First elected to the New York State Senate in 2002, Liz Krueger is currently the Chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Senator Krueger is a strong advocate for women’s rights, tenants’ rights, affordable housing, improved access to health care and social services, environmental sustainability, and public education. She has made reforming and modernizing New York State’s governmental processes, electoral system, and tax policy central goals of her legislative agenda.
Senator Krueger is a founding co-chair of the New York State Bipartisan Pro-Choice Legislative Caucus, and has led on women’s health and reproductive choice since her first term in the Senate. She was a leader in the fight to pass the Women’s Health and Wellness Act, the Breastfeeding Bill of Rights, postpartum depression legislation, the Reproductive Health Act, which protects New Yorkers after the overturning of Roe v Wade, and the Equal Rights Amendment, which was ratified by New York voters in 2024.
As a legislative leader on environmental sustainability, Senator Krueger passed the Climate Change Superfund Act and the repeal of the costly and outdated “100-ft rule” utility gas expansion subsidy. She was also central to the effort to ban fracking in New York State as well as passing the state’s plastic bag ban, and worked with State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli to implement a plan for divesting the state pension fund from fossil fuels. She is the prime sponsor of the SUNNY Act to promote plug-in solar access for more New Yorkers, and is a leader in the fight for a moratorium on data center development.
Senator Krueger has dedicated her career to issues relating to poverty, and she is a nationally recognized expert on the problems of hunger, homelessness, and the lack of affordable housing, healthcare, and job training. Her legislative initiatives include protecting and expanding affordable housing for New Yorkers and expanding access to SNAP and safety net assistance for needy families and individuals.
Prior to her election to the Senate, Senator Krueger worked for 15 years as Associate Director of the Community Food Resource Center (CFRC), where she was responsible for directing its efforts to expand access to government programs for low-income New Yorkers. She helped monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of federal and state programs in New York City, identifying barriers to participation, and fighting for improvements in the effectiveness of these programs. During those years she served as Chair of the New York City Food Stamp Task Force; Co-Facilitator of the New York City Welfare Reform Network; on the board of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court; and as a board member of the NYC Federal Emergency Management Agency Emergency Food and Shelter Program administered by the United Way of Greater New York.
Prior to her work with CFRC, Senator Krueger was the founding Director of the New York City Food Bank, building that organization into one that now serves over 1,100 emergency food programs, senior centers, day-care centers, and other community-based programs serving an estimated 5.4 million meals each year.
A graduate of Northwestern University with a Bachelor's degree in Social Policy and Human Development, Senator Krueger also holds a Masters degree from the University of Chicago’s Harris Graduate School of Public Policy. Senator Krueger lives on the East Side of Manhattan with her husband, Dr. John E. Seley, a retired professor of Urban Planning and Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center and Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs.