New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani drove a go-kart around a racetrack at Coney Island this July, parked and then held a news conference to announce a new initiative inspired by more than a decade of American civic tech work.

The mayor was unveiling the Public Interest Technology Crew — or PIT Crew, thus the racetrack locale — which he said would “work closely with city agencies to launch digital solutions to government processes that have long been defined by piles of paperwork, and they will do so with a speed rarely seen in government.”

The PIT Crew’s first race would be an online portal to help New Yorkers easily file complaints against companies that make it hard to cancel subscriptions.

For those who have followed the trajectory of U.S. civic tech there was perhaps a familiarity to the mayor’s announcement and ideas. Not with the racing and go-kart stuff, but rather with the core mission of the PIT Crew, the types of projects it would drive and the folks who would be at the wheel.

Indeed, what Mamdani described was, essentially, a similar vision as President Barack Obama’s administration had in 2014, when the federal government first launched the digital agencies 18F and the United States Digital Service (USDS). Those agencies were created in part because the early struggles of healthcare.gov made clear the need for better government use of tech. At that time, civic tech as a movement in the country existed mostly outside of government, led by the nonprofit group Code for America, which started working with cities in 2010. In the years that followed, USDS and 18F helped the federal government modernize, get agile and just generally do better with tech, often recruiting from massive private-sector tech companies, like Google, and putting those technologists to work in the public interest.

While those early efforts inspired a rise in digital service teams at the state level, it was vastly altered amid wide-sweeping federal layoffs in 2025 during the early months of the second Trump administration, which saw 18F disbanded. Arguably, American civic tech has since lacked a flashy standard-bearer for the continuation of this work.

The PIT Crew, however, may now be poised to take that lead, with a clear link back to those earlier federal tech initiatives.

Luke Farrell and Maya Israni are both former USDS staffers with experience during the Biden administration, and they now have senior adviser positions leading the PIT Crew alongside New York City Chief Technology Officer Lisa Gelobter, herself a former tech leader in the Obama White House.

“We absolutely are drawing inspiration from the existing civic tech models that are already out there,” Israni said, “and one of them is the USDS model.”

Primarily, this means working with seasoned, mission-oriented technologists who are interested in using their skills to deliver better services to the public.

There are, however, also some key differences in how the PIT Crew plans to operate. A major one, Farrell and Israni both said, is developing all of their projects in house, within New York City’s existing tech stack. This will help hit the PIT Crew’s goal of focusing on projects they can deliver within 12 weeks, because they don’t have to wait on government procurement cycles necessitated by working with outside vendors.

At the core of the work will also be user research and human-centered design, with a laser focus on making sure everything they build has clear user impact. They endeavor to design products that suit the needs of New Yorkers, rather than the needs of government bureaucracy.

But perhaps the single biggest indication of this new team’s lead role in American civic tech is the interest the project has attracted.

There was a splashy article about the PIT Crew in the national tech publication Wired — complete with a photo of Gelobter, Farrell and Israni all in go-karts themselves — followed by a massive wave of contact and job applications. Other states and municipalities reached out to learn more, and the crew has so far fielded more than 4,000 applications from technologists who want to hit the track with them.

“We want this to be so successful that it becomes a model for other cities and states to follow,” Farrell said, “but the way we get there is by delivering short term.”