On paper, New York State Comptroller is a sleepy job. No press secretary emerges from the office to spin the Sunday shows. No Twitter feuds, no viral moments. A recent poll found that 65% of New York Democrats have never heard of the man who has held the position for two decades.

What Thomas DiNapoli actually controls is another matter entirely. As sole trustee of the New York State Common Retirement Fund—the third-largest pension fund in the United States—he manages nearly $300 billion without a board, without a cosigner, and without, until very recently, a single Democratic opponent. For the first time since DiNapoli was handed the job in a backroom Albany deal in 2007, two challengers are making a case that the office has been asleep at the switch—and that New Yorkers are paying for it.

Fortune talked to both of them, Drew Warshaw and Raj Goyle, and the two longtime acquaintances, if not friends, had a clear message: The time for a change is now.

The irony is that they may be each other’s biggest obstacle. Both are running against the same 20-year incumbent. Both make nearly identical arguments about fees, fiduciary failure, and a $300 billion fund that has been pointed in the wrong direction. And both are drawing from the same pool of progressive Democrats who, for the first time in two decades, are paying attention to this race—with days left to decide.

The numbers nobody ran

Warshaw, 45, told Fortune that he’s running because “this is the way my brain works.” A former New York politico, holding positions in the New York governor’s office and the Port Authority, along with a career in business in renewable energy, Warshaw said his business school training was the motivating factor behind this campaign.

“No one in 20 years ever asked and answered this question: How has the third-largest investor in the United States of America performed? How’s he done? Like, no one measured it, no one quantified it.” After pulling the annual report of the pension fund, he got to the page that started listing all the investment managers and the fees associated with them. Then Warshaw decided to calculate all 664 names: The total fee bill for a single year was roughly $1 billion (technically, $1.1 billion for 2024 and $862 million for 2025).

“On the first day of Columbia Business School,” Warshaw said, “they tell you: It’s really hard to beat the market. It’s even harder to do it net of fees. It’s impossible to do it net of fees over a long period of time.”

DiNapoli’s office confirmed that its fund uses outside managers, “though not nearly as many as [Warshaw] fabricated,” and confirmed that the fund has paid out about $1 billion in fees, which it called “a low percentage and entirely in line among pension funds our size, another fact held up by independent reviews.” The comptroller’s office noted that the state Department of Financial Services ranked New York’s investment expenses 33rd among 74 large public pension funds surveyed. “The number of managers we use has grown over time because the amount of money managed has doubled. And in today’s unpredictable financial markets, you must diversify and not put your eggs all in one basket—absolutely key to our success.”

Warshaw commissioned Stanford economist Ryan Cummings to run a 19-year backtest—using DiNapoli’s own stated benchmarks for each asset class, to make the comparison as conservative as possible. The conclusion: The fund underperformed its own benchmarks by 39%, and paid $11.3 billion in fees to generate that underperformance. Because New York law requires the pension to be fully funded every year regardless of investment returns, the gap was made up through property taxes and income taxes. The total cost to New York taxpayers, by Warshaw’s estimate, was $59.1 billion.

This study is not peer-reviewed, and a spokesperson for DiNapoli told Fortune that it’s a “phony number based on embarrassingly bad math.” In fact, the comptroller’s office argues, the fund’s investments returned 8.94% over the past decade, and two separate, independent reviews—by the Texas-based tax consultancy Weaver and by the New York State DFS—have given it high marks for performance, asset allocation, competitive fees, and ethical management.

DiNapoli’s office further referred Fortune to the comptroller’s opinion column published on Syracuse.com, in which he argued that Warshaw’s analysis was “built on basic errors in math and an alarming lack of understanding of how investing and diversification works.” Warshaw noted that this response extends only a decade back, not to DiNapoli’s full tenure.

Goyle implicitly agreed with Warshaw but dismissed his efforts as obvious. “You don’t need footnotes and a white paper to document the fact that we should not be giving non-transparent locked-up money to managers who don’t perform, period,” the 51-year-old told Fortune. Goyle said the “corrosive nature of fees” is well-known.

The fix that Warshaw urges, and Goyle agrees with, is to move the fund toward low-cost index investing, modeled on what is already in practice with Nevada’s state pension, which converted years ago and has quietly outperformed its actively managed peers ever since.

The DiNapoli paradox

DiNapoli often defends his tenure by noting the pension is one of the best-funded in the country. He’s right—and his challengers say that’s exactly the problem. In New York, full funding isn’t a sign of investment skill; it’s the law. When returns fall short, the state raises taxes to fill the gap.

“The pension fund is fully funded, but it’s the law,” Warshaw said, “and he [DiNapoli] brags and he says, ‘Oh, it’s one of the best-funded pension funds in the nation.’ And he’s right, it is. But he leaves out the part that it has to be.”

The sole trusteeship structure makes this accountability gap uniquely acute. Unlike California’s CalPERS or CalSTRS—which report to full boards—DiNapoli answers to no one. He is, as Warshaw puts it, both the fund manager and the board. “He reports to himself.” Only Connecticut shares this structure among the 50 states.

Fees, favors, and a pattern that rhymes with history

Goyle’s critique goes beyond investment returns into the question of how the office has been used—and who has benefited from it.

DiNapoli has received approximately $500,000 in contributions from law firms that subsequently received state contracts from his office. The arrangement drew scrutiny in a Times Union investigation, and to Goyle, the echo is unmistakable: Pay-to-play contracting is precisely the corruption that sent DiNapoli’s predecessor Alan Hevesi to prison and created the vacancy that DiNapoli was appointed to fill in the first place.

Warshaw was careful to distinguish his critique from the populist Wall Street attacks that defined an earlier era of New York politics. “Eliot Spitzer called Wall Street corrupt,” he said. “I’m calling them unnecessary. That’s a far more existential critique.” DiNapoli’s $12 billion in fees, by that logic, isn’t a scandal—it’s a mistake.

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