Andrew Cuomo
Andrew Mark Cuomo is an American lawyer and politician who served as the 56th governor of New York from 2011 until his resignation in 2021 following numerous sexual misconduct allegations. A member of the Democratic Party, he is a son of former governor Mario Cuomo, and ran as an independent for mayor of New York City in the 2025 mayoral election.
Born into the prominent Cuomo family in Queens, Cuomo graduated from Fordham University with a Bachelor of Arts and earned a Juris Doctor from Albany Law School. He began his career as the campaign manager for his father in the 1982 New York gubernatorial election. Later, Cuomo entered the private practice of law and chaired the New York City Homeless Commission from 1990 to 1993. Cuomo then served in the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development as assistant secretary from 1993 to 1997 and as secretary from 1997 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. Cuomo was elected New York attorney general in 2006 after a failed bid to win the Democratic primary in the 2002 New York gubernatorial election.
Cuomo won the 2010 New York gubernatorial election with over 60 percent of the vote. He was re-elected in 2014 and 2018. During his governorship, Cuomo signed legislation to legalize same-sex marriage and the recreational use of cannabis. His administration oversaw the construction of the Second Avenue Subway, the Moynihan Train Hall, and the reconstruction of the Tappan Zee Bridge and LaGuardia Airport. He also decommissioned the Indian Point nuclear plant, which led to an uptick in greenhouse gas emissions. In response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and the 2012 Webster shooting, Cuomo signed the NY SAFE Act of 2013, the strictest gun control law in the United States. He also delivered Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act; a 2011 tax law that raised taxes for the wealthy and lowered taxes for the middle class; a 12-week paid family leave law; and a gradual increase of the state's minimum wage to $15 per hour.
Cuomo was initially lauded locally and nationally for his administration's response to the COVID-19 pandemic in New York, but he faced criticism and a federal investigation for ordering nursing homes to admit patients from hospitals without testing them for COVID-19. The order was blamed for a large number of nursing home deaths, and the administration's subsequent actions were scrutinized in a number of reports and investigations. A January 2021 report by state attorney general Letitia James found that the Cuomo administration had undercounted COVID-19-related deaths at nursing homes by as much as 50%., the U.S. Department of Justice has an open investigation into Cuomo's testimony on his involvement with a questionable report used to combat criticism of his handling of the pandemic.
Beginning in late 2020, Cuomo faced numerous allegations of sexual misconduct. A report from independent investigators commissioned by James found in August 2021 that Cuomo sexually harassed at least 11 women from 2013 through 2020 and retaliated against victims who made complaints about his conduct. Following the release of James's report, there were widespread calls for Cuomo's resignation, including from President Joe Biden. On August 23, 2021, in the midst of an impeachment investigation against him, Cuomo resigned from office. After his resignation, criminal investigations from the district attorney offices for New York County, Nassau County, Westchester County, and Oswego County were closed without charges being filed. A criminal charge in Albany County was dropped in 2022.
In 2025, Cuomo mounted a political comeback bid and ran for mayor of New York City in that year's mayoral election. Despite leading in most Democratic primary polls, he lost to Zohran Mamdani in what was considered a major upset. He continued his run as an independent, then lost again to Mamdani in the general election.
Early life and education
Andrew Mark Cuomo was born on December 6, 1957, in the New York City borough of Queens to lawyer and later governor of New York Mario Cuomo and Matilda. He grew up in the neighborhood of Holliswood.Cuomo's parents were both of Italian descent, tracing their ancestry back to Southern Italy. His paternal grandparents were from Nocera Inferiore and Tramonti in the Salerno province of Campania, while his maternal grandparents were from the Messina province of Sicily. He has four siblings; his younger brother, Chris Cuomo, is a current NewsNation anchor and a former CNN journalist, and his elder sister is noted radiologist Margaret Cuomo.
Cuomo graduated from Archbishop Molloy High School, a private, college prep Catholic school in Briarwood, in 1975. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Fordham University in 1979 and a Juris Doctor degree from Albany Law School in 1982. He lived in Sunnyside, Queens for five years after law school graduation.
