Vying to become the city’s next chief financial officer as comptroller, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera on Wednesday evening called for smarter spending in a post-Bill de Blasio City Hall.

“I ask everyone who’s here watching tonight: Does this city feel $20 billion per year better to you? It doesn’t, it’s gotten worse,” the Democrat said in a Wednesday evening interview with Inside City Hall anchor Errol Louis.

Caruso-Cabrera, a former financial journalist for CNBC who ran against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last year in a primary for Congress, called for more efficient spending. She pointed to the fact that, under the de Blasio administration, the city’s budget has ballooned to over $92 billion — a budget more than $20 billion larger than it was when de Blasio first took office.

“We need to look everywhere. I get asked a lot about where to cut,” she said. “It’s not about spending too much; it’s just that we are spending very badly.”

“The money that we bring in, we can’t blow it like we have for the last seven years, where spending has gone up dramatically and we’ve had very poor outcomes,” she added, criticizing, as one example, the performance of the city’s public health system.

Thus far, Caruso-Cabrera’s campaign has centered around the city’s economic recovery from the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. In the NY1 interview, she emphasized the need for the recovery to be equitable for all New Yorkers, particularly women and people of color, and that putting them into positions of power goes a long way.

“I have spent decades interviewing some of the best and some of the worst money mangers. I would want to see more minority money managers, more women money managers,” she said. “We have data which shows that they are actually sometimes better than your average money manager, so increasing the way that we diversify the people who manage money for us is super important.”

She also expressed support for some screens for pension funds, such as by divesting from fossil fuel companies, and by not investing in companies around the world that abuse their employees and their human rights — such as companies that in effect enslave their workers.

Caruso-Cabrera also touted her career as a financial journalist as a reason she’s the best candidate at a time when the city’s economy is still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic.

“[I’ve spent] decades following the money, investigating how it’s being spent, and that’s precisely what the next comptroller is going to need to do,” Caruso-Cabrera said.

The primary for comptroller will be held June 22, with early voting set to run June 12 to June 20.