What I Said to New York City's Commission on Government Efficiency
On why New York City struggles to hire the technologists it needs to build or buy technology well
On June 11, 2026, I testified before the New York City Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE) at a Brooklyn hearing on modernizing government and streamlining government technology. COGE is a Charter Revision Commission with the authority to propose amendments to New York City’s Charter, the city’s foundational governing document. Proposed amendments will go before voters in November.
What follows is the testimony I prepared to deliver. I had to cut and adjust in the room to stay within the time limit, so this is slightly more complete than what I actually said. The full hearing, which includes testimony from a range of New Yorkers on government technology and modernization, is available online. You can watch my testimony here. Alongside my in-person testimony, I submitted a longer written comment with more detail, sources, and specific recommendations. I'll share that here in a future post.
Good evening, Chair Gaspard and members of the Commission. My name is Rebecca Heywood.
I am a former city employee at DOT, DCAS and Emergency Management, and a technologist who has advised senior state and local government leaders on digital services, tech procurement and workforce strategy in jurisdictions across the country. I also run a job board and newsletter helping technologists move from the private sector into government that reaches thousands of people each week. I hear every day from the very people this city wants to hire.
Technology is vital to how the city runs and how New Yorkers receive services, like much of the rest of our world today. Others have talked about the effectiveness of digital services, but the city does not have the mechanism to hire these types of experts at scale. It has also been a struggle to hold vendors accountable for the technology products and outcomes they deliver.
We rely on external vendors to build, maintain and operate vital systems for delivering on city policy goals, and make build-versus-buy decisions without sufficient internal capacity to be savvy customers. We don’t have enough people who understand how modern technology is built and to know if a vendor is telling the truth about what they can deliver. We can’t always choose deliberately between building in-house and buying. And we struggle to hold vendors accountable that what they deliver actually works.
A recent analysis of city spending data found NYC spent at least $769 million last year on outside digital services. We owe it to ourselves and the city to ensure that this is leading to the outcomes we want to see. There are numerous examples from across the country that internal digital teams can build more quickly at a lower cost, ensuring residents can access services more easily and more quickly.
There are a number of limitations to being able to hire these types of teams.
Our hiring system lacks transparency for candidates and agencies on rules and procedures, on hiring timelines and on other issues. This has real impacts on the careers of city employees, workload of waiting colleagues, on the lives of potential City employees and on residents receiving services. I’ve heard dozens of stories about difficult decisions about people’s experiences trying to join the city and whether to wait to start a city job. They don’t know which exam they should take, don’t know how to represent their experience in a way to pass an E&E exam, and may have no insight into how long they may need to wait to start a job after receiving an offer. I heard this week about employees who waited six months, eleven months and over two years between offer and approval to start.
A six-month or more wait between offer and start is a financial filter. It selects for people in stable jobs, with savings, or family to fall back on. It screens out exactly the New Yorkers this city is made of.
The standard in technology development has been a product-based model for decades in the private sector, but this has only been changing in government in the last ten years or so. This requires different skill sets and work styles than a traditional IT model. New York City has a small number of teams and staff working in this way, like NYC Planning Labs and NYC Opportunity, who have delivered products like Access NYC and the digital Zoning and Land Use map that have been widely acclaimed. But there is no civil service pathway to hire the type of staff needed to build on models like this. We cannot hire staff at scale with skills like product managers, user researchers, data scientists needed to deliver more like this. Titles like Computer System Manager and Computer Associate don’t always align with the backgrounds of people who would excel in these roles or who may have been trained in non-traditional ways, and fitting specialized skills into ill-fitting titles may mean that the candidates a hiring manager can interview do not have the skills they need, meaning the process may need to start over. Others have mentioned that in some cases, agencies will then hire external contractors at a higher cost in order to get the skills they need.
In my work at DCAS, I saw a consistent pattern. The people who knew about and could navigate the civil service exam process successfully disproportionately had a family member or close friend already working for the city. If you now must know someone who can guide you, if you do not have those connections, you may struggle to get a city job. Through all of this, the city loses people it would genuinely like to hire and who genuinely want to work in public service because they simply cannot wait.
On the vendor side, our procurement models make it challenging to keep vendors accountable and for the City to deliver the outcomes we want to see for a reasonable price.
The MyCity platform took four years, over $100 million and involved more than 120 contracts. The Comptroller found it largely rebranded existing websites. Its chatbot told employers they could take workers’ tips, and told landlords they could turn away tenants with housing vouchers. Both are illegal under New York law.
The city paid one vendor $110 million to build its permitting system. It relies on the vendor to make even small changes using costly contract amendments.
And if vendors don’t deliver, the city often pays them again to fix it because they own the product, or because starting a new procurement would take years.
There are changes that will need to be made outside of the charter in state laws, in collective bargaining or through changes to management practices, but there are ways the Charter can support ensuring accountability for merit and fitness leading to effective service delivery.
Section 813 already gives the Civil Service Commission the power and duty to review how personnel administration works. It also needs the duty to regularly answer the question: do agencies have the personnel they need, in the right titles, to deliver services effectively?
The city’s technology governance needs to be in the Charter, not just in an executive order. We need regular verification, on a defined cycle, that our technology investments are actually delivering the outcomes we want to see whether built internally or by contract, and mechanisms to make changes if they are not.
And finally, there needs to be requirements to share data publicly and transparently on where time is lost in the hiring process, from position approval through offer to start date, as well as transparency with candidates and employees on offer terms, hiring timelines and changes to them. Without them, the people who can navigate this system are the people who already know how it works.
New York is a city that is constantly changing. It deserves a government designed to change with it. Thank you.
The Commission is holding public hearings through mid-July, and written public comments are open. If you want to attend a future hearing, submit a comment, or follow the work, visit the COGE website.
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