Imagine if a major arms contractor decided to lend the secretary of defense millions of dollars worth of art to hang in the secretary’s office at the Pentagon. Or if a big pharmaceutical company decided to decorate the office of the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration with millions of dollars of antique furniture. The liberal good-government types would be yelping so loud that you’d have to turn down the volume of your National Public Radio. Conflict of interest! Appearance of impropriety! Influence peddling! So imagine our surprise to get a press release from the mayor and learn that the Whitney Museum of American Art had lent nine paintings and three sculptures to Mayor Bloomberg for use in his City Hall office.

This hardly rises to the level of a scandal. It may even be a tradition; we seem to recall that Mayor Dinkins had behind his desk a wonderful painting of skyscrapers from the Brooklyn Museum. The Whitney’s arrangement bears noting, though. The New York Times had a photo cutline that said, “In a trend the art community applauds, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s office is decorated with art from the Whitney Museum of American Art.” The Times doesn’t mention the reaction of the senior citizens community, the police and firefighter community, the education community, and ordinary New Yorkers who are competing with the art community for scarce public resources at a time of budget cuts. How are the working cops or the elderly poor supposed to compete for the mayor’s affections against an arts community that has at its disposal millions of dollars worth of art with which to let the hizzoner decorate his office?

No doubt there are those who will argue that, because the Whitney is a non-profit institution, the mayor can deal with it differently than with, say, a for-profit arms contractor. But the sums of money the city is throwing around on the cultural scene are not small change. The city has given $65 million toward the renovation of the Museum of Modern Art and has pledged $67.8 million for a new Guggenheim museum building in Lower Manhattan. So far, the Whitney has shown an admirable aversion to the public teat. All the more reason to keep an eye out for whether it follows up its loan to the mayor with a similar funding request for a planned expansion of its own. Such mammoth projects require not just funding but also approval from community boards and planning agencies, approvals that the mayor’s backing can make much easier.

Many of the museums’ lay leaders — the Whitney’s new president is a vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, Robert J. Hurst — have businesses with interests of their own with the mayor’s office. And then there is the effort by the city’s nonprofits to fend off payments in lieu of taxes, payments that universities and major institutions in other cities often make in return for the municipal services they receive. The reason many New Yorkers voted for Mr. Bloomberg was the fact that he was funding his own campaign and therefore wouldn’t be indebted to any of the special interests. Mr. Bloomberg made this case to the voters during the campaign. The best thing the mayor could do now would be to follow that logic to its conclusion, and, if he wants million-dollar paintings hanging in his office, to pay for them himself.