Photo by Silas Stein/picture alliance via Getty Images
We need to change the way the City buys software.
You don’t have to look very far in New York to find failed government technology projects. A City Comptroller’s report released in August found that veterans still struggle to use the VetConnectNYC online portal to access services, despite a $2 million investment and eight years of work. The City’s Office of Technology and Innovation requested an additional $81 million in the 2026 budget to shore up another failed digital service, the “one-stop-shop” MyCity app, after already spending four years and $100 million on development. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is reportedly planning to pilot “virtual OMNY cards,” part of a contract signed in 2017 that has suffered extensive delays, scope reduction, and millions of dollars in change orders.
Failures of this magnitude are not unusual in government tech. Across a database of over 2,700 projects, researchers found that the median U.S. government IT project costs 310% of the estimated price.
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Brittany N. Montgomery is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank.