“The private equity industry is looking for any streams of steady public funding,” Sen said in an interview. “As advocates have secured more funding for home and community-based services, that has resulted in the private equity encroachment.”
Lisa Donner, co-executive director at Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, said that “private equity executives have enriched themselves by the billions, taking high fees and other charges from working people’s hard-earned retirement savings in pension funds.”
“Now they want fees from the trillions of dollars in individual retirement accounts,” Donner added, “putting millions of more people at risk.”
“What we’re seeing isn’t just a budget cut,” said Amanda Jackson, the consumer campaigns director at advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform. “It’s a structural defanging.”
“[Mamdani] popularity reflects in part a generational breakdown in views of the housing system,” says Caroline Nagy, who studies housing for the non-profit consumer financial advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform. “Everyone under 40 thinks everything about the system is broken.”
“It’s not an investment, but an extraction,” says Aditi Sen, managing director of research and campaigns for the Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of groups advocating for a strong, stable, and ethical financial system. “The profit-seeking that is built into this model is really going to go after cost-cutting as the primary strategy for generating those profits.”