Zohran Mamdani’s NYC Tech Team Is What DOGE Should Have Been
Zohran Mamdani’s NYC Tech Team Is What DOGE Should Have Been
佐兰·曼达尼的纽约市科技团队才是“政府效率部”（DOGE）该有的样子
A go-kart track is an odd location to launch a tech initiative in the nation’s biggest city. Yet last month there was New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, zipping around the 900-foot oval at Coney Island’s Luna Park before stepping up to a podium to unveil a program called Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crews. Thus the go-kart theme.
在全国最大的城市启动一项科技计划，卡丁车赛道是一个奇怪的选址。然而上个月，纽约市长佐兰·曼达尼（Zohran Mamdani）就在康尼岛月神公园（Luna Park）900英尺长的椭圆形赛道上飞驰，随后走上讲台，揭幕了一个名为“公共利益技术（PIT）团队”的项目。这就是卡丁车主题的由来。
PIT will consist of five “game-changing” teams that, Mamdani promised, will “raise the bar for what New Yorkers can expect from City Hall.” Working closely with city agencies, these small groups of engineers and designers will strive to change the hidebound and confusing tenor of current city services by using state-of-art skills to rapidly whip up specialized apps that solve real problems. “We want to transform how New Yorkers interact with the government,” said the mayor. “We want to raise expectations on what government can deliver, because we really can deliver.”
PIT将由五个“改变游戏规则”的团队组成，曼达尼承诺，这些团队将“提高纽约市民对市政厅的期望标准”。这些由工程师和设计师组成的小型团队将与市政机构密切合作，利用最先进的技术快速开发专门的应用程序来解决实际问题，从而努力改变当前市政服务陈旧且令人困惑的现状。“我们希望改变纽约人与政府互动的方式，”市长说，“我们希望提高人们对政府交付能力的期望，因为我们确实能够做到。”
Do those words sound familiar? If you follow government tech, they might. Because Mamdani’s message could have fit quite comfortably in the pitch that Barack Obama’s chief technology officer, Todd Park, delivered in 2014 while recruiting tech talent for what would become the United States Digital Service. The USDS was an idealistic effort to bring top Silicon Valley talent into the executive branch to bypass the logjams caused by outdated and inefficient IT, by building great, user-centric software.
这些话听起来耳熟吗？如果你关注政府科技，可能会觉得熟悉。因为曼达尼的这番话，完全可以套用在2014年巴拉克·奥巴马的首席技术官托德·帕克（Todd Park）在招募人才组建“美国数字服务局”（USDS）时的演讲中。USDS是一项理想主义的尝试，旨在将硅谷顶尖人才引入行政部门，通过构建出色的、以用户为中心的软件，来绕过因过时且低效的IT系统所造成的瓶颈。
The agency somehow survived the first Trump administration and kept going through the Biden term. But in 2025, Elon Musk and his DOGE wrecking crew infiltrated the agency and pulled the plug on much of the useful stuff. (Now, with the National Design Service, the Trump administration is ostensibly trying to revive some of what it destroyed.)
该机构在特朗普第一任期内幸存了下来，并持续运作至拜登任期。但在2025年，埃隆·马斯克及其“政府效率部”（DOGE）的破坏小队渗透进该机构，并切断了大部分有用的项目。（现在，特朗普政府正打着“国家设计服务局”的旗号，表面上试图恢复其曾经摧毁的部分内容。）
Mamdani’s PIT crew initiative adopts much of the original USDS ethos, with a timely twist: It embraces Silicon Valley expertise while taking a skeptical, almost adversarial, stance toward Big Tech itself. The combination of mayoral charisma and a chance to make software that doesn’t serve advertisers, the military, or the pocketbooks of centibillionaires makes the Mamdani team an attractive, high-status, mid-career change of pace for some techies. Suddenly, one of the sexiest places in geekdom is the Brooklyn headquarters of New York City’s Office of Technology and Innovation.
曼达尼的PIT团队计划采纳了USDS最初的大部分精神，并结合了当下的时代特色：它拥抱硅谷的专业知识，同时对大型科技公司本身持怀疑甚至对抗的态度。市长的个人魅力，加上能够开发不为广告商、军方或亿万富翁钱包服务的软件，使得曼达尼的团队对一些科技从业者来说，成为了一个极具吸引力、地位高且适合职业生涯中期转型的选择。突然之间，极客圈最令人向往的地方之一，变成了纽约市技术与创新办公室的布鲁克林总部。
Mamdani’s transition team set the stage for an urban, democratic-socialist-adjacent, USDS-style tech squad when it tapped Lisa Gelobter for the city’s chief technology officer job. Gelobter’s résumé includes stints at big companies and startups, but the standout item was her post at the United States Digital Service, where she was embedded in the Department of Education. She led the effort to create a College Scorecard that focused on nuts-and-bolts criteria like costs and graduation rates. To this day, she gets misty when recalling her Washington experience; she even remembers what she was wearing when the USDS team took a group picture with Obama just before he left office.
当曼达尼的过渡团队任命丽莎·格洛布特（Lisa Gelobter）担任纽约市首席技术官时，就为这支带有城市色彩、接近民主社会主义风格的USDS式科技团队奠定了基础。格洛布特的履历包括在大公司和初创企业的任职经历，但最亮眼的是她在USDS的工作，当时她被派驻到教育部。她领导创建了“大学记分卡”（College Scorecard），专注于成本和毕业率等核心指标。时至今日，每当回忆起华盛顿的经历，她仍会热泪盈眶；她甚至记得在奥巴马离任前，USDS团队与他合影时自己穿的是什么衣服。
“I’m really excited about trying to recapture that essence, that energy here,” she says. Her budget for the program is $5.24 million, with an additional $2 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, which will fund one of the crews.
