New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made a big show of bringing his “pothole politics” online: He donned his sunglasses, lowered himself into a go-kart and took a lap around a track in Coney Island to sell his new Public Interest Technology Crew, or PIT Crew. (Get it?)
The team’s mission is to make the city’s clunky online systems easier to use and to help enact his agenda. It’s an initiative Democrats are adopting across the country. In Virginia, Gov. Abigail Spanberger, too, is setting up a crew of tech whizzes to bring government services into the 21st century.
Many of the people running those teams are alumni of the U.S. Digital Service, the relatively unknown Obama-era tech squad that President Donald Trump transformed into DOGE on Day 1 of his second administration.
Now, they’re out of Washington and working for some of the rising stars of the Democratic Party who want to use technology to enact the liberal agenda and show voters that they can get things done.
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“What I heard along the campaign trail, and certainly now that I’ve been governor, is people have this sense that things don’t work,” Spanberger told NOTUS in an interview.
The Trump team and DOGE were “correct in identifying that people want things to work better,” she said. “Rather cynically, they used that sentiment to their electoral advantage, and then used it as a mandate to break things further.”
More than 10 blue states have digital services teams — many of them with former U.S. Digital Service staffers and several of them established before the second Trump administration. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro set up a digital team in 2023. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, in 2024. By comparison, only two red states have similar units.
The teams are an answer to what Donald Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, calls a progressive “neuroses” that wants to prove liberals can govern effectively, part of a movement calling for “abundance” — more development, more ambitious policies, faster.
That, and the national focus on DOGE, have brought what was once a relatively behind-the-scenes administrative effort, like building a website, into the foreground.
“Doing the good work is the core of what we need to do every day,” said Luke Farrell, a deputy commissioner and senior adviser for New York City’s chief technology officer. “But also, we then need to show people the work, and we need to get it into people’s hands.”
Mamdani’s PIT Crew has been tasked with making his administration’s “click-to-cancel” rule into a reality with an online portal for New Yorkers to file complaints. The consumer protection rule, which requires businesses to provide simple subscription cancellation, is projected to save New Yorkers millions of dollars once it goes into effect next month.
In Virginia, the digital team is being told to address the inefficiencies that disrupt the daily lives of residents; Virginians still have to write checks to the state because they can’t pay for some state services online, Spanberger said. Other parts of the state government still require traditional signatures.
“One of the ways that you can best ensure that you’re correctly utilizing state taxpayer dollars is to make things actually work,” Spanberger said. “The state digital service is meant to be a part of that.”
President Barack Obama set up the U.S. Digital Service in 2014 to fix HealthCare.gov after a botched rollout threatened to tank Obamacare, one of the Obama administration’s signature policies. The unit became a core part of a network of tech do-gooders in the federal government.
After the HealthCare.gov rescue, the team largely operated in the background of government. During the first Trump administration, the leadership of the U.S. Digital Service fashioned the team as a nonpartisan unit. In a shift, the Biden administration installed political leadership and tasked it with working on priorities like building a government program to file federal taxes for free.
Still, when Trump returned to office, few Americans were familiar with the tech team that the president and Elon Musk transformed into DOGE.
In the early months of the second Trump administration, many of the existing U.S. Digital Service staffers were laid off. Others resigned publicly, saying that DOGE’s work was antithetical to the mission of the original team. 18F, another Obama-era government tech team, was shuttered in March 2025, weeks after Musk tweeted that it had been “deleted.”
DOGE quickly departed from its nominal tech focus to overhaul of the federal workforce and slash government spending — moves that inspired nationwide protests and lawsuits. The backlash has given Democrats nationally an opportunity to reclaim the government efficiency mantle.
That conversation has already begun in Washington. Liberal think tanks and former federal officials are drafting plans for how future administrations could improve the government, as NOTUS has previously reported. The work could have an impact beyond political resonance: In New York, Virginia and the capital alike, these efforts to improve technology and government could help politicians actually implement their agendas.
“A policy without a way to enforce it isn’t really a policy at all,” Erie Meyer, who was previously the chief technologist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told NOTUS of the importance of the PIT Crew’s work implementing Mamdani’s click-to-cancel rule.
Mamdani’s team is still deciding on what other projects they’ll focus on, but the work will be “core to the Mamdani administration’s agenda around affordability, housing, consumer and worker protection and more,” said Maya Israni, senior adviser to the city’s chief technology officer.
More than 4,000 people have submitted applications to join the New York City PIT crews, which will consist of five teams focusing on building services in-house instead of using contractors.
“We really want to have a direct impact on someone’s day-to-day life as a New Yorker and make their life on a day-to-day basis better and more affordable,” Israni said. “We’re here to deliver on core Mamdani administration priorities.”
At the state level, Democrats are also using the teams to respond to Trump’s agenda. Spanberger said Virginia’s tech push is especially relevant in light of the Republican budget law passed last year, which slashed federal funding in food assistance programs and Medicaid.
As the state implements Medicaid work requirements from that law, how well various state systems interface to validate eligibility becomes really important, said Spanberger, noting that “any of those gaps means loss of coverage or means loss of social safety net programs for people in a way that can really be harmful.”
The tension: Sometimes the work to enable policies isn’t flashy.
The goal of the new tech unit in Virginia is to “improve the services that the government provides for every Virginian,” Andrea Fletcher — who also previously worked in the U.S. Digital Service and just recently started as the new director of the Virginia Digital Service — told NOTUS.
To do that, the Virginia team will also be looking to tackle the “boring stuff” that often makes the government headache-inducing in the first place, like procurement and hiring, she said.
During DOGE’s heyday in Washington, some who had previously been on civic tech teams in Washington expressed envy at the political aircover Elon Musk’s team had to get things done.
The teams in New York and Virginia have that top-down investment, said Lynn Overmann, who worked as a senior adviser for the Biden administration as part of the U.S. Digital Service.
The real test, she said: “Can they actually get it done?”
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