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.