“我非常兴奋能在这里尝试重现那种精髓和能量，”她说。该项目的预算为524万美元，外加洛克菲勒基金会提供的200万美元赠款，这笔赠款将资助其中一个团队。
Gelobter says she brings an engineering mindset to New York City government. “I know how to build software,” she says. “I know how to run a technology organization from a technology perspective.” It’s also a cultural thing for her. “I’m wearing jeans to work—not because I don’t look great in a suit, but it’s a statement, right?” she says. (The same norm-breaking happened in the USDS, which had to overcome objections from bureaucrats who didn’t want to meet with anyone wearing a hoodie.) Naturally, the two people Gelobter hired to run the PIT crew program are also USDS veterans, Luke Farrell and Maya Israni.
格洛布特表示，她为纽约市政府带来了工程师思维。“我知道如何构建软件，”她说，“我知道如何从技术角度运营一家技术组织。”这对她来说也是一种文化表达。“我穿着牛仔裤上班——不是因为我穿西装不好看，而这是一种态度，对吧？”她说。（同样的打破常规也发生在USDS，当时他们不得不克服那些不想与穿连帽衫的人开会的官僚们的反对。）不出所料，格洛布特聘请来负责PIT团队项目的两人也是USDS的资深人士：卢克·法雷尔（Luke Farrell）和玛雅·伊斯拉尼（Maya Israni）。
From Left: Lisa Gelobter, Luke Farrell, and Maya Israni are leading NYC’s civic tech upgrades. Courtesy of Andres Lopez-Ovejero/NYC Mayor’s Office
从左至右：丽莎·格洛布特、卢克·法雷尔和玛雅·伊斯拉尼正在领导纽约市的市政技术升级。图片来源：Andres Lopez-Ovejero/纽约市长办公室
The projects Gelobter and her team choose to tackle will set a tone for the way the government works under a mayor whose future depends on how well he manages his city. “Without technology, policy is just words written on a piece of paper,” says Gelobter. Seen that way, the PIT crews are essentially Mamdani’s symbolic stand-ins in his fight against self-interested consultants and inefficient contractors. They will make their case by actually building things, in frantic 12-week sprints.
格洛布特及其团队选择攻克的项目，将为这位市长领导下的政府工作方式定下基调，而他的未来取决于他管理城市的能力。“没有技术，政策只是写在纸上的文字，”格洛布特说。从这个角度看，PIT团队本质上是曼达尼在对抗自私的顾问和低效承包商时的象征性代理人。他们将通过在紧张的12周冲刺中实际构建产品来证明自己的价值。
On its face, the first project of the PIT crew seems nonintuitive. The mission is to implement a pet mayoral project: click-to-cancel. On July 10, Mamdani announced this regulation, which penalizes companies that make it difficult to cancel subscriptions or ongoing payments. The rule takes effect on October 1, which is the exact date that the PIT crew plans to launch software that empowers citizens to blow the whistle on services that force people to go through hoops to end the relationship. (Mamdami might be the first customer; on Coney Island he admitted, “I am currently subscribed to something I don’t even know my login for, but they have my credit card information, and I don’t know how to cancel it.”)
表面上看，PIT团队的第一个项目似乎并不直观。其任务是实施市长的一个心头好项目：“一键取消”。7月10日，曼达尼宣布了这项法规，对那些设置障碍、阻碍用户取消订阅或持续付款的公司进行处罚。该规定将于10月1日生效，而这正是PIT团队计划推出软件的日期，该软件将赋予市民举报那些强迫用户通过繁琐流程才能终止服务的公司的权力。（曼达尼本人可能是第一个用户；在康尼岛，他承认：“我目前订阅了某个服务，甚至不知道登录名，但他们有我的信用卡信息，我也不知道该如何取消。”）
The city hasn’t yet announced what the other four PIT crews will work on. My guess is that they will concentrate on more nuts-and-boltsy city services, and at least one will address the housing problem—but it’s telling that this first choice provides a way for ordinary people to stand up to bullying corporations. “It will show that we can directly affect people’s lives. It’s supposed to save, like, $160 million for New Yorkers,” says Gelobter. The project, she confirms, was a “mayoral priority.”
市政府尚未宣布其他四个PIT团队将负责什么工作。我猜测他们将专注于更基础的市政服务，至少有一个团队会解决住房问题——但值得注意的是，第一个项目选择为普通民众提供了一种对抗霸道企业的方式。“这表明我们可以直接影响人们的生活。它预计能为纽约人节省约1.6亿美元，”格洛布特说。她证实，该项目是“市长的优先事项”。
It’s perfect Mamdani branding. Even though much of Hizzoner’s personal tech surge is based on the USDS playbook, the conditions in 2026 are considerably different than they were in 2014. Back then, most people saw Silicon Valley as an enviable font.
这是完美的曼达尼式品牌塑造。尽管这位市长个人的科技热潮很大程度上基于USDS的剧本，但2026年的情况与2014年已大不相同。那时，大多数人还将硅谷视为令人羡慕的源泉。