Eliminating unnecessary spending has taken on new urgency as Mr. Cuomo and his aides seek to cut roughly $1 billion a year from New York’s operations budget and to bring new discipline to state spending. Half of the savings is scheduled to come out of spending on real estate, office supplies, computers and even groceries: The state spends $105 million a year on food to serve at prisons, youth homes and other institutions, including $938,000 on kosher hot dogs.

“We’re a $100 billion-plus corporation that has squandered its buying power, has no standardization across business units and does not reward efficiency,” said Howard Glaser, the director of state operations, who has been charged by Mr. Cuomo with wringing dollars out of the state’s bottom line.

Some of the problems became clear to the administration before it took office, when Mr. Cuomo’s transition team moved to the vacant half of a floor leased in a building on the Upper West Side by the State Department of Taxation and Finance.

Curious about why the department had so much excess space, Mr. Glaser asked state officials for an inventory of all real estate leased or owned at taxpayer expense. The answer: No such inventory existed.

Mr. Glaser imposed a statewide freeze on new leasing while UGL Equis, a real estate consulting firm, conducted an audit of the state’s real estate holdings. The firm discovered that more than a quarter of the state’s office space in New York City and in the capital region was vacant. In Albany, at least 10,000 state office workstations sat idle, and Corning Tower, the imposing 42-story marble edifice that anchors the capital’s skyline and once symbolized modern state government, is one-third empty.