Some guidance for Mayor Mamdani’s Committee on Government Efficiency
I want to tell you about something called the windshield survey.
Every two years, teams of New York City Department of Transportation inspectors drive along the city’s 6,000+ miles of streets and manually assign pavement condition scores to what they see, which then inform which streets get prioritized for repair. It has always been a deliberate and somewhat subjective practice, but it worked well enough. Then two things changed: the roads began carrying more and heavier vehicles, and climate change intensified. Road deterioration now accelerates faster than a two-year inspection cycle can keep up with, and a process that was once adequate has become a liability.
One of the fellows in the program that I oversee at Cornell Tech — the Urban Innovation Fellowship — is now implementing a computer vision solution at DOT that processes high-resolution street imagery with AI. It compresses that two-year inspection cycle to six months (and one day, that may be even less). This approach will produce more consistent results, and will eventually support a comprehensive digital inventory of roadway markings the City doesn't currently have. The tech isn’t new — it has existed for years, and DOT staff have wanted to use it for years. What is new is having a skilled person with the right mandate, embedded in the right place, with enough time to earn the trust of the people who actually run the streets.
This is one of the many stories the new Commission on Government Efficiency needs to hear, because it reveals something a charter commission can easily miss: that the path to government efficiency runs through people and capacity, not just rules and regulations. COGE is Mayor Zohran Mamdani's newly-formed Charter Revision Commission, charged with reviewing the New York City Charter and recommending reforms for the November ballot. Its first public hearings, focused on infrastructure, small business and government technology, began in June.
COGE, not DOGE.
Mamdani was right to name this the Commission on Government Efficiency. Not because the contrast to Elon Musk's DOGE is clever — though it is — but because he's right that government efficiency is a necessary component of good governance, regardless of your politics. The Commission’s chair, Patrick Gaspard, made this connection explicit at the Commission's opening meeting. "While this is a commission on efficiency," he said, "efficiency is not the end goal. Efficiency is in the service of affordable housing, affordable childcare. It's in the service of mass transit that works well." The mayor himself made the same point more concretely: two-year delays in affordable housing construction, the seven-month average lag between construction completion and tenant move-in, and eight-month permitting backlogs are not abstract bureaucratic failures. They're the reason apartments don't get built. At the Department of Buildings, he noted, only six people can approve permits for housing. Six! "That is not a recipe for being able to build enough housing to keep up with our ambitions for the City."
This same logic runs through every agency with a role in delivering the Mayor's ambitious agenda. You can't run universal childcare through a hiring process that takes nine months from offer to start. You can't fight climate change through procurement rules that make it nearly impossible for City agencies to work with the startups developing the technologies we need.
Necessary but not sufficient.
But if COGE only focuses on rules changes, which is mostly what charter commissions do, it will miss the deeper problem. New York City government isn't just over-regulated. It's also under-resourced in ways charter revisions can’t fix on their own.
Certainly, there are rules worth changing: outdated procurement requirements, civil service classifications that predate the smartphone, and hiring timelines that would make any private-sector recruiter flinch. But as Commission member Kathy Wylde observed at that first meeting, there is "no philosophical fix" for these problems. The work is "in the weeds," and it is "grinding." Rule changes are necessary but not sufficient. The City also needs to build technical capacity inside agencies, talent pipelines that civil service pay scales can't support alone, and cross-agency knowledge networks that the current siloed structure actively works against.
The Urban Innovation Fellowship was designed to do exactly that. Over the past year and a half, seven fellows embedded directly in seven City agencies (alongside some truly remarkable full-time agency employees) have been doing the painstaking work of building innovation capacity where services are actually delivered. What we've found is that the hunger for this kind of support is real and too often unmet.
There's a persistent assumption in government reform that the most important decisions happen at the top of the org chart. And that by electing the right leaders, we can fix what the last person failed to. Maybe that's where the power is. But it's not necessarily where the work happens.
The work happens at the Department of Environmental Protection, which manages 6,800 miles of water mains, many of them more than 80 years old. And at the Department of Sanitation, which oversees the collection of 44 million pounds of trash every day. And in the Sustainability office of the City Housing Authority, trying to decarbonize the largest public housing system in North America. And, yes, at the DOT, driving every single street on a two-year cycle.
More than 300,000 City employees work across 50-plus agencies delivering services to New Yorkers daily, while City Hall itself employs roughly 300 people. The innovation signal that comes from City Hall weakens the further it travels from the executive suite. There are tech-savvy people in or near the Mayor's Office. Fewer at the agency level, and fewer still inside the divisions where the actual decisions get made: which data to collect, which processes to automate, which vendors to call. That gap is what the Fellowship exists to address.
Our fellows certainly bring unique skills to their projects, but they also bring a fresh perspective to problems that have bedeviled the public sector for years. For example, our Mayor's Office of Contract Services fellow redesigned procurement workflows that had been largely unchanged for decades. Some timelines are now 75% shorter, not through deregulation but through common-sense, human-centered process design. That kind of work requires someone with enough expertise to spot the bottleneck and enough credibility to persuade agency staff to try something new. Our NYCHA fellow identified wastewater heat recovery as a viable technology for decarbonizing domestic hot water, secured grant funding from the State, and will soon launch a demonstration project that could scale across hundreds of similar buildings. This technology has been around for years, but nobody had done the work of putting all the necessary pieces together. (You can read about these and other fellows’ projects in greater detail in our interim report.)
Charter reform alone wouldn't have been enough to make any of this happen. It required skilled people embedded in agencies, building trust with civil servants who already understood the problems, and bringing outside expertise to bear in a way that produced solutions neither side would have reached alone.
Yeah, a commission’s cool. But have you tried a permanent office?
Charter reform and executive action can create some of the conditions for change. But conditions alone won't deliver it. Someone has to own it. And right now, nobody does.
The reforms above, and the slew of smart reforms the Commission is sure to propose, aren't necessarily new ideas. They are the kinds of ideas that smart people in government have been advocating for years. And they’re the kinds of reforms that happen in fits and starts. Meaningful reform keeps happening in disparate corners of government, piecemeal, without an overarching strategy and without anyone with the authority to push through solutions that span agencies. Flagship programs succeed when senior leaders babysit them, or when enough political attention gets focused on a specific initiative to force the system to respond. But as Jennifer Pahlka, author of Recoding America, has written, that is not the same as fixing the system. The goal has to be: "let's not just fix it for my pet project. Let's fix it globally."
So COGE should recommend more than charter amendments. It should recommend the creation of a Mayor's Office of Government Transformation, an empowered City Hall team with one job: to close the gap between policy intent and operational reality across all of City government. Modeled on the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability that drove the first PlaNYC, it should sit in the First Deputy Mayor's portfolio for real coordinating authority across agencies, and once the work of the Commission is done, COGE’s Executive Director, Ann Cheng, should become the head of this new Office. It should find chokepoints, pilot solutions in a few agencies, measure results, and scale what works. And it should have actual authority to act, not just recommend. Because an office that can only recommend becomes just another study group, and the City already has enough of those.
There are 300,000 people who show up every day to make this city run. They know their systems, their communities, what's broken, and often how to fix it (or at least, how to work around what’s broken). What they need are the tools, the talent, and the room to act on what they know.
