Key mayor aide Banks is leaving
Mayor de Blasio’s social services commissioner, whose agency has landed in hot water for outsourcing homeless shelter operations to sketchy companies, announced Monday that he will leave public service at the end of this year to join a white-shoe law firm.
Steve Banks, who has served as the head of the Department of Social Services since 2014, said that his departure also means he won’t be seeking a job in Mayor-elect Eric Adams’ incoming administration.
“Serving as your leader and your colleague for these past eight years has been an honor and a privilege of a lifetime,” Banks (bottom) told his staff in an agencywide email. “But I know that for change to fully take root it cannot be dependent on a leader continuing to serve indefinitely and that lasting change occurs when it continues beyond a single agency head.”
Banks said he’s instead set to join the prominent Paul, Weiss law firm next year as its special counsel in charge of pro bono work.
“As many of you know, I have missed the practice of law,” he wrote in the staff email.
Adams, who’s set to take office on Jan. 1, has for weeks signaled that he wanted to keep Banks in charge of DSS, a sprawling agency that oversees the city’s Department of Homeless Services and Human Resources Administration.
In light of his resignation announcement, Adams praised Banks as “a skilled and accomplished public servant, who has navigated complex government problems to find essential solutions on behalf of New Yorkers.”
“I wish him well in his new endeavor,” Adams added.
Banks’ agency has faced scrutiny in recent months over a string of reports revealing that the Department of Homeless Services has handed out lucrative shelter operation contracts to companies whose owners have histories of self-dealing and fraud.
Just hours before Banks’ announcement, state Attorney General Letitia James said that an executive of one such company, Millennium Care Inc., had pleaded guilty to stealing more than $2 million in Department of Homeless Services funds that were meant for shelter services in the Bronx.