Public Interest Technology Crews: New York’s Progressive Twist on the U.S. Digital Service Model

Launching a major new public technology initiative at a go-kart track might seem like an odd fit for America’s largest city. But that’s exactly where New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood last month: after zooming around the 900-foot oval at Coney Island’s Luna Park, he took the podium to unveil his new program, Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crews, leaning fully into the go-kart-themed venue for the announcement.

Mamdani framed PIT as five “game-changing” teams that will reset expectations for what New Yorkers can expect from City Hall. Working hand-in-hand with local city agencies, these small groups of engineers and designers aim to overhaul the clunky, confusing experience of accessing most current city services. Using cutting-edge technical skills, they will rapidly build custom apps designed to solve tangible, everyday problems for residents.

“We want to transform how New Yorkers interact with their government,” the mayor explained. “We want to raise the bar for what government can deliver, because we know we actually can deliver results.”

If that rhetoric sounds familiar to anyone who follows public sector technology, that’s no coincidence. Mamdani’s vision aligns almost perfectly with the pitch former U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park made in 2014, when he recruited private tech talent to build what would become the United States Digital Service (USDS).

USDS grew out of an idealistic mission: poach top Silicon Valley talent to work in the executive branch, cutting through gridlock caused by outdated, inefficient government IT by building excellent, user-centric software. The agency unexpectedly survived the first Trump administration and continued its work through Joe Biden’s term. But in 2025, Elon Musk and his DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) team gutted the agency, shutting down most of its most useful work. (Today, the second Trump administration claims it is reviving some of what it destroyed via a new body called the National Design Service.)

Mamdani’s PIT Crews draws heavily from the original USDS ethos, but adds one timely, distinct twist: it embraces Silicon Valley-level technical expertise while taking a skeptical, nearly adversarial stance toward Big Tech itself. For many mid-career tech workers, the combination of Mamdani’s political charisma and the chance to build software that does not serve advertisers, the military, or the bank accounts of centibillionaires makes PIT an attractive, high-profile career shift. Overnight, one of the most sought-after workplaces for tech-minded people has become the Brooklyn headquarters of New York City’s Office of Technology and Innovation.

Mamdani’s transition team laid the groundwork for this urban, democratic socialist-aligned take on the USDS model when it hired Lisa Gelobter as the city’s chief technology officer. Gelobter has held roles at both established big tech firms and startups, but her most formative experience came during her time at USDS, where she was embedded at the U.S. Department of Education. There, she led the creation of the College Scorecard, a tool that breaks down clear, practical data for prospective students like college costs and graduation rates. She still gets emotional talking about her time in Washington, and even remembers exactly what she wore when the USDS team posed for a group photo with Barack Obama just before he left office.

“I’m really excited to bring that same spirit, that same energy, here to New York,” she says.

Gelobter’s program has a starting budget of $5.24 million, plus an additional $2 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation that will fund one of the five PIT crews. She says she brings a hands-on engineering perspective to New York City government: “I know how to build software. I know how to run a technology organization from a technical perspective.”

It is also a deliberate cultural shift, she adds: “I wear jeans to work—not because I don’t look good in a suit, but it’s a statement, right?” That kind of norm-breaking echoes the early days of USDS, where leaders had to push back against long-time bureaucrats who refused to meet with team members wearing hoodies.

Unsurprisingly, the two people Gelobter hired to lead the PIT Crews program are also USDS veterans: Luke Farrell and Maya Israni. The projects Gelobter’s team chooses to take on will set the tone for how city government operates under Mamdani, whose political future hinges on how effectively he delivers results for New Yorkers.

“Without technology, policy is just words on a piece of paper,” Gelobter says. Framed that way, PIT Crews is essentially Mamdani’s tool to push back against the influence of self-serving private consultants and inefficient government contractors. Instead of just talking about change, teams will build tangible solutions in fast-paced 12-week development sprints.

On the surface, PIT’s first project might seem unexpected. The team’s opening mission is to deliver on one of Mamdani’s top priorities: click-to-cancel subscription regulation. On July 10, Mamdani announced the new rule, which fines companies that make it unnecessarily difficult for consumers to cancel recurring subscriptions or payments. The rule goes into effect October 1—and that is the exact same date PIT plans to launch its tool, which lets New Yorkers report companies that force users to jump through endless hoops to cancel their services. (Mamdani himself is a victim of the problem: at the Coney Island launch, he admitted, “I’m currently subscribed to something I don’t even have the login for, but they have my credit card info, and I can’t figure out how to cancel it.”)

The city has not yet announced what the other four PIT crews will work on. A reasonable guess is that they will focus on other core, everyday city services, with at least one team tackling New York’s ongoing housing crisis. But the choice of click-to-cancel as the first project is intentional: it gives ordinary New Yorkers a way to push back against abusive corporate practices.

“It will prove we can directly improve people’s lives. We expect this will save New Yorkers around $160 million a year,” Gelobter says. She confirms the project was a “mayoral priority,” and it fits perfectly with Mamdani’s political brand.

While most of Mamdani’s public tech push is modeled on the USDS playbook, the context of 2026 is very different from 2014. Back then, most people viewed Silicon Valley as a respected source of innovation, drive, and high standards, and Obama administration officials wanted to bring that same excellence to government. Today, Big Tech is widely viewed as an oppressive force, especially among progressive politicians and young people. So the choice of a consumer protection project as PIT’s first launch sends a clear message: Mamdani’s tech team won’t just make government services easier to use—it will also rein in the power of corporate oligarchs.

That message is already resonating with tech workers who are tired of building tools that harm more than they help, including AI systems that threaten to displace millions of workers. Farrell says that in the first week after PIT posted its open jobs, more than 3,000 people applied for just 35 available roles, and applications are still pouring in. A surprising number of applicants currently hold high-paying jobs at major Big Tech companies—even though city PIT roles pay far less and offer no equity.

“We’ve heard from a lot of people lately who are disillusioned with the private tech industry,” Israni says. “A lot of them got into tech because they wanted to use their skills to do good.”

If those applicants join PIT Crews, they will get exactly that chance: to put their skills to work for the public good. Or, at the very least, to put them to work for Mamdani and his vision for New York City.

This is an edition of Steven Levy’s Backchannel newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.