Mamdani invests in tech capacity to “solve real problems”

What PIT Crew says about how he is governing, and tech in government

Yesterday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled the Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crew. This new unit in NYC government will hire dozens of tech specialists charged with making the city services work better for the public. Mamdani said:

In 2026, nearly all of the services city hall offers New Yorkers are dispensed through digital platforms…New Yorkers should not be forced to navigate systems that are confusing, outdated and burdened by bureaucracy. The PIT Crew turns that model on its head. These teams will move quickly and deliberately to solve real problems, make City government easier to use, deliver for working New Yorkers and advance our agenda of affordability and public excellence.

Credit: City of New York

This is a big deal for three reasons: First, it tells us much about Mamdani’s closely-watched approach to governing. Second, when it sometimes feels like tech is just making our lives harder, it offers a model for how it can be used to make life easier. Third, it provides a model of how progressives can reclaim tech in a post-DOGE era.

When is a technology office “not about technology”?

PIT Crew will be led by Lisa Gelobter, the Chief Technology Officer of NYC. Committing fully to the automotive bit, the announcement took place at a Go-Kart race track in Coney Island.

Mamdani and Gelobter. Credit: City of New York.

People we spoke with in the NYC government emphasized that PIT Crew was not primarily about tech, bit on delivering on Mamdani’s core priorities on housing, childcare, consumer and worker protection. Mamdani also framed the investment in broader terms, emphasizing improving the experience of government.

But this work is not just about making city government more efficient. It is about improving the way that government works…Every confusing step and every dead-end portal makes it more difficult for government to deliver for New Yorkers, and for New Yorkers to trust that government is working to deliver for them. Every straightforward experience New Yorkers have on city platforms rebuilds that trust and our PIT crews will help us do exactly that.

PIT Crew helps to answer one of the puzzles about Mamdani: why is he investing so much capital in public sector capacity?

A conventional wisdom is that politicians have scarce political capital and investing it into fixing existing government services, rather than claiming credit for new policies or initiatives, isn’t politically fruitful. This is one reason why our infrastructure is decaying. The smart politician goes to the ribbon-cutting for a new highway, but not fixing its potholes.

But here is Mamdani talking about filling potholes…

Mamdani is a smart politician with charisma to spare. And yet he is spending it on 311 calls…

As public policy professors, we love this. This sort of messaging emphasizes the dignity and value of public work. It brings joy to public policy implementation. But we are a pretty niche audience who cares about good governance. If you read this newsletter, you are probably in that audience!

Why is Mamadani so invested in the nuts and bolts of administration? He closed his speech announcing the PIT crews with this:

In the words of Jeff Gordon: I’ve never believed in luck. If you perform well, execute, have a good race car, and a good race team, you’re going to increase your chances dramatically of having better results. City Hall is building a team that performs well and executes well. You better believe that our chances of delivering well for New Yorkers are increasing dramatically as well.

And this is a key point: Mamdani is tying state capacity not to some amorphous end outcome, but to the most visible goals of his administration. For example, here he is talking about reducing administrative burdens to speed up the building of housing, a central theme of his campaign.

This is interesting for multiple reasons. First, it represents a form of civic education. One of the most charismatic politicians in America is using his political honeymoon to explain in simple and accessible terms how the public sector works. Even before Trump, political explanations about public administration have typically been used to bash the bureaucracy, not to uplift it.

Second, it is a form of accountability. Mamdani is asking us to hold him accountable to outcomes. And he sees those outcomes as directly tied to administrative capacity. On high-stakes issues he is betting on City employees rather than consultants. City officials set the goal as: “Deliver exceptional products and services in the hands of the public that raise expectations for what government can deliver.”

What does ‘exceptional products’ mean? Their first project is the City’s new Click to Cancel rule that in theory makes it easy for people to get out of annoying magazine subscriptions or gym memberships that private companies deliberately make onerous. Having a law on the books is great, but NYC is promising to make sure Click to Cancel works, creating a platform where violators of the law can be easily identified.

There is also something else. A demand for excellence: In his inaugural speech, Mamdani said:

For too long, we have turned to the private sector for greatness, while accepting mediocrity from those who serve the public. I cannot blame anyone who has come to question the role of government, whose faith in democracy has been eroded by decades of apathy. We will restore that trust by walking a different path—one where government is no longer solely the final recourse for those struggling, one where excellence is no longer the exception

An easy way to dismiss progressives, and especially democratic socialists, is that they have unrealistic ideas that they can’t implement. Mamdani seeks to disprove this claim. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Corey Robin argued that Mamdani’s emphasis on “excellence” was a rhetorical innovation, one designed to reclaim the rhetorical high ground on good governance for progressives.

