A go-kart track is an odd location to launch a tech initiative in the nation’s biggest city. Yet last month there was New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, zipping around the 900-foot oval at Coney Island’s Luna Park before stepping up to a podium to unveil a program called Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crews. Thus the go-kart theme.
PIT will consist of five “game-changing” teams that, Mamdani promised, will “raise the bar for what New Yorkers can expect from City Hall.” Working closely with city agencies, these small groups of engineers and designers will strive to change the hidebound and confusing tenor of current city services by using state-of-art skills to rapidly whip up specialized apps that solve real problems. “We want to transform how New Yorkers interact with the government,” said the mayor. “We want to raise expectations on what government can deliver, because we really can deliver.”
Do those words sound familiar? If you follow government tech, they might. Because Mamdani’s message could have fit quite comfortably in the pitch that Barack Obama’s chief technology officer, Todd Park, delivered in 2014 while recruiting tech talent for what would become the United States Digital Service. The USDS was an idealistic effort to bring top Silicon Valley talent into the executive branch to bypass the logjams caused by outdated and inefficient IT, by building great, user-centric software.
The agency somehow survived the first Trump administration and kept going through the Biden term. But in 2025, Elon Musk and his DOGE wrecking crew infiltrated the agency and pulled the plug on much of the useful stuff. (Now, with the National Design Service, the Trump administration is ostensibly trying to revive some of what it destroyed.)
Mamdani’s PIT crew initiative adopts much of the original USDS ethos, with a timely twist: It embraces Silicon Valley expertise while taking a skeptical, almost adversarial, stance toward Big Tech itself. The combination of mayoral charisma and a chance to make software that doesn’t serve advertisers, the military, or the pocketbooks of centibillionaires makes the Mamdani team an attractive, high-status, mid-career change of pace for some techies. Suddenly, one of the sexiest places in geekdom is the Brooklyn headquarters of New York City’s Office of Technology and Innovation.
Mamdani’s transition team set the stage for an urban, democratic-socialist-adjacent, USDS-style tech squad when it tapped Lisa Gelobter for the city’s chief technology officer job. Gelobter’s résumé includes stints at big companies and startups, but the standout item was her post at the United States Digital Service, where she was embedded in the Department of Education. She led the effort to create a College Scorecard that focused on nuts-and-bolts criteria like costs and graduation rates. To this day, she gets misty when recalling her Washington experience; she even remembers what she was wearing when the USDS team took a group picture with Obama just before he left office.
“I’m really excited about trying to recapture that essence, that energy here,” she says. Her budget for the program is $5.24 million, with an additional $2 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, which will fund one of the crews.
Gelobter says she brings an engineering mindset to New York City government. “I know how to build software,” she says. “I know how to run a technology organization from a technology perspective.” It’s also a cultural thing for her. “I’m wearing jeans to work—not because I don’t look great in a suit, but it’s a statement, right?” she says. (The same norm-breaking happened in the USDS, which had to overcome objections from bureaucrats who didn’t want to meet with anyone wearing a hoodie.) Naturally, the two people Gelobter hired to run the PIT crew program are also USDS veterans, Luke Farrell and Maya Israni.
From Left: Lisa Gelobter, Luke Farrell, and Maya Israni are leading NYC’s civic tech upgrades.Courtesy of Andres Lopez-Ovejero/NYC Mayor's OfficeThe projects Gelobter and her team choose to tackle will set a tone for the way the government works under a mayor whose future depends on how well he manages his city. “Without technology, policy is just words written on a piece of paper,” says Gelobter. Seen that way, the PIT crews are essentially Mamdani’s symbolic stand-ins in his fight against self-interested consultants and inefficient contractors. They will make their case by actually building things, in frantic 12-week sprints.
On its face, the first project of the PIT crew seems nonintuitive. The mission is to implement a pet mayoral project: click-to-cancel. On July 10, Mamdani announced this regulation, which penalizes companies that make it difficult to cancel subscriptions or ongoing payments. The rule takes effect on October 1, which is the exact date that the PIT crew plans to launch software that empowers citizens to blow the whistle on services that force people to go through hoops to end the relationship. (Mamdami might be the first customer; on Coney Island he admitted, “I am currently subscribed to something I don’t even know my login for, but they have my credit card information, and I don’t know how to cancel it.”)
The city hasn’t yet announced what the other four PIT crews will work on. My guess is that they will concentrate on more nuts-and-boltsy city services, and at least one will address the housing problem—but it’s telling that this first choice provides a way for ordinary people to stand up to bullying corporations. “It will show that we can directly affect people’s lives. It’s supposed to save, like, $160 million for New Yorkers,” says Gelobter. The project, she confirms, was a “mayoral priority.”
It’s perfect Mamdani branding. Even though much of Hizzoner’s personal tech surge is based on the USDS playbook, the conditions in 2026 are considerably different than they were in 2014. Back then, most people saw Silicon Valley as an enviable font of innovation, gumption, and high standards. The Obama-ites wanted to reflect Silicon Valley’s glory. These days, Big Tech is seen as an oppressive force, especially by progressive politicians and young people. So the choice sends a message that Mamdani’s version of a geek squad can not only make services accessible, but could also check the impulses of oligarchs.
That message seems to be resonating among techies who want to do something other than develop AI that might decimate the labor force. Farrell says that in the first week after the city posted PIT crew job opportunities, over 3,000 people applied for the roughly 35 available slots, and résumés are still pouring in. A shocking number have come from people who currently hold high-salaried jobs in big tech companies. (The city jobs pay considerably less, with no equity.)
“We've heard from a lot of folks recently who are disillusioned with the private tech industry and maybe went into tech because they wanted to apply tech for good,” says Israni. If those people make it to PIT crews, they can indeed apply their skills for good. Or, at the least, for Mamdani.
This is an edition of Steven Levy’s Backchannel newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
