise has used its ownership position to review and strengthen Bellwether’s underwriting standards to go above and beyond GSE-mandated tenant site lease protections for manufactured housing communities,” an ECP spokesperson previously told Shelterforce.
Warshaw has never been a member of the nonprofit’s board. The 501(c)(3) where he served as a chief operating officer and Enterprise Community Investment are separate entities, though both are under the ECP umbrella.
To be fair, Goyle’s record is less than spotless when it comes to progressive priorities.
Five days after he was arrested in Albany for protesting Gov. Kathy Hochul’s rollback of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, Politico unearthed a video from September 2010 where Goyle—then a member of the Kansas legislature—appeared to voice opposition to cap-and-trade, a market-based policy designed to drive down emissions. In the video, he can be heard saying: “I oppose cap-and-trade because I think it actually would kill jobs here in Kansas, and it’s a one-size-fits-all regulation that doesn’t make sense.” Goyle also expressed concern toward the Environmental Protection Agency “overreaching” in its regulation of the fossil fuel industry.
Still, that incident was 16 years ago, and in a much more conservative state. Goyle has since positioned himself as an ardent supporter of climate justice.
Speaking at a March 15 rally outside ConEd’s East River Generating Station, Goyle told demonstrators: “We can indeed make a future where energy justice is climate justice, and where we tackle the affordability crisis and put justice for ratepayers back on the table in Albany.”
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