Betting on state capacity rather than contracting out

If you are a good government wonk, this innovation is interesting for other reasons. reflecting how thinking about tech has evolved. Traditionally, the conventional wisdom since the 1990s and before was that governments could buy tech products like an off-the-shelf product. This led to a massive turn to contracting out, which was great for consultants but bad for government capacity. The outsourced approach often cost too much, delivering too little and too late.

Even when tech teams were created they were unable to reverse the pattern towards outsourcing. Too often the existence of a tech team became a symbol of governance without a clear purpose. This was perhaps one of the failures of early government tech units, as Merici Vinton has written. “The Digital Service was Never the Point” say Jen Pahlka and Kelly Taylor.

The lack of strategic vision was telling. The federal US Digital Service was treated as firefighters to be called in when a private vendor’s product was in trouble (see, for example, FAFSA). The origins of USDS and 18F came from the need to fix Healthcare.gov, and that emphasis on fixing rather than building products was constantly a structural problem. Towards the end of the Biden administration, we saw the emergence of some exceptions, most notably Direct File (until the Trump administration killed it).

It would be very easy for critics of Mamdani to reflexively say “well, Mamdani hates the private sector, and everyone knows government tech is garbage.” Easy, but wrong.

This is not a private vs. public debate. What people who know tech and government have been screaming for years is that building good tech needs in-house capacity, even when you are using contractors. It requires the government owning the design, development and delivery of technology, relying on rapid iteration to fix problems in a way that is impossible when contractors are running things. A senior PIT Crew official, Luke Farrell, has published here on the ways that private firms overcharge government for supporting digital services, while his own work at the US Digital Service revealed how small capacity investments can have big payoffs for government.

New York is not alone. Recently, the state of Colorado blew up their approach to IT. One of their takeaways was about how outsourcing proved a barrier to modes of working that led to good digital products.

Outsourcing often becomes a barrier to doing tech right for structural and incentive reasons. The contract becomes the barrier to rapid coordination needed to build good tech quickly, and the incentives of profit-seeking contractors are to maximize revenue. But it’s also true that the traditional IT model of government has been a barrier to doing tech right for cultural reasons. Turf battles, caution, and a lack of urgency, failure to embrace new modes of operating, inability to recruit top talent are all real government problems that need to be fixed.

Innovations like PIT Crew seek to solve both sets of problems. NYC should be able to attract top talent and their job descriptions advertise accelerated hiring. The sense of urgency and purpose that these offices create can change the culture of government. Having government ownership of the product should save money and improve quality.

There are a lot of big ifs in Mamadani’s big bet on tech. A reasonable question is whether agencies engage collaboratively with PIT Crew. Another risk is that PIT Crew will consume energy and resources, but agency level IT culture remains unchanged, making it an island of excellence that does not scale to the rest of government.

But the creation of PIT Crew matches something he promised in his inauguration speech: “we will govern expansively and audaciously. We may not always succeed. But never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try.”

Reclaiming tech for good

NYC is in a budget crunch, and Mamdani is betting that an investment in internal tech capacity will not just save the city money, but also create value for citizens. During the press conference announcing PIT Crew, a reporter asked the Mayor how he could justify the $5 million in new spending.

Mamdani offered two revealing insights. He pointed out that just one fifth of the new funding will be used to enable the implementation of the Click of Cancel rule, which is expected to save New Yorkers $160 million. In other words, his accounting considers not just public dollars spent, but citizen resources saved. Tech can create public value. Second, he emphasized reducing the psychological costs of these hassles “the time and stress” that comes from private sector hassles.

This thinking echoes another late Biden-era initiative, repealed by Trump, which is that government has a legitimate regulatory role in regulating how private businesses weaponize administrative burdens against customers.

It also reflects another theme, which is how tech is viewed in progressive spaces. For a long time, progressives saw tech as a force for good. Tech workers connected their work to a broader purpose, using terms like ‘civic tech’ and ‘public interest tech’ to describe a community of people who saw tech as a way of solving big public problems.

DOGE, the rightward shift of Silicon Valley, and the rise of AI has dampened enthusiasm for tech on the left, and fueled concerns about potential abuses. Mamdani’s PIT Crew feels like an effort to reclaim tech as a progressive force, to explain how it can be used to help the public.

As Alondra Nelson, former Acting Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, noted:

Done right, digital government can help millions of people save hundreds of millions of dollars, and hours and hours of time. Done wrong, it can be costly, useless, discriminatory or even dangerous. How a City interacts with its people shouldn’t be outsourced. It should be local and accountable.