Mayor Mamdani should revitalize New York City government’s capacity to innovate.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept to victory on transformative promises: 200,000 units of affordable housing, free buses, universal childcare, City-run grocery stores. These can’t be delivered by pushing harder on institutions without rebuilding the underlying machinery. Take affordable housing: projects need four to eight years of approvals, financing and construction before move-in; November’s Charter reforms should shave six months off those numbers. Making buses free could well lead to overcrowded routes, which likely requires hiring drivers — a huge challenge given that exams are only administered every 18 months. A City-run grocery store, staffed and supplied through standard civil service and procurement, would be lucky to open within three years.
These would be constraints even in perfect political conditions, but the mayor faces headwinds that make his recent predecessors’ playbook — coasting on growth while avoiding trade-offs — untenable. A $12 billion inherited deficit means Mamdani must wring efficiency from existing systems just to sustain current services, let alone deliver new ones. Which is precisely why Mamdani should overhaul the city’s back-office IT department, the Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), into a transformation engine with the authority, talent and political mandate to accelerate delivery across his entire agenda.
Technology as the unlock
City government as currently structured operates on timelines that delay or kill ambition. A few examples among many: Taking publicly funded affordable housing from first concepts to occupancy averages over 10 years. Neighborhood-scale rezonings, like Long Island City’s recently approved OneLIC and its promised 15,000 units, regularly involve a decade of negotiation, even if the Governor’s proposed SEQRA reforms pass.
The tech sector has solutions that can help collapse such timelines. Some are big bets: modular construction can erect housing in days, digital twins can integrate real-time, citywide conditions to increase bus speeds, autonomous buses could run continuously without driver overtime, warehouse robotics could automate grocery logistics. AI implementations could have shorter horizons: flagging compliance errors before applicants submit and approving straightforward permits in minutes. AI can likewise empower the new Office of Mass Engagement to translate a city’s worth of public input into consensus.
Beginning to think through these tech propositions, big or small, exposes the daunting complexity of deploying such systems inside government. Each demands specialized technological expertise, comprehended and coordinated across agencies, and none fits neatly into existing city procedures, norms, skill sets or budgets. If AI opportunity in government, for one, is to match the accelerating hype, a confident institution must move with urgency, not let cautious process dictate agenda success. Without a deeper reconstruction, Mamdani's agenda will die a slow death within the bureaucracy he inherits.
Rebuilding New York’s transformation engine
New York City already has the theoretical capacity to make this leap. OTI emerged at the outset of the Adams administration, a consolidation of the city’s IT department (DoITT) and NYPD Cyber Command with the Mayor’s Offices of Data Analytics and the chief technology officer. His transition team’s vision was to create a citywide innovation hub — one that would prototype, de-risk and accelerate technology adoption across all agencies.
But that vision has so far failed spectacularly. Without direct mayoral backing and authority to override agency resistance, OTI became another siloed IT department, at times even adding procedural layers, such as the still unfinished Critical Application Portfolio review, which has effectively frozen agency software installations. It has not challenged citywide practices, stepped on commissioners’ toes or pursued the grander vision of using technology and innovation to fundamentally transform government operations.
Instead, under a CTO pulled from law enforcement, OTI killed universal broadband in favor of corporate subsidies, alienating and eventually driving out the agency’s civically-minded technologists. To fill the tech talent void, the agency pivoted to a sprawling network of vendors to build the flagship "MyCity" portal for New Yorkers to access everything from traffic tickets to school report cards. The result, however, has been a $100 million boondoggle delivering a fraction of its promise.
OTI can still become a transformation engine and durable vector for delivering Mamdani’s agenda. There are precedents worth emulating in other cities. One is Boston’s in-house civic innovation lab, the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, which describes its limited role as “performing acupuncture” on existing systems. Pennsylvania’s Office of Transformation & Opportunity frames its mission as shepherding businesses through bureaucracy rather than building new institutional capacity. As Jennifer Pahlka, who led the Healthcare.gov rescue and helped launch the U.S. Digital Service, recognizes, achieving transformation requires an institution empowered to remake government itself.
Those are models of what OTI, properly reimagined, can and should become in Mamdani’s New York.
What overhaul looks like
Previous transformation attempts have foundered because tech offices can’t hire tech talent themselves or spur other agencies to do so, nor do they have leverage over agencies to rewrite procedure, influence contract structure or force in-house development over established vendors. Overhauling OTI means first installing leadership with real authority — a commissioner with explicit mayoral backing to override agency objections and the courage to use it.
That leader should then go out and get talent through every available channel: fellowships like Urban Innovation Fellows and Bloomberg Philanthropies’ i-team, USDS-style tours of service and talent sharing with agencies operating outside of civil service. A model worth following for deploying that talent is New Jersey’s Office of Innovation, which embeds five-person innovation teams within city agencies to build high-impact tools and implement new processes.
From there, a reinvigorated OTI should assert control over how the City buys technology and hires technologists, coordinating or absorbing functions now fragmented across the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services, the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Citywide Administrative Services. Deeper structural reforms to civil service rules and union contracts will require legislation and years of negotiation, and will provoke resistance. But a capable OTI need not wait. It can collapse permitting timelines, accelerate procurement and build tools that multiply agency capacity now, and push further as constraints loosen.
Every OTI action should be aimed at delivering tangible benefits, not press release headlines. Digital governance leaders Estonia and Ukraine grounded their transformations in refreshingly ambitious public targets: putting 100% of services online, enabling one-minute interactions between the public and agencies and more. Equivalent targets in New York would be metrics such as halving housing start times, eliminating bus bunching and launching City-run grocery stores within a year while keeping them fully stocked.
Mamdani insists government should be “wedded to outcomes, not process”; he must now use the communication prowess that made affordability a winning issue to show New Yorkers, and crucially, labor unions, that transcending old procedures means more jobs, more opportunity and a more livable city.
Along the way, OTI should leverage technology’s ability to promote transparency and give New Yorkers more meaningful ways to shape what’s being built. Few will fault him for bold, Hamiltonian attempts to consolidate the authority needed to bring about positive change. All will notice his grand promises going unfulfilled.
The closing window
The challenges Mamdani has chosen to take on are elemental: more affordable groceries means making it easier for people to feed their families; free childcare means giving parents a better chance to land a job and cheaper, more abundant housing means not being forced out of the city that raised you.
Unfortunately, inertial forces threaten to strangle his attempts. The question is whether Mamdani will target these structural barriers quickly enough. The alternative is settling into the existing systems and hoping that this time will somehow be different.
For the New Yorkers who elected him on transformational promises, hoping isn’t enough. The machinery must be rebuilt, and that work can’t start soon enough.