Early career
During his father's successful 1982 campaign for governor, Cuomo served as campaign manager. He then joined the governor's staff as a policy advisor and sometime Albany roommate, earning $1 a year. As a member of his father's administration, Cuomo was known as the "enforcer" where his father was known as the "nice guy" in a good cop/bad cop dynamic to further advance his father's legislative agenda.From 1984 to 1985, Cuomo was a Manhattan assistant district attorney and briefly worked at the law firm of Blutrich, Falcone & Miller. He founded Housing Enterprise for the Less Privileged in 1986 and left to run HELP full time in 1988. From 1990 to 1993, during the administration of New York City mayor David Dinkins, Cuomo was chair of the New York City Homeless Commission, which was responsible for developing policies to address homelessness in the city and providing more housing options.
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
Cuomo was appointed Assistant Secretary for Community Planning and Development in the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1993, a member of President Bill Clinton's administration. After the departure of Secretary Henry Cisneros at the end of Clinton's first term under the cloud of an FBI investigation, Cuomo was unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate to succeed him as Secretary of HUD. Cuomo served as Secretary from January 1997 until the Clinton administration ended in 2001.In 2000, Cuomo led HUD efforts to negotiate an agreement with handgun manufacturer Smith & Wesson. This agreement required Smith & Wesson to change the design, distribution, and marketing of guns to make them safer and to help keep them out of the hands of children and criminals. Budgets enacted during Cuomo's term contained initiatives to increase the supply of affordable housing and home ownership and to create jobs and economic development. These included new rental assistance subsidies, reforms to integrate public housing, higher limits on mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration, a crackdown on housing discrimination, expanded programs to help homeless people get housing and jobs, and creation of new empowerment zones.
During Cuomo's tenure as HUD Secretary, he called for an increase in home ownership. He also pushed government-sponsored lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy more home loans issued to poor homeowners in an attempt to end discrimination against minorities. Some believe that this helped lead to the 2007–2010 subprime mortgage crisis. Edward J. Pinto, former chief credit officer at Fannie Mae, said: "They should have known the risks were large." Pinto said, "Cuomo was pushing mortgage bankers to make loans and basically saying you have to offer a loan to everybody." But others disagree with the assessment that Cuomo caused the crisis. Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said Cuomo "was a contributor in terms of him being a cheerleader, but I don't think we can pin too much blame on him".
According to author and critic James Bovard, Cuomo was obsessed with changing HUD's image, as Cuomo declared, "The PR is the important thing I do... Eighty percent of the battle is communications." He championed a new program called Community Builders, created without appropriation by Congress, for 800 new HUD employees with computers to be paid as much as $100,000. In a June 16, 1999, speech, Cuomo declared that one purpose of the program was to fight against HUD's abolition. In August 1999, Community Builders distributed a letter to community groups to fight against proposed tax cuts. One HUD official declared that Community Builders was seen as "Democratic ward heelers who act as a pipeline between Democratic city officials, party leaders, and the administration and the Democratic National Committee."
In 1998, Clinton-appointed HUD inspector general Susan Gaffney testified to a Senate committee that she was the victim of escalating' attacks on her office by Cuomo and 'his key aides,' including cooked-up charges of racism, insubordination, malfeasance, and general dirty-dealing". In 1999, Gaffney's office concluded that "most Community Builders' goals were activities rather than actual accomplishments" and that Cuomo's initiatives "had a crippling effect on many of HUD's ongoing operations". Gaffney retired in May 2001, shortly after the department reached a $490,000 settlement with a black employee who had accused her of racial discrimination in passing him over for a promotion.
Prior to Cuomo's tenure, HUD was routinely included on the General Accounting Office's biannual watch list of government programs whose poor management made them prone to fraud. During his time in office, two of HUD's four main departments were removed from the GAO list. In addition, the department cut 15 percent of its staff as part of a Cuomo initiative to streamline its operations.